Hello
Did anybody try the following engines ?
Torque X
Blade3D
Visual3d.net
All of them are based on XNA 2.0 and C# 2005
The future of the windows game programming ,in my opinion
Thanks in advance for your opinion
No, tried JV-ODE in association with Blitz3D though.
I liked the look of Blade3D, but they have a weird subscription-based model which doesn't really make any sense to me, so I never looked any harder. A subscription model for a game engine feels like someone is trying to make money out of being incompetent. Unless the engine is lacking in features or bug-ridden, I only need a one month subscription, so it almost feels like it's in their interest to spread the new features and bug fixes pretty thin to make sure they keep me on the hook. 3DRad had the same thing for a while but they quickly dropped it.
I've used TorqueX extensively. Like any engine (or library/middleware for that matter) it does certain things a certain way. Nothing will work exactly the way you want it, so you have to learn to work with the engine/tools, not against them.
With that said, TX has been great. It gave me a huge productivity boost since I could focus more on the game mechanics. It's great for prototyping in that respect. The only issue I have with it is developer support. They tend to be slow on the responses. I personally wouldn't recommend getting the 'free binary-only' version of TX if you plan to go that route. Source code is practically a must with just about any type of engine/middleware, especially with limited dev support.
I was put off them by the size of the finished games, they can be enormous compared to blitz.