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Once again, I use you guys as my steering community:


So you, your company, and/or your team are interested in acquiring the hot new game engine. Surely you would want to have some sort of demo of the engine first. So when you get that demo, what are you expecting to see. How far are you expecting it to let you go?

Not really in order of preference:

1. Source code
2. User-friendly editors
3. Said editors written in an editor-friendly language such as C#
4. Source code for those editors
5. Widely-used asset file type support
6. If it is commercial and expensive, good support that is not just a forum. I mean employees of the company you can call
7. Great documentation
8. Ridiculous amounts of good comments in the source
...
...
...
243. Nice graphics can be cool, too.

wouldnt you getting the source allow you to either develope your own engine, or expand on said engine? eliminating the need to purchase said engine??

or am i wrong lol



EDIT~

i would expect it to be retard friendly just so i get to play aswell lol..

other than that all is good :p

Yeah, I'm talking about the demo Jack :p

Oops, I missed the "demo" part. Well, then I guess everything else, minus the source code part.

Although usually, for more high-end engines that offer the source code, they will give you a sample of the source if you ask. Not enough to pull it out and use for something else, but enough to guage how well documented and clean it is.

We can definitely give out a sample of the source, however full source would be out for sure.

What about license wise? How long do you expect to have an engine demo?

30 days if it lets you use all the tools and such, maybe more if it has some restrictions.

First of all I like

-Being able to use a demo project in the editor
-Good Interface
-More than a week because everyone is busy with there lives and a week is not enough
-Lots of tutorials of all kinds on the website

As far as I would like to go
-To be able to use pre-made models/sprites to place in game
-Have all the features minimaly visable (no hiding menus for demo users)
-Hopefully get a special demo test of the engine

It depends,
are you selling a good product for people to buy
Or are you selling a product for good people to buy

Haha that saying makes me chuckle, no need to ask me on it, I just wanted to share it lol

OooH i like this topic. Anyone who knows me knows I have tried every engine demo out there.

Unless you are building a craptastic fluff powdered attempt at a game, you need a good long demo. 30 days should suffice but it should be exactly like the real engine...EXACTLY. You should be able to save the project and compile to play. None of that , here is the engine you just can't compile or save because its the demo.

Anyone who is serious about making a game needs to get their hands dirty with the engine before knowing if its right for them. Simply running around in a pre-made world without options of placing your own models in it, or writing a few scripts is no better than seeing a video or screen shots.

Have you ever bought a car without test driving and kicking the tire first? Having a game engine demo only let you play a pre-compiled world is like going to test drive a car and they only let you drive it around in the parking lot.

Halls you make some pretty good points about length of the demo and featured. I was planning on having it full featured, but removing or heavily limiting compile options. To what will no doubt be our largest market the engine will seem alot like a toy. From the price point to the ease of use, do you have any suggestions for preventing that market from just getting the demo and saying the hell with it? (If I was to leave in the compile options that is)