5 replies to this topic

[Veleran]

I did modeling in 3ds max and level design,i can not code at all,and i need a light ,easy and free engine with enough features so i would not need a programmer from the start ( to modify the engine to the game needs - lets say a simple physics based 3d side scrolling platformer.
However i would try other tricks as possible when ever i can avoid scripting.


Which would be the easiest of these three engines as they are now..
If you know an easier than these that is also free ,let me know.
.
There is gameplay which looks to me clean and trusty and supports platforms like android etc but i doubt it has editors yet and that is light enough for me to use.

http://devmaster.net...ngines/gameplay

So next choice would be maratis which says can work on mobile also.

http://devmaster.net...is#user-reviews


and there is cafu

http://devmaster.net...nes/cafu-engine

I will check more the docs of these engines to see what they can do out of the box ,but would like a second opinion.

[xenobrain]

GamePlay is lovely. I've been playing with it a lot lately. Clean architecture, small, easy to understand. But you WILL NEED TO CODE! The character demo even provides a nice starting point for a platformer and the spaceship demo implements a 2.5D camera. I think it needs a more sophisticated resource manager for a full game though.

Maratis is quite nice as well. Again. pretty clean architecture, and a promising level editor. You may not even need to dip into C++ to build the game (or at least not much) since a lot can be accomplished with the level editor and lua script behaviors. Lua coding is still coding though, and there's no way around that, it's just much easier and there's a platformer-ish sample provided you can work from.

Cafu absolutely requires code. I've spent some time reading Cafu's source code and it's rather messier than the above two. Also it's GPL license is far, far more restrictive than GamePlay's Apache 2.0 and Maratis' ZLIB licenses, which combined with the less readable code was enough to turn me off working with it.

[Veleran]

Thank you for the reply.
Except maratis ,i heard Sandbox game maker,is quite easy and includes a side scroller demo.
If it is simple as many say i might try that also.
Maratis 3ds max exporter seems not finished yet,so far supporting Blender as modeler,and so

[wrapscallionn]

Maratis seems to be based on Blender, and unless you want to spend a good while " reinventing the wheel" i.e. tossing all you know of 3dsmax and taking the at least 6 months it takes to learn Blender, then don't use Maratis. Go DxStudio instead.

[tyree]

veleran there isnt any way around coding a great deal when making a game. all interactions and responses have to be coded. but you could limit the amount of coding that your doing by using animation to move things. instead of having a character move in place. have the character actually move forward. instead of using physics to make a character jump use animation. any object that moves do it with animation instead of code that will save you time. then you only need to code the responses that occur from whatever the animated objects collides with

[kesmanu23]

OpenSpace 3D