Productive and Stable?

It has been over two years since my last comment on this engine and little to nothing has happened in the way of progress to a full release. Realmware has still accepted payment for pre-release licenses. I hope for the sake of those that paid they eventually release a full version of their product. To all others I say: steer clear of this blue-baby. 03-23-11

I have been a big fan of this team over the last few months and still believe that they will eventually deliver a fantastic product. I do however think that "productive & stable" is an overstatement of V3D's current state. V3D is very much in Beta. If there was a stable and documented API I think that productive and stable would not be completely out of the question. Though there are many great features planned most currently lack the functionality, documentation, or stability to use even for prototyping. In V3D's defense this is based on the currently free Beta version. Hopefully when the release version finally arrives I will be able to return here and edit my review once more.

In closing let me say that if you are interested in getting in on the ground floor of a potentially fantasic engine and don't mind being productive in other facets of your current projects (modeling, texturing, and asset creation in general) then I would highy recomend V3D and it's community. If you are pressed for time and need to get moving look into other solutions. 12-01-08

Not what I expected

This has great features and easy to use, but alot of the times, its realy laggy. The features are great, but does a poor job of making the features useable. As I already said it is pretty easy to use, but there are certian parts that are confusing. The support is okay, and the graphics arn't amazing. Over all I think this engine would be great for a small company. If you are trying to make a game and win game of the year, or best selling game, this isn't the engine for you.

Easy Visual Development with All-in-One Development Tool in Visual3D v1.0

With Visual3D v1.0 (available now to beta testers, like myself), Visual3D Game Engine has come lightyears from where it began, especially when it comes to its easy-to-use All-in-One Development Tool.

The development tool included with the Visual3D Game Engine makes it easy for "visual" development of games and training simulation, providing everything you need - ranging from built-in Terrain Editor and Conversation Editor to Cinematics Editor and IronPython, C# or Visual Studio-based scripting - all in a single tool, instead of a "toolset" or series of unconnected tools and text editors like a lot of other engines provide.

And, for some licenses/editions, the development tool can even be included with your game as a kind of built-in "modding toolset" or "mission / map / scenario editor".

Student Game Project - Making Headway

I have just graduated highschool, and we selected Visual3D as the platform on which to build our game for school project. We had a few novice modelers, programmers, artists, writers, and musicians on the team, to create an educational game that emulates life in America when the settlers first came to New England territory.

We had a good time with importing our animated FBX models. Level design was easy. Hooking up triggers and scripts was easy too, but has a few tricks we had to learn to make them work right. I don't know if we'll be capable of completing this game for real, but we have made good progress on it, especially considering the age of our team members (high school).

Previous realmware employees have been helpful in getting us started and providing support when we had questions.

This program hardly ever crashes or locks up. It seems very stable. We were able to make it run fast on many types of PCs through the quality settings.

We are glad to have selected Visual3D for our project, and have really learned a lot from the experience. Thank you Realmware. Our programmers especially enjoyed the pure .NET/C# foundation of Visual3D which sped up their work, and made them very happy.

PS: I wish Realware would release version 1 soon. Maybe then we would be able to complete our game for real.

Visual3D = The Only Engine+Toolset for C#, XNA & Visual Studio (Recently Updated with many new t

The Visual3D Game Engine has made it much possible for me to develop next-gen games in C# (using Visual Studio and Microsoft XNA), while still cutting out the need for tedious coding, with its many visual tools.

It's been updated several times in the last month or two, with another major release expected soon, so it seems like development is not just continuing (unlike all other XNA-based engines to-date, such as Blade3D), but accelerating, even.

With the slurry of tutorial and docs updated, and video tutorial series, the documentation seems to be improving as well. There are still some features without much documentation, but mostly those are the ones just added or much improved in last update, and, considering all the doc updates recently made, I expect those will have video tutorials and updated docs as well soon.

The last release seems to have added lot more visual tools, which help in reducing the need for scripting and coding. But, not only do I like the visual tools that Visual3D provides (hence its name, possibly?), but also that it's not *just* a "game authoring toolset" as some alternatives are.

Visual3D is pretty much the only viable option I have seen as far as fully managed engines go -those written entirely in C#, for Microsoft .NET which work well with Visual Studio, and includes a powerful toolset. With Visual3D, I can create my own components in C# with Visual Studio, and have them automatically appear in Asset Explorer in the "All-in-One Development Tool" as they call it.

When play-testing my game, I can just hit F3 so that the toolset quickly shows up (overlayed around and hosted within my game window), so that I can just drag-drop my components from Asset Explorer onto my entities and avatars, and edit my game scenes and missions. Even while the game is running, I can use Visual Studio "Edit-and-Continue" to edit and debug my components, as well as many other parts of the game, considering the C# source provided for many core engine features, such as input handling and GUIs.

Awesome Tools

Not many engines provide the tools Visual3D does. I've been searching for multiple engines for our game now, and when I came across Visual3D - it's Visual tools plus it's base in .NET has allowed us to be very productive and get things done quickly.

One of the main benefits is that they now offer source code. In my experience, to develop a good 3D game, you MUST have source code - and Visual3D offers that. Not only that, but the source is in .NET, so we've been able to use all of Visual Studio's productivity tools to develop with. Because of this we've been able to customize the engine exactly to our liking and have become very very productive with it.

That being said, it's still got some kinks to work out. Some tools and functionality still need some work, and are sometimes buggy, but with source we've been able to tackle some of those issues ourselves.

Of the 2 source licenses we've bought, I'd have to say, we're very very happy with our purchase.

Visual3D Review

I have only spent a short time with Visual3D, but I personally know one of the creators who showed me what was possible with it. Everything I have seen so far has been nothing short of amazing. The animation and visuals are great, although a little choppy at times. Of course, this is only the beta so I'm sure that will be remedied with great results. Taking control of vehicles and creatures is easy and entertaining. Every controlling input seems to run smoothly. Vehicles especially have a great terrain detection, bouncing over hills and rumbling over bumps. Giving commands to npcs seems to work well too, paths drawn for them are followed closely, changes in direction is recognized, and commands such as 'attack' always seem to work. I've only seen a few minor hiccups within the software's processing of information, but again I'm sure that that will all be fixed when the final version is ready. I look forward to getting the real product and using it for myself. I'm sure a lot of people will be able to take Visual3D's engine and make something great out of it.

So easy even high school kids can use it!

The engine is absolutly amazing, i have been developing a small simulator of my school for my last year(12º) project and its been realy awesome to work with this engine, its amazing how easy you can create stuff , evrything is ther you only need your imagination, even a new programer like me can create a simple game within a few months imagine an experienced one.

The only down side of the engine its that its not complete yet and has some bugs and a lack of support for some 3d formats but those issues are goign to be fixed when v1.0 comes out so its no problem :P

So easy even high school kids can use it!

The engine is absolutly amazing, i have been developing a small simulator of my school for my last year(12º) project and its been realy awesome to work with this engine, its amazing how easy you can create stuff , evrything is ther you only need your imagination, even a new programer like me can create a simple game within a few months imagine an experienced one.

The only down side of the engine its that its not complete yet and has some bugs and a lack of support for some 3d formats but those issues are goign to be fixed when v1.0 comes out so its no problem :P

So promising, I bought a source license

After trying the downloads for this and several of the competing commercial products that have been around longer, I was much more comfortable with Visual3D, and purchased an indie license. It wasn't long before I was so into it, that I upgraded to a source license (cheap prices if do so while in Beta). I have even contributed some code to help import inexpensive Poser 3D models (not yet integrated into any released Beta).

What I liked about it:

* Sculpting terrain into mountains and then smoothing out areas for paths and mob interaction.

* "Painting" on terrain textures and even landcover, so quickly get large areas of terrain looking sweet.

* The "near + far" blending of textures, so terrain looks good both close-up and farther away.

* Tools worked the way I expected. For example, I can drag 3D models from Asset Explorer directly on to a scene. In general, an excellent use of familiar UI standards: dragging, tabbed pages of controls, extensive property lists for tweaking every detail.

* Sometimes tools worked even better than I expected. In Terrain editing mode, sculpting is ridiculously easy, as is painting on landcover. And then I discovered holding mouse wheel down (middle mouse button) let me rotate around a point of interest -- this is something I've long wanted to do in other packages. So easy to paint, turn, paint. [in Beta 6, this only works in Terrain editing mode.]

* Wandering around a scene in play mode, pausing it to re-arrange objects or even add new actors or props, then continuing play.

* Using Microsoft Visual Studio with C# or VB when I need to write a script. I had already used these languages for paid contract projects, and I love programming in these powerful languages.

Features I am looking forward to being more fully developed over the next month:

* visual drag-and-drop of behaviour, including triggered by scene location or nearby mob, from pre-built script components.

* Support for 16 different textures painted on to a single landscape (5 textures in the Beta I am using).

From everything I have seen, this product will make killer DirectX games once it is completed -- and it is getting quite close to having everything I need; this is why I bought now to get the cheaper Beta price.

The Visual3d.net engine is Awesome

Hi

I am Josh_sg1 from the game mod and development community and I have to say that Visual3d.net over any other engine I have worked with is unrivaled in the interface and how quickly you can get your models on screen and moving around.

Currently they have few tutorials and it is not finished but what they have so far is Amazing. Already they have support for collada and ogre formats and the animation works great, you can move your objects around on the model editor and make the doors of a building open and close without making a second model or knowing any animation, You can form the model door to open from code, as you can with planes, turrets, cars, all objects are drag and drop and scaleable like with most editors .

The great thing I liked about visual3d.net unlike the other engines is that the engine is made to look great for terrain and world scenes and that everything is not all props and hollywood scene looking. You have a nice sky and grass environment with unlimited world space and that makes Visual3d.net already a really nice engine for Air Combat and RTS, Ground troops, FPS MMO , TPS, and the Physics .

You have other engines like Torque, and hero engine for large games, Torque is for 2007 games, and hero engine is a well put together development tool. I would invest in Visual3d.net from the API that they work on . You can make your own custom Interface layout for your team, that works great for my project, a planned asset importer and team collaberation make Visual3d.net the perfect new Professional Game Engine for Real Time Gameplay and Next Gen games .
Get the Trial today and you will know right away what I am talking about.

Fully integrated for .NET Programming

Visual3D has the best looking toolset anywhere, and they are about to release version 1.0 according the roadmap. I'm planning to buy a professional seat license this month, as it's on sale for half-price promotional deal.

I can't believe the stunning graphics and performance at this price. The advanced materials and model editor make it easy for me to import my own models and supe them up to look superb! Unbelievable!

The design mode manipulation of objects is a snap to learn and use.

The terrain editor is out of this world! I'm getting quite good with it, creating some nice masterpieces.

This product has been 3 years in the making now -- and has blown me away.

I am a programmer. Of all the features here, the #1 thing for me is that Visual3D is fully written in .NET, which allows me to natively write my own code and components for it also in .NET! I love C#, and love that I can program with all of the luxurious convenience and speed that comes with .NET's fast compiles, sweet syntax, and most of -- Edit and Continue!!!

The support here is pretty good, with some very nice videos just being released to show me how to get things done! More are on the way.

Check out this single page here on World Building and Terrain Editor. Have you ever seen terrain editing inside a game engine look so sweet?
http://game-engine.visual3d.net/wiki/world-building-and-terrain-editor

How are these guys offering so much for such a low price tag. This is a steal. Better buy now before the price goes up!

One in a Million Game Engine

I've spent many months looking for a game engine. I've tried 2 other commercial engines that I purchased licenses to, however in the end I've purchased Visual3d.Net and it surprises me how good it really is.

This is a truly next-gen, triple A quality game engine. It's not 'little triple a' it's the real mccoy. I just encourage you to try it for yourself.

Only problem I have with it so far is lack of docs and bugs. But the engine is still in beta, and the support you get on the forums is really SUPERB. SUPERB SUPERB. I can't overstate the high level of quality concern and support and feedback you receive from the devs on the forums. It's really great.

Hopefully the community there will grow more and more (it's already pretty decent size for age) and the engine will continue. It's really highly recommeneded by me. Just look at the features list on the page. Those features are for real. I'm really impressed with this engine.

It's really top of the line. I think it's the best engine available for indies.

Visual3D.NET Game Engine

For some reason this didn't show up as under my account, but instead as anonymous. Hopefully I have better luck this time.

My team and I have been using Visual3D.NET for the past couple months and have been having pretty good success. Keep in mind the engine is still in beta, but it's progressing along very fast and nicely. With each new build, there are more features and things are getting much easier to use. Realmware's editor software (the architect) is easy to use and provides much functionality to the level designers and other non-programmers on the team. The support for the engine has been superb. The forums on their website are amazing. I have been able to get answers to any questions I've had in two days or less on average. The community is strong and the Wiki is actively evolving with many tutorials.

The API is stable and using C# is easy and efficient. Models are easily imported into the editor and manipulated both code and editor side. I've seen the progression over the past couple months and am very excited to see it continue to evolve.

Visual3D

While still in development, this engine is very promising. The team building it is very focused on making an incredibly easy and intuitive user interface. Being a new engine, the community is still budding and growing, but this will increase with time. While gameplay features are currently still in production (pre beta 1.0), other features such as their terrain engine (World Builder, to be more precise) is unparalleled by anything I've seen in any other engine. Other promising aspects are the performance requirements (very low for what you get on screen) and the use of C# over C++ for more rapid programming.

Check out their main site:
http://www.visual3d.net/

great engine with fantastic development cycle

One of the things that attracted me to this engine the most was how much work is being done on the engine every month. We see consistent releases and constant updates to the engine, which can often be hard to find (or costly) with other engines.

Great engine with great dev support

This is a very promising game engine, They have a great set of tools, a very detailed roadmap on their site where they detail what the dev team is working on and when they expect it to be complete. Their dev team is working on a set of tutorials for there 3.3 release, due out Jan 09'

I feel when they release their MMO addon's this engine will be the best choice on the market for MMORPG style games.

Great Engine

This Engine is XNA based.
You get many AAA Game feature and a good performence. The Visual3D Editor is amazing and productive!

Could be a new Indie Game Engine Star is born.

Game Engine of the Future

Greetings!
First of all, I'm not pretending and can honestly and proudly say that I'm a one of Realmware development team.
I think I don't need to tell more about advantages of Visual3D.NET, many of it's benefits are described here already.
Though need to say that I see from inside it's very fast maturing, almost every day new features are added and toolset is improved. All developers are working hard at day and night for making powerful progress. That's very pleasant to see when the result of your work looks attractive and useful, especially I very like this.
And for programmers this engine is top-notch, any features, that they can imagine, can be done quite easily in C#.
Nevertheless any of useful features that can be requested by beta-users or just imagined (and even more) are added continuously into Visual3D.NET to make it outstanding.
Can't say how support looks from outside, but team tries to make best effort, no one stays without answer, and resolving of any possible issues is going on as soon as possible.

potentially the greatest investment for any good mod team with higer aspirations

After clearing up a few hiccups with my personal life, i got back to working with my Dev team about a month ago.
As i got talking to one of the team leaders to get an update and i discovered we had migrated from CE2. (cry engine 2)
well when he got raving about this new engine i thought "oh great, he has found a new toy to play with, now im going to have to re-learn the whole developer interface"
well to my surprise, and a pleaseant surprise it was too, the V3D.net engine is absolutely spectacular.
I Downloaded the Beta and i was able to create terrain almost instantly, i could manipulate and edit 3D assets in the engine in minutes.
i was, for want of a better phrase, Gobsmaked.
it took me nearly 3 weeks to get any basic terrain and assets into CE2, and the fact we all had to wait for developer kits and other assorted compatibility issues to be resolved, the whole project seemed pointless and impossible.
After fiddling around with this game developing environment, i am completely convinced that a complete game is easily within our grasp, and not just a game, but a high quality game, with graphic AT LEAST EQUAL TO CRYSIS and physics that can go above and beyond any preconceptions i ever had.
i am completely enthused about this opportunity and with the continued support and great design that the developers have got going, they are going to be responsible for some of the greatest games of 2008-2012.
Potential doesnt even begin to describe it, this engine has the ability to give designers God like abilities.
Just give the command and it will be done. no more faffing around with 2 different 3d apps, exporting from one file format to another using a flawed file format, corrupting all your hard work in the proccess,just to get the model to work.
I am deeply gratefull to the developers and community that are making this engine great.
N.B
This engine does not, just yet, have crytek like abilities, but as i said before, the potential of the engine, and what it is going to become, combined with what it already has, is what im giving it such a good rating for

Regards
Leddhedd

Great for Content Creators

This engine has a great art pipeline for content creators, with support for auto-importing (and re-importing) , and is optimized for COLLADA (.dae). It makes it pretty easy to build worlds, without having to spend so much time in tedious programming, and this is getting much better with new tools for building up and using asset libraries and object databases, especially with the recent (and upcoming) improvements for building entity models, scripting (and visual scripting), and cinematics.

I look forward to trying out one-click deployment, when finished, to start showing off what I create =)

Powerful, Easy to Use Toolset for Virtual Worlds & Serious Games built on .NET/C#/XNA

I have tried out a number of engines, looking for a good solution that allows me to develop in C# with Visual Studio and .NET, and must say that Visual3D.NET is, by far, the best option available.

It is far ahead of the competition in terms of ease of use, especially in using it with Visual Studio and .NET languages (C#, IronPython, VB, C++/CLI, pick your flavor). I believe "All-in-One" is a good way to sum up the toolset, since it includes a World Builder (or Terrain Editor), Scene Designer, Scenario Editor, Entity/Model Editor.

It also has a built-in UI Editor (which is especially hard to find in a .NET or XNA-based engine), which seems to be undergoing revamp now. And, its supposed to have Visual Scripting (Visual Programming Diagrams) in the next release, as well as improved workflow with Visual Studio (for scripting in the best programming tool out there).
in that it provides all the different tools you would need to build AAA game, serious game (training simulation, etc.), or virtual world (MMO, virtual collaboration environment, etc.).

The networking support is pretty good, which you can tryout with the included Robot Wars demo game. Rendering performance and networking scalability is constantly improving, so I believe we will see production quality MMO support (with zones distributed across multiple servers, for example) by its v1.0 release - which seems to be before the end of the year.

Besides being the best option for those developing with .NET or Visual Studio, I would say that this engine stands out as being one of the few engines out there tailored for Serious Games (visualization, training, simulation, defense, etc.). With features like importing real-world earth data and upcoming CAD support, it makes it one of the few good and affordable options out there.

And these "Serious Games-specific" features don't just apply to sims and training, as I see it. The ability to procedurally build vast environments with terrain, vegetation, and entities, is critical these days, considering the growing size of virtual worlds in MMOs and even single player games (like Oblivion).

To top it all off, I have seen very fast and effective responses on the forums, and, though documentation is a bit sparse at this early stage (with all the new features being added with each release), it seems like it is building up pretty quickly now that Visual3D.NET is approaching a v1.0 release.

Overall, I believe that Visual3D.NET is a good, solid, long-term bet if you looking for a toolset that easy to use for content creators (non-programmers) for building AAA games, serious games, and virtual worlds. And it is the only good solution, when it comes to .NET developers (such as myself) and those looking to target Microsoft XNA.

Looking forward to this maturing

This looks to be a very promising game engine. This is a review of their version 2.3 of their Beta. All I can say is that it is the first time I have been blown away my the ease of use of an engine even without looking at any documentation. Did I say documentation? There currently is only a scant few wiki docs to look at. The hardest thing to figure out thus far is importing of models.

Since it is still in beta it is still lacking a few areas, most noticeably is a none programmatic way of getting custom Avatars/characters/vehicles into the game. Also, I am not sure if where their AI is going. It looks like you may need to get a programmer on your team in order to put the "game" into this engine.

Again this is only beta 2.3, its going to be very interesting to see this one develop.

Robot War Rocks!!

I am an avid on-line gamer. Graphics and overall effects are key to keeping my attention and my membership. I was surprised to see that many of the effects and graphics for V3D were superior to those in most of my other games.

Robot War is impressive and I look forward to the September release of the next beta version.

On-line gaming efforts continue to gain momentum and I would suggest that companies wanting to offer high end products to those of us willing to pay to play should tap into the resources available through V3D.

If this is our Golden Nugget, then concider the chicken shot, stuffed, and baked at 375

Visual 3D.NET, unfortunately, was not the first engine that we tested for our game concept. There were many engines that we looked threw, toyed with, and ultimately gave up on. But, not after months of frustration with each one. However, that was until we found the CryEngine2.

The CE2 engine had most of what our concept needed. The next-gen graphics, top notch physics, simple terrain tools, great vegetation to work with, and the list goes on. Though, our concept calls for a very large playable environment, much larger than what the CE2 could offer. But, CE2's functional terrain sizes were the best we had found so far. At least in combination with all of it's other "eye candy" features. So, we began pre-development.

For those not clear on pre-development, it's that patience driven period where the artist has to endure the painstaking process of learning a new system. Getting comfortable with it's little quirks and temperaments, and finding ways of refining the processes and procedures required to make development run smoothly. This was where the CryEngine2 began to show it's grim shortcomings lurking under it's veneer finish. The engine itself is impressive, but you can impress me all day long. At the end of that day, I'm still going to ask what exactly it was that has been accomplished. Sadly with the CE2, I would never get a strait answer. Maybe a mumbled "well, I tried this, but...". Of course as I walk away I here "if the Editor would quit crashing, maybe I would have made some progress". The process of getting assets into the engine was convoluted and tedious beyond belief. The terrain editor proved to be more work than it had originally suggested. The physics editor would leave me balled up in the corner of my office chewing on pencils and asking the Gamer Gods "WHY!".

The bottom line is that no matter how easy some of it's features are, and no matter how quick some elements can be implemented... All of that was greatly off set by the hours spent getting some of the more "complicated" aspects to function properly.

This is where we found Visual 3D.NET. "And, I'm looking at this little line below the text box that says to remain objective, so I'll try not to go all "fanboy" on you." But, V3D has been a Godsend. Every element, feature, graphical twitch and tweak, every aspect of the engine is exactly what we need to make our concept a reality. And, unlike the CE2, actually shows us some hope of wrapping up development within the next decade or two.

Our concept calls for a very large asset base. (makes Crysis look like an afternoon modeling session) So, we'll need to be able to get assets in and functioning quickly. We'll also need outstanding network code to start from. Huge terrains that are easily managed, maintained, implemented, and modified. Game engine support for the little things we get hung up on. Physics that will make FlightSimX fans put down their $5k PC Cockpit peripherals to take "our" birds for a spin. Projectile calculations that will stop noobs from saying "I !SWEAR! I shot him". ...Ok, so it's a tall order. But, V3D hasn't let us down yet. We've traced their road map right along with their Beta's, and they've never missed a beat. {albeit, a small skip over to Hawaiian time. ;)} The Google Earth style world editor is truly an innovation in game engine technology.(at least a functional one) The graphics are on par with the CE2. Physics are outstanding, and allow support for PhysX. I couldn't ask for better developer support. The assets are as easy to get in-game as clicking export from 3DS Max 09'. The pathing logic is just as capable as the CryEngine's. And, most of all, a 4 figure price tag so our money can go to asset development instead of a Microsoft product that's masquerading as a game engine under the guise of a company called Crytek. ...With a "very nice man" they call Yuri running the show.

In closing, the only thing I have to say to fellow developers is "don't purchase this engine". It's ease of use, breathtaking graphics, massive feature sets, comprehensive tools, stellar support... it's all overrated. What you really should be using is the UT3 engine. Yeah, maybe it doesn't look as nice, maybe it doesn't have all the innovative features, or even backing of hands on support. But, if you're all using UT3, or even CE2 (though I wouldn't wish that on anyone), then we won't have anyone crowding our spot on the cover of Game Informer magazine!

Sincerely,

IrishDeviant