Another new engine in town, Wave

Hi there,

Just found out about wave, anyone familiar with it? it's multiplatform and free. Plus I enjoy the fact that it has included the regular stuff without the need of plugins, like the in-app purchase for every platform is built in.
http://waveengine.net/Engine/Overview

So far i'm liking it although not as powerful as unity3d it runs on every system including win8 and windows phones.

Anyone tested it?

 

Their website isn't too great, and they have little to show in terms of accomplishments in the gallery, so it doesn't look like anything that could possibly compete with Unity.

 

Not terribly multiplatform considering there's no OSX or Linux support.

 

That's true. Nowadays, multi-platform means more than Windows and mobile phones/tablets. I'm not terribly impressed.

 

While we are on the subject of game engines, here is one I have been testing for a few months now.
http://www.chi-ad.com/Skyline/SDN/

 

if its brand new, then ofourse there's not much thats done with it yet :/ Also, by that standard, you can say the same negative remark about unity when compared to older and more established engines.

on a side note, i like all the new engine stuff coming out. More options for the consumers means more competition for our money. that means more features, more company accountability, more support, etc. Both the engines (wave and skyline) presented looks kinda cool.

 

The documentation is full of grammar errors and poor language use. Maybe whoever wrote it isn't a native English speaker. Still, it doesn't sell it very well.

"A well analogy of this three basic concepts could be that a Scene represents a planet, for example the Earth planet, the Components are the very first cells that appear millions years ago, and an Entity could be from the first unicellular organism appeared till a human being."

 

Reads like Ed Wood dialogue from "Plan 9 from Outer Space."

 

This engine is purely Amazing....







......NOT !

 

The thing is, if your at a point where you NEED Unity Pro, the 1500$ license shouldn't be that much . Unity and UDK both are well documented AND fine tuned .

 

Guess I'll download it and see what its like, why not haha.

 

I think Unity's success shows that there is a huge market for multiplatform engines out there with "good enough" rendering.

I mean, let's face it, from a professional programming point of view, Unity's object model is based on completely screwy fundamental design decisions that would certainly be changed in hindsight and force code structures that would generally be considered "anti-patterns", its APIs range from underexposed to half-baked to completely broken, it doesn't thread properly in a world where even cell phones have multiple cores, it doesn't play well with larger teams / source control, and although Mono is one of its key strengths, it's using an ancient mono version with severely out of date language features and an alpha-quality garbage collector.

Is it any wonder people want a piece of the pie?

 

+1 for this one : GameStart3D

 

Well, I'm downloading and testing for 3 things: built-in components, ease-of-use, and it's scripting language.

 

I installed it just to check it out a bit. Not in any way as intuitive or easy as Unity3d. It might be a fine engine, but I bet you have to read quite a lot before you can manage to accomplish anything with it. Don't see why you'd want to do that when you can just use Unity3d free instead, which - apart from being easier to use - has more features and a larger community.

 

Love all these new FAIL engines popping up.
If one had to succeed I really hope it's name is FAILengine.

Actually that's a cool name.

 

+1

 

not sure if serious

 

I looked at it, all the websites for these new engines seem to be similar, a few cool pictures and barely any info about the engine.

 

Yes, but Unity has been used by major studios (Rovio), has support for Linux, and has a kick-ass particle and animation system. Plus it's used by brilliant people. So, yeah, Unity wins.

 

This one is confusing. There doesn't seem to be anything on their site. Just a forum? No doco? No download? No feature list?

 

Download is here:
http://www.gamestart3d.com/download
Documentation (only reachable when you go to the forum first) here:
http://www.gamestart3d.com/wiki/index.php?title=GameStart_Wiki__Documentation

 

Must admit, GameStart actually looks pretty cool. Playing with it though, you can see just how many ideas they've borrowed from Unity. Still, it's a pretty nice job on the Editor. Might be worth checking out some day if it comes out of beta and supports more platforms.

 

They have a thread on their forums with GameStart vs Unity, I found the actual members are pretty..biased.
LINKY

I don't really like some of the comparisons..apparently Unity is bad because we have lots of third party plugins..(????).

I'm happy to see they allow discussions of other engines; but the forums are rather dead in comparison to ours and most sections don't have more than 50 topics at most. This is one of those things where if I invested time in learning and using then I'll probably find it brought out later down the track(in my opinion).

 

If their community is smart and demands important features and the devs support them, it could become soemthing. As it's new I'm inclined to think it will be buggy.

 

Yeah, I read that thread too. Half of them sound like they haven't even actually USED Unity.

The community looks extremely small at this stage. But, like I said, their editor isn't too bad - I enjoyed playing around with it and was at least interested enough to go take a look at some of the language syntax.

Maybe some day, it might be a tool worth checking out... if it makes it that far.

 

sounds like this board, and prob any game engine board.

that can be seen as a negative thing because unity doesn't have all the cool things you want out of the box, so you have to spend more money on plugins. People dont like to be nickle and dimed on plug-ins, esp if they are not be up to standard (from the asset store), or will not have great support.

i agree, but then again, new board = less discussions. In time, the boards will fill up...and hopefully not with "how do i make dis script" type of discussions.

 

lol...rovio.Ah yes, what particle system are you talking about? The old system or the one that replaced it, the half implemented and buggy shuriken? I haven't used the new animation system, so i cant say how great it is. the old animation system is fine for me.

And ofcourse, only brilliant people use unity and only unity!

 

I agree with all these points. I'm also pretty biased towards Unity .

With the board thing, that's what I meant by in comparison, they should eventually fill up.

I'm glad to see they're allowing an engine comparison though. Even if the original poster asked it to be only in comparison with Unity Free.

 

There are plenty of engines to choose from and it doesn't matter which one you choose if you're getting results.

 

All the new engines like those have the same peculiarity: They keep in a beta stage for years and never reach a finished state making them unusables in practical terms.

 

I think that (Rovio is a major studio) comment was sarcasm at least I hope so lol. I do agree that the shuriken is buggy as hell and half implemented. The new animation system however, is pretty brilliant. Not perfect, but it will get there eventually.

 

It looks good, but I'm still sticking with Unity till the end.
Best of luck to whoever created the engine though, Its always difficult facing such huge challengers like Unity for indie developers.

 

Well I have been informed numeroues times that you can anything with Unity cause its not about the tools but the capabilties of the user so I guess it's just to rejoice that another perfect engine has hit the market

 

lol, thats a good point.

 

So, I looked at the Wave Engine. I'm not exactly impressed, even though I'm primarily a coder.

First, the 'no fees ever' philosophy looks great on paper, except that if they're not making money up front, I would certainly posit they're going to make money some other way. I have no desire to see ads when I use my game creation suite, or have to buy into certain components. The only way I could see this working well is for them to implement an Asset Store of their own that they make money from every sale.

Second, the 3D art assets appear to be locked to just 3D Studio Max, which I can't say I'm a fan of. Sure 3DS Max is a great package used the world over by the best of the best of the industry, but we're indies - we want to use other cool formats like Blender, Maya, and Sketchup. Maybe that has something to do with how they'll make money...

Third, the tools may look polished now, but a bit of perspective on the tool polish situation: all of Unity's 'faults' are less faults than symptoms of the engine aging and the dev team having limited resources to fix everything that needs to be fixed. I guarantee four years from now Wave will be facing the same problem Unity is, if they're still around by then.

Is it a bad engine? It dosen't look like it. It appears to cater more towards coders than artists, though, which I don't necessarily find a point in its favor - code is a relatively small part of a game. Besides, the best shader technology in the hands of a noob (e.g. me) avails no practical benefit for a title, and helps that title get nowhere closer to completion.

 

Hi!

one of the Wave Engine members here. We have been following this thread with a lot of interest, but we didn't want to come to another engine forum to talk about us (I hope the mods are ok with this, if not, sorry :S). But I wanted to address just this one comment (it has appeared quite a few times before in reddit, twitter...).

Wave Engine is an internal tool we created and we use for our own developments and projects. Making it public or continue private is an argument totally unrelated to its existence. We have decided to made it public because we think it is better for the project, and because we wanted to share it with the managed games development community. Most of us have been quite involved on it for a long time with MDX, XNA...

That's about it Thanks for this conversation, we have learned quite a few things with it.

Regards!

Vicente

P.D.: hi superpig!

 

It does look cool, but I personally wouldn't invest time in an engine that isn't commercial and open source(I assume it's not). The main reason being that you have no real obligation to keep it going and it will only survive as long as you do. And I'm not really one to bet money and/or time on a studio.

 

This engine looks very promising

 

Well, people on GameStart forums have obviously never used Unity, as said before.......

Should get off their high horses and live with us common folk for a while

 

I think the people in the GameStart forums were pretty relaxed about their Unity comparisons (accuracies aside), none of the usual aggressive-defensive posturing.

Not sure I could get comfortable with it myself; I have to retain enough muscle memory for too many vastly different UIs and application workflows already without adding more to the pot.

Nice to see they've gone with Bullet physics though. Very nice.

 

Ladies and gentlemen, just now, an engine, without an editor, currently in its beta stage, is making a noise in unity forums.

Guys. I'm totally lost here.

Unity is better blah blah blah. Of course you cannot compare wave with unity at the moment but i see its potential.

Give it a few years, with the impressive architecture that they have, one day we might see an awesome engine.

hmmmmmmmmm...

i just saw their recent addition to the engine, skeletal 2D animation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGpk2AiHYko

 

Well, then perhaps come back and post about it in a few years. Or better yet, post about it in your own forums. This is the Unity forum, it's what we post about here.

 

Get back to work!

 

Mother's day coming, MUST PREPARE.

 

I'm unfortunately working that day... would LOVE to work on a sculpture of my mom...

 

lol. I'm a unity user. and this thread was not mine. i just replied. ))

i just appreciate guys who try their best to contribute in the game dev community and that's it - no nonsense judgement.

 

I tired to look at the forums on Wave, I wasn't even allowed to look at the post without registering. Sorry but that kind of stuff kills it for me. You can't keep a game dev community in a tiny box and expect it to thrive.