Hello

FIrst of all this is my first post in this forum but I'm sure is not going to be the last, so thanks everyone in advance for all the work and time you spend in developing and helping people to develop their own games :).

I'm a computer engineer and I started making games long time ago using ncurses. I've been learning how to use unreal development kit and I also got the chance to work and create some games using it, but now I want to do something diferent.

I hav a time to work with, 2 programmers, 1 level designer and 2 modelers and we are trying to decide what software shall we use to develop our game.

Our game will be a pc online game, think of a super mario online with friends for example

We are using 3dmax for develop the characters of the game and we would like to program using c++.

Now we are discusing about how engine shall we use, UDK is descarted because you need to pay an expensive license to publish your game in case it success, the online framework that udk uses is oriented to FPS games such as unreal so won't be optimized for our game and since you don't have access to the source code you can't change that.

I'm aware we will have to make our own framework, but we are looking an engine that allows our level designer to create the map for the game which an interface similar to udk or unity, with a physics system integrated and that allow us to use our own framework and all our code in c++.

The only option I've considered right now is ogre3D, I just want to know if is there anything else that could work too.

PD: I know the right thing to do would be to grab OpenGL and create everything from scratch but we are trying to optimize our time as much as we can to focus on developing the framework (which will stealh our programmers for a while) and program the game instead of just make the tools for that since we have a deadline (more or less 9 months)

Thank very much and see u at the forums ;)

Out of curiosity, why do you want to invest your precious little time re-inventing the game engine? Unity is very inexpensive, and you even mentioned it as an interface you wanted to emulate. C4 is another very powerful engine in many ways similar to Unity and much lower cost than UDK. I have seen side-scrolling platform games made with Unity that reached first playable in about 100 hours of work, and have turned into fairly profitable, fun, entertaining games. (I've worked with professional projects that used Unity to very rapidly make amazing prototypes and even turn them into successful console games.) C4 has similar success stories.

Throwing those existing engines out just because you cannot afford the source up front seems a questionable business decision. It is your decision to make of course, it just is unusual to see people discard very viable options, so I'm curious to the reasoning behind it.

Hi. Thanks for your quick response.
I've been trying unity too. I did not mentioned in this post because the idea was to discover other engines that are not that known as udk or unity. For example i've never heard about C4.
I also forget to mention that my game will work with a third person camera.
Anyway there is no problem in buying a unity license and i've considered that already. I just wanted to know what else is out there because I believe that before you choose something like that you need to know all the possible options and get the one it fits you more.
PD: i have to make my own online framework anyway. I just decided it could be nice to use it in my own game so thats why my only restriction is that I can make my game with my online system.
Thanks

Because an online framework is my final project in university. We (the other programmer and me) are not new in c++. Ive been working with it more than 5 years that s why we want to use it in our game. So we could learn a new language but we wouldnt be as experts as we might be in c++. Develop an engine is one option that we only would take if we find a problem that an engine can solve and i dont think thats gonna happen. So apparently we should try with unity but I know that unity has its own online system.

The rest of the team doesnt know c++ but they will create the models and the levels while we make the behaviour

Leadwerks is an option. It's crossplatform (Win/Mac/iOS/Android, Linux coming soon), uses C++ and Lua (if you want scripting) and is very easy to program with. It's also cheaper then Unity Pro to get all versions.

It also has some flowgraph functionality where your programmers can write Lua scripts that your level designer can connect together via outputs/inputs to make functionality on their maps.

The creator is working on 3.1 right now and it should be done in Dec. 3.1 will bring a deferred renderer, amazing graphics, and real-time lighting. He'll deliver on that also because Leadwerks 2.x had deferred rendering and it looked amazing. He made Leadwerks 3.x because he wanted to be crossplatform so he rewrote it from scratch so it's a very solid engine right now.

Things to note. The eval hasn't been updated for a while. 3.0 doesn't use a deferred renderer so you calculate your lighting. I think 3.1 will be a paid upgrade but I'm guessing maybe $50-$100?

Updates. I don't need to do the framework of my game anymore, just the framework of the lobby wich will launch the game. so I can make the game in any engine I want, then I will make a lobby in c++ with my own framework, and this lobby will launch an instance of the game with the right arguments.

So, I've been reading all the answers, thank very much for them. I think the best option is Leadwerks by far. the license only costs 200$, which is really cheap comparing to unity (1500$) and it works in c++ , with his own framework and graphic interface for the level designer.

My only question here is, how is the community, or the support (for example the community of udk is huge and you get response for almost every problem in question of days, more or less what happens here too). did anyone worked with Leadwerks before and has something to say about it before I made my final decision?

thank very much.

I use LE. The creator (Josh Klint) responds on the forums all the time. He's very active. Almost every question is responded to/answered the same day. It's a smaller community but with that comes a handful of regulars who like helping people and a tight group.

Josh is doing bug fixes about monthly for 3.0 while working on 3.1. 3.1 will be much better because of real-time lighting and deferred renderer, but the API will be the same so getting 3.0 and practicing learning the API would be helpful by the time 3.1 (Dec) comes out.

In terms of API/programming I think LE is by far the best out there.

Thank rpiller!

so if I'm not mistaken, I buy a license and I have full access to the forum, the full application,future updates and I can publish my games too right?

if is like that. LE here we go!