What game engine?

[Klyde]

Does anyone know what game engine that games like Shaiya and Last Chaos use, and can one get a copy of it to put out their own game like them??

[lisa]

I don't know for sure, but a lot of people seem to be suggesting that Shaiya is the same engine as Lineage 2, which is using a modified version of Unreal 2.

Unreal can *definitely* be licensed. Both Unreal 2 and Unreal 3 are very popular engines to license. It is a bit expensive, however. Epic lists on their website that Unreal 2 is $350,000 per platform, plus $50,000 for each additional platform. (A platform means PC, XBox, etc.) There is also a 3% royalty due on each unit sold based on the wholesale price of the game. If you don't want to pay royalties, you can go royalty free for $750,000. Epic doesn't publically post pricing for Unreal 3, but it is more expensive than Unreal 2.

http://www.unrealtechnology.com/licensing.php?ref=terms

[Klyde]

EEEK!!!! sorry for the yelling; but MG that is way too expensive for my blood. Guess it is back to bringing mine out of the darkages- (Turbo C++ 3.0/3.1- using BGI) into this brave new world( using Dev C++).
First person shooter/flyer here I come; LOL
Thank you Lisa.

[lisa]

Anytime.

Incidentally, there are a lot of other engines that are *much* more affordable you might want to consider.

Torque is pretty good and it's only a couple hundred dollars for indies, even for the "advanced" version. It gets a lot of mixed reviews, but honestly I've used it myself and having used a lot of "pro" engines, it's not half-bad. The key to Torque is that you *must* design your art specifically for the engine and its capabilities, although in truth you should do that for any engine.

Ogre is pretty popular. Ogre is only a graphics engine, however, and not a game engine. The difference between something like Ogre (a graphics engine) and something like Torque (a game engine) is that most game engines give you functions for things like string localization handling, resource packing, and other "mundane" tasks. These tasks aren't glamorous, but in a real, shipping product they may make up more of the code than the fancy renderer. Honestly, I think lack of attention to the "boring" tasks is a lot of the reason why open source engines don't get used in commercial products as often as they might, even though a lot of the open source projects have quite advanced renderers.

There's also Panda3D, which is free and has been used commercially by Disney and other studios in shipping products. Its renderer isn't as advanced, but it's got all other pieces you'll need.

Unity is well-known and priced similiarly to Torque. It too comes with an editor/IDE. A lot of browser games are made in Unity.

Some of people here on the forums use BlitzBasic. BlitzBasic's main selling point is use of the Basic language, so if you are new to code it's a little easier.

There's a lot of other ones out there too worth considering.

[Klyde]

Lisa;
Your information presented here is much appreciated. I have spent the past few months digging my old game engine out of TurboC/C++ 3.0/3.1; I got to the 16- bit assembler routines and got frustrated at the amount of work, and that is why I asked (looking for the easy).
Thought it would be easier if I still had the source code for these and then could recompile it into a new .obj but even at that; the old 16 bit DOS calls would not port. So you can see my frustration of time; having to rewrite them in C. I will continue with the rewrites and as I get a showing; will post the link to my site containing both an .exe and the source.
Did find something interesting: some of the old routines have similar calls contained within this new world; i.e.; addTextBox(), addMenuItem(); addMenu(); addEditBox(); ;etc. of course it would be, considering most GUIs' are typical and based on Linked lists.
oh sorry; I digress.

[Klyde]

Update: ??
having very difficulties getting my "programmng mind" back. At least I am up to 1989- 1993. but still have no showing to post here. Hope that I have not implied any promises, am just tryin to get brain working again. Maybe have it in too many pies?
PHP/MySQL while logic is easy ....? Maybe it is motivation.
Given up on recreating my 3D libraries- so am investigating Open-GL(established an instance- so were good here)
or maybe DX9-10 (having probs establishing instance).
do have my old yaw/pitch/roll calcualtions, and my 3d to cartesian map routines. it is just a matter of creating a viewport(), and deciding on a file format to parse ( ac3d if able) instead of the in-source-arrays that use to use.

[Klyde]

Update: ??
having very difficulties getting my "programmng mind" back. At least I am up to 1989- 1993. but still have no showing to post here. Hope that I have not implied any promises, am just tryin to get brain working again. Maybe have it in too many pies?
PHP/MySQL while logic is easy ....? Maybe it is motivation.
Given up on recreating my 3D libraries- so am investigating Open-GL(established an instance- so were good here)
or maybe DX9-10 (having probs establishing instance).
do have my old yaw/pitch/roll calcualtions, and my 3d to cartesian map routines. it is just a matter of creating a viewport(), and deciding on a file format to parse ( ac3d if able) instead of the in-source-arrays that use to use.
Am sorry. Don't have it in me anymore. Been too long since the 80's. Gave it hell though.

[lisa]

Ah, I wouldn't fret.

These things take (a lot of) time. A good game engine can take many years to write.

[sierracharlie]

I investigated alot of game engines before I settled on Panda3d. Getting your 3d app up and running quickly is a big advantage. Python rocks.

[Ham]

Unity Indie just became free.
http://unity3d.com/