Great 3D Engine-ish? Esperient

I found a 3d application authoring tool and I was surprised as hell when search results came up negative on these forums for it.

It's at such a low version, and such a low release count that i'm baffled because it seems like the most polished product. The main developer seems to constantly respond to questions, and the community seems to want nothing but to support the product further because of how satisfied they seem.

You can create scenes and games without a single line of code, yet it supports scripting for networking, advanced events, etc. You can publish as exe, .esp (scene file), zip, web-version and even screensaver.

http://www.esperient.com/


check out how easy it is to impliment physics:
(11.5mb)
http://www.esperient.com/videos/RigidBodyPhysics.wmv

You could simply add a collision event to an object so that when it collides it creates waves in what it collides into, explode, etc.

I'm in awe.


ps. It's win32 only, but i'm not going to cry over it for focusing on the biggest market in 3d software.

It doesn't really have a low version number. It's been around for ages under different names. Before it was Esperient, it was Deep Creator. Before it was Deep Creator.. I can't remember what it was called then, but it was around for quite a while before Right Hemisphere bought it.

It's pretty good, no question, but with other tools (eg: Quest3D, Shiva and Unity3D) appearing to have a much bigger userbase, I can't see this competing in the long run. There are too many of these type of tools around at the moment, and the less successful ones are likely to go to the wall in the next year or two. Doesn't matter if they're good when they don't have enough users. S2, for example, is really good too, but that's struggling.

Ah, yes you're right about the transitions it went through. Curious.

I have doubts it would struggle and die in the end though, considering some of the other engines that appear to be making it with small communities, lack of support, and nothing close to as polished.

I figure it is an engine worth mentioning though. While not practical, it's too sadistically easy to throw scenes and write quick professional looking games together in. Obviously not the tool if you want to export to mac and iphone, but I can't see this product being anything short of a penny-maker on the customers side.

I know some architectual visualisation guys who rave about Esperient, especially as modellers wanting to add interactivity.

it's nice for VR but not best for games
the new cscript system is nice but it'not suitable for creating runtime
object

Most of that has to do with it being win32 only. I preferred it over shiva just because its networking is what you would expect, as where shiva's networking support is a joke (by silly limitations).

Unfortunately i'm beginning to fully agree with Gabriel. I don't trust the future of the company, and for applications it isn't as worthy in the end as other cross-platform, iphone-capable authoring tools.

It's too bad, because it really is an exceptional tool.

I'll stick with B3D for a while then.... with JV-ODE, Newton and the myriad of other stuff - Ultimat Unwrap is worthy of a mention - who needs to shell out $500....? and that (gulp) annually ?

I agree for $500 a year you can do much better. (Unity windows maybe???)

http://unity3d.com/unity/coming-soon/unity-2.5