Are there any 3D game engines with licensing fees in the $5K-$10K range?

It's become easy to find the engines at the lower end ($100-$500) like Torque, Blitz3D, Ogre, etc. And, of course, there are the engines like Unreal, Doom3 (eventually), and HL2 (someday) at the very high end.

Where is the middle? Is there a middle? Could it be that the middle isn't sustainable? (too expensive for the indies, too old for retail, maybe)

-David

Ogre is actually free (LGPL)

Granny 3D ( 10K )
http://www.radgametools.com

pat.

Both Quake1 and Quake2 are free if you adhere to the GPL. If you don't want to adhere to it, either engine will cost you $10,000.

Originally posted by patrox
Granny 3D ( 10K )
http://www.radgametools.com

pat.

From the site FAQ:


So, is Granny a 3D engine? No, Granny is meant to be a component of your 3D engine. It was designed to work seamlessly with any 3D scene architecture. You'll be able to get running with your 3D engine in minutes!

So Granny is not a 3D engine. If you're looking for components of a game engine within the $5k-$10k price range you may want to check out www.novodex.com. The personal liscense is $95, but the site liscenses are about $10k-$15k. Torque is technically in the $5k-$10k range if you make a lot of money (> $250k or something.)

3d gamestudio is < $1,000. virtools is around $5k - 10k for starters i believe.

I had never heard Granny referred to as a 3D engine, so I was kinda surprised to see it listed. Impossible has, however, cleared up my momentary confusion. :)

Q1/Q2...it's hard to argue with success...but $10K for Q1 is pretty silly, anymore. And looking at Id's site, the Q2 development tools are an additional $5K. Which, again, seems odd considering the age of the engine.

I had never considered the question of engines in this price range ($5K-$10K) until someone asked me about it recently. The more I think about it, though, the less I think that such a price range would be successful.

Really...the person who asked me was more interested in an engine that had a very smooth, fast content pipeline. They had been frustrated by the time and effort required to get their models and animations into Torque, and were hoping that looking "upmarket" would provide something useful.

-David

Originally posted by DavidRM
I had never heard Granny referred to as a 3D engine, so I was kinda surprised to see it listed. Impossible has, however, cleared up my momentary confusion. :)
-David

Oops sorry, i never read the faqs :rolleyes: silly me!

how about pixomatic then ?

pat.

Virtools increased to $9.5k at GDC, ostensibly due to USD<->Euro conversion rates. That gets you free publishing for web player-based titles. There are licensing constraints/fees/whatever that are negotiated for standalone downloadable and retail projects. They don’t have established fees for downloadable content yet, AFAIK--everything is still very much negotiated on a per-project basis.

Your friend may want to check out the Qube engine http://www.qubesoft.com. It's free to use (without support) and support\licensing is about $15k a year. I don't know if he's going to find anything with a painless tool chain and the stuff with really good toolchains (Unreal, Renderware) is extremely expensive.

Yeah, I thought the Quake 1 price way a bit high myself.. and even Quake 2 to an extent, so I emailed Todd Hollenshead to see if that page hadn't been updated with current prices.. but I have yet to get a response. It's too bad since I am really digging the Quake 2 codebase and would quite possibly use it for the right price. (It's a solid engine that works very well on older systems and all sorts of configurations of hardware.)

There's Quest3D - http://www.quest3d.com/
I've heard good things about them and I'm going to evaluate their product for our next project. You might want to check them out for yourself.

Power Render (http://powerrender.com/)

$289 Shareware SDK
$1500 commercial
$5K for source

I've run across two free engines:


http://www.neoengine.org/

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/

irrlicht is being used in many places like here:

http://www.ping.net/

I did the same research a while back and found this specific price range quite empty as well. Auran Jet is priced ad $30k but you might be able to negotiate pure runtime licenses for less. I think this market is just emerging, there will probably be more demand within a year or two. At the moment I'm betting on OGRE, as it seemed like the best deal in the <$5k category. :)

Fly3D http://www.fly3d.com.br (http://www.fly3d.com.br/)

is available under GPL and, for commercial projects, for $5000.

Hey guys,

Its good to be back. I am currently using Irrlitcth engine for my own indie project. Got a lot serious about going independant now and am hoping my game finishes in next 2 months so I can approach steve and few other publishers.

Irrlitch seems to be a decent engine. And the learning curve is apparently very low. I would think Ogre or Irrlitch would be best to use. But that my opinion.

Gautam