Game editors, which one to choose
polycounter lvl 9
Hey guys, i'm in my final year of college now and i have to make a project for my diploma. My ideea was to make something like a plane hangar or a car showroom where you could ineteract with the cars or planes like so : rotating around them, opening the doors / cockpit, starting the engine, changeing skins for interiour/exteriour using a menu, looking under the hood and stuff like that.
My question is what game engine would best be suited for such a task ? considering that i have about 28 weeks to make the " game " and it's assets.
I'm running windows and the assets will be made in Maya.
My question is what game engine would best be suited for such a task ? considering that i have about 28 weeks to make the " game " and it's assets.
I'm running windows and the assets will be made in Maya.
Replies
The kind of demonstration that it sounds like you are attempting to make is very museum-esque. You want to construct a display space within a 3D environment. But most moddable game engines are 1st person, and don't necessarily lend themselves to such interactivity. The problem is the interaction with the displays. When you just have 3D models, and no immediate prompts for interacting with them, it can be a little confusing for the user. And a display like this has to be as intuitive as possible.
The solution is in-game menus. Anyone who has ever been to a museum recognizes the plaques and other interactive or informational elements usually placed in front of a display. And if they want to know more about a display, that is the first place they go. By placing an in-game menu on these plaques, you can provide immediate and intuitive controls that will allow the user to manipulate the models in a way that they understand.
There are two game engines that come immediately to mind that have this feature.
1. Doom 3. ID Software's Doom 3 engine has a very nice implementation of this feature. It is also a decently graphically advanced engine. The downside is that it is a little more difficult to wrap your brain around.
2. Neoaxis. Neoaxis is a much lower-budget project being developed by a fellow in Russia. It can currently be liscenced. But the creator always provides a non-profit version of the engine that you can use for projects that you don't intend to charge for. (freeware games, educational projects, etc...) Neoaxis' isn't as technically robust as Doom 3's engine, but it has some very useful editors that make getting it running a lot easier.
There are many other engines out there as well - perhaps with less resources and trickier thus to get into but from a technology side and feature wise at least as strong as UE3 or even better.
I am not very up to date but some interesting engines and their editors that come to my mind right now are:
http://www.projectoffset.com/technology.php
http://www.leadwerks.com/
as for ingame menus or GUI's the Doom3 engine had a special GUI scripting language to add interactive menu screens in the game on surfaces and alike- maybe check out id's engine portfolio.
@EarthQuake : can you really make a game using ue3? i thought it just made levels for unreal?
I suggest buying UT3 because the engine is a bit more stable and has a few feature improvements.
It would also help to mention you need to pick up the PC version.
Source (Half Life2, Team Fortress2 Orange Box ect) is also free if you own HL2 or TF2.
It has a pretty robust set of triggers that can call animations inside of models, which is in UE3 also.
But really what you're looking to do is going to require quite a bit of work and wrangling because this kind of thing isn't something your standard game engine is set up to do.
Hopefully this is more of a focus on technical than art.
http://www.virtools.com/
http://unity3d.com/
http://www.adobe.com/products/director/
style decision and art direction have nothing to do with that engine, it's veeeery flexible, from all engines i worked with the Unreal3 would definitely be my favorite, the toolset is great and you just feel (besides some things) that they are experienced in creating engines for finishing projects anmd not having fancy pants codestuff in it, just for the sake of having it.
There are limitations, yes but you could ask anyone he would know how to fuck that bitch, and thats the biggest plus.
Unreal is the whore everyone fucked with.
EDIT:Damn,I must be blind
the visual expectations aren't high because this field is relatively new to Romania, and only a couple diploma projects are 3d game-like . I also have an option to make the actual software using open-gl , which i've played around with a while back, the thing is it would be much more difficult to achieve the same interactivity and visual quality, but it would be viewed better by the teachers, i'll decide what i'm using next week.
Thank you for all the help guys
Agreed. Unreal is supper easy to use an d there are a ton of tutorials for it.
I am looking forward to seeing the Far Cry Editor though. Saw the demo and looked amazing for creating levels not sure though what hoops will have to jump through to bring custom content in. If it is as easy as Unreal I will be playing with it a lot.
the farcry editor seems really similar to crysis' sandbox editor. and if it gets the same kind of developer support it'll be gimped. really hard to beat unreals documentation and support.