Raghar said:
The trouble is a beginner needs all that programming to learn stuff. You'd make things easy for him, and he would learn nothing. (Some people in the industry have university titles, but are unable to create new stuff and are lacking some experience.)
If you want to make game engines, then making a game engine from scratch is a worth while exercise. If you want to make games, then stop wasting time making game engines and make your games.
The problem is there are lots of technical people who can program, but they aren't very creative and make boring games. Then there are people that can design great games, but aren't wizard programmers. So engines like Unity3D make it possible for almost anyone to make games, as it should be.
Raghar said:
A game creating kit would crete similar experience for any game, and when a game developer learns some stuff, it would cause problems. In addition when a good looking game would be easy to do by some external tools any idiot would be able make a game. Look at PS2 games. Majority of them would be ignored when they would be made for PC. Some of them are QUITE low end quality.
Unity3D isn't a game creation kit like FPSCreator. Unity is a 3D engine with 3 scripting languages available C#, Java Script and Boo and if you go Pro you can drop in C++ Dlls. So you can create any game you want with it. What it does is do all the hard work for you. For instance, the work flow for artists is a dream and the fact that it will run on any Apple or PC made in the last 10 years is fantastic.
Raghar said:
I would consider more important a public domain or MIT licence library for making character model, and for automatic generation of animals. Programming is half year effort, animation and modeling takes more.
This is true. Game art is a PITA to get, as most artists have a 'no cash up front, no work' mentality. However there are cheap quality sources of 3D game art, that are starting to open up.
www.dexsoft-games.com is one that is pretty good for sci-fi, medieval and present day buildings.
Raghar said:
Balancing? Are you making a fighting game? Balancing are two curves that intersects or Monte Carlo. RPGs are games that are unbalanced (more or less).
Turn based RPGs can be quite difficult to balance. Ask VaultDweller.
Raghar said:
Games are digital media, which means if there are not freely available articles and resources on the Internet, you are screwed.
[/quote]
Thats why Unity3D is so good. They have many users, so there are tons of free articles and code. Hang out at their forums and check out the Unify Community Wiki. There are also excellent paid plugins as well, that will speed up development time.
I sound like I am just pushing Unity3D. The Free Unreal engine is pretty good as well and has something called Kismet (I don't know if Kismet is free). I haven't looked into Unreal, as the licensing conditions on Unreal "Free" are pretty steep. I think they want 25% of all sales over $5000. Unity3D Free on the other hand is completely free, however there are no real time shadows, but you can bake static ones in. If you want decent shadows, you need to buy the pro version at $1500, and from what I have seen of the work flow in other engines, it is worth it in terms of time it will save you.