(02-27-2013 11:05 AM)Zervox Wrote: Stupid question, but I would love to know what attracted you Leadwerks users, or any of you to move to Esenthel : ) I bet the developer of the engine would love to know as well.
Hi Zervox,
This mass exodus started around 2 months ago when myself and Donik (who is rather silent on the forum) pre-determined the impending doom of Leadwerks. After looking into the features of EE it seemed too good to be true but the fact that it only cost $99 meant there was not much to lose.
Following the next week or 2 Donik and myself simply marveled at how advanced EE was in comparison to LE. I had been talking to a lot of people on LE about Esenthel in private chat and now that the cost of LE3 was announced a lot of people started asking me where I went.. so I told them.
So that's the history.. Now to what I love about EE so far.
This engine just takes away the vast majority of mundane generic coding tasks that are often needed and allows you to focus on your game. I think that's the essence of it. Also a lot of us are C++ programmers so the fact that EE was nativly C++ was great. I personally hate scripting so I really liked that EE doesn't have any and doesn't need any due to object classes.
LE3 was promising multi-platform development in C++ and claiming that they would be the first to do it... So now that I found EE actually did it before them, things started to become clearer. It is great how easy the multi - platform aspect of this engine is so easy to manage.
The art pipeline is very good as well in EE2.0.. just drag and drop everything... fantastic.. I love how you can also drag assets into your code... genius. Us LE2.5 users are used to a painstakingly long process of converting assets. LE3 was going to change this and the creator even stated that it was the "best" pipeline ever... which was rubbish because I was in the LE3 beta and it was no better than EE... so that was a big ++ for me.
Another thing that I like about EE is that it has both high end renderer for PC and low end for mobile. What was happening in LE was the high end was being sacrificed and promised for later releases... that made a lot of people not so happy. But with both options in EE... it's a no brainer for me.
The terrain system is fantastic as well as the pathfinding and such. I really love how the engine gives me a lot of things already done (such as a music manager) but doesn't restrict me in doing so. In other words I don't have to use said music manager if I don't want to... I can make my own if I want to... for example.
I love how you have a lot of control over the rendering of individual objects. Don't have that in many engines.
Personally I think the most awesome feature about EE is the object classes. It essentially allows me to carry out Data Driven Design without ever having to touch SQLite. It also allows me get all the benefits + more of scripting without the problems encountered with scripting like the awkward interface between the script and the code.
I have also so far been pleased with Esenthel's response time to questions and bug fixes... These often used to take 6 months to happen in LE.
I think the only thing I have concerns about in EE is the lack of hardware instancing and advanced occlusions culling. These are things we are used to having in LE. However, I see they are on the roadmap so that's good at least. Luckily my game is generally top down so it doesn't effect me much.
I really do find it hard to nail down what I like about EE. There is just so much to like from what I've seen in the time I've been here. In less than 2 months I've nearly surpassed the level that my game was up to in LE which I had been working on for 8 months prior.. Now that is fast valuable development time there. Not to mention I had to learn from scratch in those 2 months and develop my game at the same time.
So I am really only talking for myself when I say.... besides no hardware instancing and advanced occlusion culling, what's not to like.
I have to say that EE + Occlusions Culling + Hardware Instancing + CSG editor = my dream engine.