Deciding on an Engine...

[Foolish]

I have used older versions of Torque. You can get something up and running quickly, especially multiplayer, but than you can hit a pretty solid wall. Bugs can be extremely difficult to troubleshoot. And the forums needed cleaned out at the time. Still, the advantage of having your multiplayer component very accessible is a big win.

 

As an amateur/hobbyist programmer, I feel LE gives me lot of freedome, and though I hit walls, I steadliy overcome them. It just feels like more things are possible in LE.

[Delinx32]

I fall into the "will never finish a game, but will spend tons of money on art and engines" category. I've used many engines, and tried many frameworks. I haven't been using LE yet (although I've been using 3dws for a while) because I was focused on xbox 360 and xna, but I was spending more time writing tools than I was developing a game, so I decided that the trouble wasn't worth it. I'm never gonna finish a game anyway, so who cares if it will be on xbox or not.

 

From an outside observer's perspective, LE looks like the most complete hobbyist engine on the planet. Torque made me want to kick myself in the balls every time I tried to use it. I can't speak to LE's credit yet because I'm not an actual user, but I feel that I would be doing the world a disservice by not saying "don't buy torque. Keep your money and your sanity." Torque is a good exercise in how to "almost" write an engine, leave out features, have **** documenation, samples that don't work, and a community that does nothing but complain about the product.

 

I fully intend to buy this engine. The quality of 3dws, along with the friendly community and the fact that Josh actually responds to posts, make me think that there is something different about this engine...in a good way.

[Rick]

I'm running a "experiment", if you will, to bring a Unity feel to Leadwerks, that will extend to a flowgraph in the future. It would be great if the thing stopping someone from making a game ISN'T the game logic. Most everyone can think logical about how their game should work, so it would be nice if that was easily translated into code.

[DaDonik]

From an outside observer's perspective, LE looks like the most complete hobbyist engine on the planet.

 

Speaking as an insider, it looks almost the same.

[Dan]

I am a 3D modeler and game developer. I have been using Leadwerks for R&D and production work since October, 2009. I have written code for and developed art pipeline content for a bunch of engines prior to that including Torque. In my opinion Leadwerks is a dream to work with. There are great export utilities for 3DS max and the in game rendering with shadows, lighting, normal and spec is excellent. great support for shaders and particle effects as well that can be tweaked to your heart's content. The sandbox is a must have and LUA scripting rules! Absolutely a dream for pre-vis, effects and entity attributing. Nothing beats the price of the engine and as you can see, the support forums are excellent as well. There is more and more being developed for this engine all the time and major releases come out frequently with no extra cost. They seem to be using CryEngine 3 as a benchmark and many new features closely resemble what you can achieve at a much lower cost. I pitch this engine every chance i get because I believe in what Josh and his team are doing. They really understand where game and simulation development is heading and have years of proven experience behind them. It is more than worth the cost just to explore what you can do with it.

[allaak]

I never try c++ so

I got good result with :

Blitzmax+3Impact (need to program lod for terrain and vegetation system but everything else is here)

Blitz3D+FastExtension+easytoak+blitztree (need to program lod for terrain if you don't use blitzterrain)

Blitz3D+Xor3D (need to program lod for terrain & shader is not my favorite coding language)

 

For me Leadwerks Engine is the more complete exept that the target is latest GPU and it's only PC

[Davaris]

I've tried Unity3d and its got a lot of nice addons and art imports effortlessly, but its terrain is ugly and its movement gives me a headache.

As I like things to look as good as they can be, I prefer LWs.

 

As for Torque, I've heard bad things about the code base, documentation and support for years, so I did not try it.