Any recommendations for alternatives to TGE/TGEA

#41 If you'd like to try Blitz, Darkbasic, why not try Gamestudio?

#42 @Frederick Lim
There is a rather large difference between an engine like A7 and a programming language oriented and optimized for game development. A7 has a group of tools that you can use to develop your title whereas in Blitz or DBP, you will have to make those tools or license them from someone who has developed them. Plus there is a lot of built-in functionality in an engine like A7 that you would have to build from the ground up. Things like occlusion or level-of-detail or raycasting. And while they are oriented towards "BASIC" users and new users, the more advanced topics will require a gifted programmer regardless of the ease of the language.

Of course, with A7, you will need a gifted C++ programmer to extend it as far as the SDK will let you if the engine doesn't have what you need built-in.

@Derry
Cipher was okay back in the day, but it was left out of development for a long time. Not only that, but the community seemed to fade away for the most part rather than taking it and working on it. It is only recently that a community member (and now group) stepped up to take over the licensing and keep it going. I've been a licensee since 2004 and learned quite a bit back then about different methods for bsp traversal and the like (things that seemed over my head when reading about them in Abrash's books). It was interesting to compare Irrlicht from the time, Torque, and the Quake engine to see different methodologies for getting similar things done.

I haven't seen whether it is really active or just appears to be active again, however.

#43 As silly as this may sound, I'm actually surprised you folks at Garage Games don't own a copy of some of these other engines (Obviously a commecrial license). While each engine has it's pro's and con's, including Torque, I'd think it would definately be worth it for you folks to at least keep in touch with what the competition is up to and consideing many are just as cheap or cheaper than Torque. Just a thought is all.

#44 @Chris Harpan: I wouldn't be surprised if GG didn't own licenses for other engines. Certainly they want to look at other engines, but actually owning licenses could be a problem (especially source licenses). Certainly they don't want their engineers looking at the source code to other engines, because if they then wanted to implement anything like some other engine they could be facing a lawsuit.

Even knowing that GG employees might (certainly do) have knowledge of possibly superior engines to Torque, I wouldn't expect them post here in favor of any engine other than Torque. The fact that they allow this thread to exist and have posted responses is a testament to their integrity.

#45 There are a lot of community members who have copies of various engines and can provide feedback, but Derry is right on so many legal fronts. Most engines have a demo version, and if they are open-sourced, then they have the source code out in the public eye. These can be evaluated rather safely. And I'm sure that some employees have looked at them, especially things like Unity which are oriented to rapid asset-flow development or Sauerbraten which is a very cool little engine with networked level editing on the fly. That's just a sweet, sweet thing! With engines like Nebula 2, BeyondVirtual, Lawmaker, C4, A7, Stencyl, and a whole slew of others, it's a huge list to try to research anyway.

But I stress that it is *EXTREMELY* important for buyers/licensees to examine various engines, try demos, cruise the forums, etc to see if it is the right match for their project. Otherwise buyer's remorse hits hard. Seeing information on Irrlicht or C4 and thinking "sweet!" is all great, but if you can't program in C++ you're going to be having a rather hard road of learning both the engine and the language at the same time. Yet, the same project may benefit greatly from Unity or Sauerbraten or BeyondVirtual. Or a product like A7 or Torque might be a better fit for their project.

For example, I'm a strong advocate of Torque, BlitzMax, Unity, and Sauerbraten. These are four engines that I really like. When it comes to communities, I really like the Blitz, Unity, Torque, and DarkBasic communities. I quite like the dev's over at Stencyl, too.

#46 txt file on reasons to currently avoid the Lawmaker engine
(done this way to save a few eyes and thread space)

#47 Interesting write-up, though my main beef is that the engine seemed to die and the developers disappeared (except via e-mail).

You didn't have to use their LUA IDE. It was just more convenient. I used the beta until it was released as a product and then switched to an open-source one. While it wasn't as convenient, I never had a problem using it. I also never had an issue with their support regardless of the question. However, their forums have been dead for the last six months. Not just comatose, but dead. DEAD. It seemed to have some potential, but then stopped going anywhere. I definitely agree on documentation, though knowing LUA and being familiar with a number of engines made it much easier to parse the included example game to figure out what was going on. Luckily the tutorials that were released well after I licensed the engine were good introductions. I haven't used the last couple of builds as the hardware-locked PC that I had is in storage and I'm not going to be able to get it out any time soon for lack of space.

BeyondVirtual was in that boat for a while, but the testing of GameCore might change that. Cipher was horribly dead, but the community revived it.

#48 I often hear good things about Unity, it sounds like a really solid engine. Enjoyed the GameDeveloper magazine writeup about it, too. I'll probably take a closer look myself, when they get their Windows platform up and running - it's not worth spending money on a new Mac just for that app, to me anyway.