| >One thing that stands out as odd to me is the small selection of really "good" game engines. not much odd about it. 3d game engines are a large endeavor, somewhere between making a Large desktop application and making a full blown OS. I'd say the largest ones are comparable to making a web browser engine or even a full blown IDE suite. There's also some slight snide in that there is no truly "good" game engine. Just ones that teams put up with enough to get across the finish line. The sheer scale of the engines and the nature of them being developer suites means running into edge cases is inevitable. There are several mature 3D solutions out there, but the ones mentioned have the 3 largest communities and are strongly supported. But to throw out a few others - Open3dEngine (O3D3), and fork off Lumberyard, which is a fork off CryEngine, is probably the biggest off-the-shelf competitor to UE when it comes to delivering AAA level games. - Stride is an engine mentioned often in discussions, and it has a similar feel to Unity. But it simply isn't as mature as Godot and lacks some platform support like Mac - UPBGE is the spiritual successor to the defunct Blender Game Engine, with a similar pitch: create your game without ever leaving your modeling suite. -Finally, while not a fully featured game engine, I do want to give some note to Ogre3D. It's one of the oldest and most battle-tested graphics libraries out there, is MIT open sources, and is there for the kinds of developers who rolled their own engine/framework and simply used Unity as a rendering backend. Ogre doesn't include physics nor input (nor an editor), but it's really good at throwing your hand rolled game logic and giving it something visual. I could make similar other recommendations for stuff like Raylib and BGFX, but Ogre still being supported after over 20 years is admirable. There aren't tons of choices, but there are choices out there if you are willing to get your hands dirty. |