nightrobin, on 04 May 2013 - 01:49 PM, said:

Completely wrong. You can definitely build closed-source applications with those IDEs. Their license means you cannot build proprietary IDE which INCORPORATES THEIR CODE. You could even build a your own proprietary IDE with those programs, so long as you wrote all the code yourself.

Since you are doing neither, their license is completely irrelevant. Use the IDE however you wish, the authors assert no copyright over your work.

nightrobin, on 04 May 2013 - 01:49 PM, said:

Great! Brush up on licensing though. There is more than one way to license a program, some of which enable differnt business models.

nightrobin, on 04 May 2013 - 01:49 PM, said:

In the DevDB, filter engines, libraries etc with the licenses 'MIT, BSD, ZLIB'. Anything licensed under those licenses is free for you to use, under the following conditions:
1) NO LAWSUITS!
2) NO DEFAMATION OR IMPLIED ENDORSEMENT! (It means don't say mean things about the authors or their work. The second part means don't claim the authors support your work, no "The OGRE3D Team Says My Game Really Shows Off Their Engine!!!" unless they actually said that and gave you permission to reprint)

3) GIVE CREDIT! (A simple 'Contains Software Copyright ' in a credits screen or README is generally enough, and not even technically required with the ZLIB license)

That's pretty much it. There are a couple finer points, especially if you use something under the Apache 2.0 license, but the principals are pretty much the same.

nightrobin, on 04 May 2013 - 01:49 PM, said:

Do you mean using LGPL software, or licensing yours under LGPL? If the former, yes, you can use the software with a proprietary product, but it's pretty complicated so make sure you really understand what that license means, which is basically that you can interface with their DLLs, but you can't copy-paste their code implementations inside yours unless yours is GPL compatible as well (not just any open source license will do). If that sounds confusing, STAY AWAY!

If you want to license your software under LGPL, then yes, you can still sell it. You can even make it illegal to pirate by making the content proprietary but leaving the code open for modification. A very interesting business plan, one I hope to see more of in the future, but it may create confusion amongst the customers about the legality of redistribution. It can be very difficult the explain to people that they are only allowed to share the program itself and that sharing the complete game is actually piracy.

Hope that helps.

*** EDIT: Slight clarification on LGPL

Cube 2 / Sauerbraten is a joy to work with for quick n' dirty level creation. It's not brush based, as it's focused more on subdivision, extrusion etc of geometry sort of like box modeling. However it's actually extremely easy to get a handle on. It's free, it's fun, open source, and yes, has bloom.

However you mention that you prefer to import your maps (from Radiant?). In that case, your choices are somewhat more limited: OGRE, Irrlicht and G3D are the (rendering) engines I am familiar with that can import bsp maps. Of those I am going to go against the trend and actually recommend investigating G3D. The community is tiny compared to the other two but it is somewhat more comprehensive providing a good framework and examples, and has lovely well commented source that teaches a lot of game engine concepts.

I'm on my way to work now so I can't elaborate much--

CryEngine uses a dynamically reparenting scenegraph (I think baed on the current zone) with octrees for spatial sorting and a very fancy software culling solution called a "Coverage Buffer" that uses simplified occlusion volumes and object bounding boxes to do a pass before moving on to hardware culling solutions (adapted to the host platform). It does have a CSG tool, but I think it's used mostly for whiteboxing by most developers these days

I don't know as much about Unreal Engine except it's also using a dynamically reparenting scenegraph with octree spatial sorting, and that it has "cull distance volumes" and is still pretty heavily dependant on PVS and portals/antiportals. Again, CSG is available in the toolset, I've seen it used more often than in CryEngine but more and more games seem to be focusing on static meshes for scene geometry so CSG is getting used only on the coarsest level, if at all.

Phyre Engine is interesting since as far as I can tell, it pretty much ditches the scenegraph and uses nodes only for things like animation where they are conveniant for transforming hierarchies. Instead it is relying very heaviliy on occlusion volumes and SPU/ThreadPool jobs testing against those volumes, using a simple front-to-back scene traversal that it performs by getting world transform matrices from the active objects list.

Finally, Unigine is using the usual dynamically reparenting scenegraph (I think its's bsed on assets "clusters" or groups" in the world), but is using what they are calling an adaptive (frequently regenerated) axis-aligned bsp tree.

All this is based on my memory which isn't perfect, of course.

I have to get the obligatory comment out of the way first.

Judging from this and your other posts you seem to be looking to make a Battlefield-style game. My first recommendation is to start with a mod of one of those games (Battlefield 2 would be the starting point since BF3 does not have mod tools yet AKAIK. Crysis Wars may be a decent starting point as well). Make some maps, vehicles, weapons etc and see how far you get.

If after a few years (that's how long it takes most mod teams if they ever even reach completion) you actually have a decent mod you can start working on an actual game, maybe even with some funding from investors! In which case choosing the engine will be the least of your worries.

If you choose to ignore this advice (which you almost certainly will...) then I would say the Torque engine would be an excellent place to start. It gets somewhat maligned in these parts, both fairly and unfairly, but it is extremely well suited to making games of the Battlefield style. It has excellent networking code and There is a lot of built-in logic for guns, vehicles, grenades, mines etc as well as environmental systems such as weather, forests, and rivers.

People run into trouble when they try to make... well.. anything else... But it is certainly well equipped to handle that genre. And completely free now with no hidden gotchas like the free versions of UDK, Unity or Cryengine. And perfectly good graphics rendering too, if you feed it some nice artwork.

Finally if you are absolutely dead set on BF3 quality graphics and environments and have the skill and manpower to pull it off *ahem*, well then Cryengine 3 is probably a good bet as it's designed with those sort of environments in mind, has one of the very best renderers in the industry and seems to have solid net code.

This sounds like the real question is "How do I make a WoW server emulator?"

Let's just say the legality of those is in a bit of a gray area, and I doubt you'll find much help here.

If the question is "How do I make my own MMORPG?" then I direct you to this posting.