OK.

The problem I have is this.

A friend and I are planning on producing our own TBS/RTS hybrid game. No huge plans - just for fun, if it "goes anywhere" we might consider releasing it but we have no plans to become professional game devs. We've been looking around for a while for an RTS game engine that we can play with our ideas in.

I thought I'd found the ideal engine. The Sudden Strike Next 7 engine by Fireglow games.

As seen here:

http://fireglowgames.com/index.php?uid=engines

As you will see from the screenshots and the description this looks like it is easy to use, probably extensible and has good AI. My main problem is this:

I can find nowhere to get hold of it.

There's no download link. The last press action Fireglow games had seems to be January 2008 and my use of the "contact us" page has yielded no results so far.

In desperation I searched for torrents, figuring that if the company was dead in the water their game engine might still be kicking around somewhere for free (I know, not very legit but I assure you if we ever got close to 'commercially viable' I would have done whatever it took to track down fireglow games or whoever now owns the intellectual property and pay them any money due to them - my conscience wouldn't allow anything else) however this only yielded results which would be available to me if I gave my e-mail, some money and my credit card details to an unknown quantity. Not wanting to end up poor, identity-thieved, spammed and still downloading something which has the possibility of being a virus I decided against this option.

Does anyone know how I can get hold of a (preferably legitimate) download of this game engine? Or does anyone know of an RTS engine that has similar qualities?

What I'm looking for is a game engine that:

Is designed for RTS production or easy to adapt to this purpose
Is flexible and extensible (preferably in a low level language like C++/C# - would be necessary for adding any of the "turn-based" options)
Has an easy to use interface for terrain design and building and unit placement
Is preferably true 3d (but this is not totally essential)

As we have no concrete plans for releasing the game as a commercial product it would also preferably be free or cheap to get hold of, at least at the development stage.

[Edited by - SpiroExDeus on November 13, 2010 9:05:56 AM]