Working on an indie game, looking for strong engines. - Games

Okay, so for a couple of months now, a group of friends and I have been shooting ideas for a game. Now for the most part, we're all pretty familiar with C and C++, as well as audio recording. Now, we've gotten most of the storyboard, and information pieces all finished up, and now we're going to move onto actually working on the game. So we've been looking for nice powerful engines that we can manipulate and use. Originally, we had Source in mind because we were still working with the idea the game would be extremely linear, but as we progressed, we pushed towards a more open-world type game. So we scraped Source for the most part, because it isn't really the engine that would work with the whole thing. Now after we moved on from that, we began looking for other engines we could possibly use instead. Now of course, we're looking for an engine that is user friendly, and easy to learn, and works with C, or C++, if we wanted to edit the engine itself. We've looked at Unity, and for the most part, it seems pretty strong, versatile, and good for open world game-play. What I'd like to know, is if any of you guys know of any engines out there that might be powerful enough to handle an Open-World game, with Red Dead Redemption-esque multi-player. Please don't say "Gamebryo, hur dur", or "Idtech 5" because I don't want to pay thousands of dollars for a game engine. If it's free, than that's a bonus. Anyway, thanks for the help, and on another note, after we've done this, I'll drop a little information and concept art for the game.

UDK? Unity? Those are the normal choices Good luck with your project, sounds like quite a load of work. Get your artists making assets right now

Unity has a lot of potential in my eyes, I think it could do a lot if used properly.

Huh, I'm surprised we haven't looked into the Unreal Dev kit. But I always imagined it as a very linear and FPS based engine.

Well, see, the only reason I'm on the fence about Unity is the terrain editor. As in, it's a lot less professional and clean than I'd like. It's very sloppy feeling, very little chance for detail. The map editor, is actually just you placing models to act as buildings, instead of having those buildings being brushwork in the editor, as I'm used to in Source SDK.

all I can say best of lux in your projects

Source.

Well, as it seems, Unity sounds like the best choice so far. It's user friendly, has potential for the open world maps we're looking at creating, and is very powerful and versatile. I looked at the UDK, and although it looks pretty, it doesn't really look like something we'd use on our project.

UDK. [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErnmP5yjtfo[/media] I don't think engines get more open and fulfilled than UDK. Especially not for free.

Well, from that little bit of eye candy, I really see UDK as pretty powerful. I mean, it is one of the staples of most gaming engines, I'll do a little bit more research on it.

Id Tech 1

UDK is good for serious games and is very flexible. Unity is also pretty good although it's generally used for smaller games, but it has potential for large ones. [editline]16th December 2010[/editline] Judging by your needs I'd say UDK

From what I've seen, UDK has rarely been used for open-world based Role playing games. I mean, professionally, yes, UDK might be a more comforting choice. I don't know, UDK seems extremely powerful if the work is put in, and seems to work well for actual "games", but, Unity has been recommended quite a bit.

Tell us a bit more about your project so we can help.

[url]http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/LevelStreamingVolumes.html[/url] You can stream levels in UDK so they all connect

Gamebyro [media]http://www.threadbombing.com/data/media/13/75378-TrollFace.png[/media] [highlight](User was banned for this post ("Trolling [Hezzy]" - Swebonny))[/highlight]

[QUOTE=Lick;26746193] Spill the beans comrade.[/QUOTE] I'm not gonna go off spoiling story or whatever, so I'm just saying it's an open world, RPG, with co-operative, and muliplayer elements, and a singleplayer storyline and gameplay. The game is very free-form, and from what we've decided, is going to have a rich atmosphere, and world. We don't want this to be a generic role playing game rip off of Elder Scrolls, Two Worlds, Fable, ect. [editline]16th December 2010[/editline] Also, it's not based in medieval fantasy genre like you might expect from what I just stated.

Okay, so from what I've seen, Unreal looks real nice, but everyone has used it (successfully) for shooters. I'll keep looking at it, but I'll work on some stuff in Unity in the mean-time. Haha, what I'd give to get my hands on RAGE and Euphoria right now.

Borderlands uses unreal and has some pretty open environments. There are still the occasional loading screens between areas but for the most part it's open. Also gearbox described it as "FPS meets RPG" as it's a FPS which has adopted RPG elements.

yea tell us about your project I think you will find quality people here...

I did the research, and yes, while Borderlands has some RPG elements, the ones it actually utilizes, are not the ones we are looking to use in the project (Project Grayspeed for now) Borderland's "RPG elements" are just quests, weapons, and a more open environment, and even then, each little section was quite small in comparison to our estimated world size. [editline]17th December 2010[/editline] [QUOTE=Freedom;26748753] Spill the beans [/QUOTE] Again, I do not have the authority to just reveal aspects, and storyline of our game, without first consulting with the other team members. As much as I'd like to, I just can't, that's why I said I'd reveal any PR stuff later, when we were agreed.

OK , but if you want more team members you cant contact me and I will do my best to help with you ( mostly modeling and similar stuff)

UDK have SpeedTree too, a very quick and efficient way to model and render trees and foliage in the world. Sounds like it could be of use in an open world kind of game. Also, does Unity instance models nowadays? I know it didnt a month or two back when I played with it. UDk does however, which is kinda essential if you want to do an open world game.

If you get UDK make sure you have Zbrush to go along with it.

Okay, so now that UDK is on the table, everyone is pretty much saying to go for it, which I'm okay with, since we weren't set on Unity anyway. Let me just ask right fast, what would be the advantages of using ZBrush over something like Blender? @Freedom: Well, we were hoping to try and keep the team localized to the area, so work and ideas could be easily transfered at meetings and the like, but if you have worked on models, I'd love to see an example of your work to see if you could be an asset to the team. PM me if you're interested, and have talent.

ZBrush is a sculpting tool made for creating high poly meshes for normal-maps and the like (to then be applied on models made in traditional modelling software), not really used for making optimized game models. I don't have hands on experience with Blender, but it's more in the line of Maya or 3D studio Max (traditional 3d modelling software). I guess you could make high-poly models in ZBrush and then export normal-maps etc to Blender or the other way around.

Personally if you are familiar with C++ I would go with illricht (Am I spelling that right?) It requires quite a bit of C++ to get it to do what you want, so if you cant program (pretty much) a whole game, I would stay away. But its really easy and adaptable.

So I would use ZBrush in conjunction with Blender?

unity uses java bare in mind

Irrlicht has been pretty good for us. Has a full set-up, open source, it's pretty powerful if you're willing to put the time in. Any engine that can run Star Ruler is a powerful one. :P Also: What Epic Lul said. [url]http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/[/url]