Best GFX engine for my current project? Thread

Ok, A while ago I posted "best GFX for my mod?" thread, I've reseached tons of engines and still can't find what I need. So i'm asking again, but now I have more of an idea of what I need. Here's a list of what I need and how much I need it. Red means I pretty much have to have it, blue means it would be a plus.

Real-Time Lighting and Soft Shadowing.
EDIT:
Shadowing and light close to something like Splinter Cell 2/3, here's a few examples for what I need:

Outdoor and Indoor Enviorment Support.
Able to have cutsences (in-game movies)
Hi-Quality Player Animation (able to export a model/anim with litte to no quality loss.).
Able to run with a player model at or over 10,000 ploygons.
Medium-Large Map size.
Able to have hi-res textures (1024x1024)

Physics Engine.

Engines I already know won't work:

Source (HL2, just plain wouldn't work)

CryEngine (Far Cry, Indoor enviorments don't work well with it)

Reality Engine (Perfect, but I think they aren't selling anymore because "Epic Games" Bought the company )

ORGE (Can't get it to work, glichy)

Cube Engine (the names says it all, horrably cubeyalar)

Ca3DE (Not quite what I need, came close in a few areas.)

Torque Engine (I've used the editor, I don't want to go back to THAT evil thing, doesn't have what I need)

Quest 3D (waaaaay to expensive)

Torc interactive's "Instinct Engine" (Needs way to much resources to run, it's minium req. is higher than
HL2's recomended O_O )

Codecult ( Indoor support? nope.)

Renderware (just doesn't work)

There's quite a few more but I don't really need to list a ton of engines that don't work.

That's all I can think of for the engine. Hope you guys know a good engine for my needs

Edited by (in order): Sfisher7, Sfisher7, Sfisher7, Sfisher7, Sfisher7

Don't get me wrong, but maybe you're asking for too much? I think you should just find an engine that you are comfortable with and work around the features that you don't like about it but I dunno, maybe theres an engine out there for you

Sfisher7 wrote:
Real-Time Lighting and Soft Shadowing.

Stop right there. There are basically no engines around atm with real time lighting and soft shadowing. Certainly no engines with cheap or free licencing. Why do you think no games are going out with soft shadowing and real time lighting? It's just not viable on current video cards, and it's right at the cutting edge of what is being produced for next generation games.

My advice - wait for Unreal Engine 3.

Mauvebib wrote:

Sfisher7 wrote:
Real-Time Lighting and Soft Shadowing.

Stop right there. There are basically no engines around atm with real time lighting and soft shadowing. Certainly no engines with cheap or free licencing. Why do you think no games are going out with soft shadowing and real time lighting? It's just not viable on current video cards, and it's right at the cutting edge of what is being produced for next generation games.

My advice - wait for Unreal Engine 3.

I can list a few:
Stalker
Unreal 3 Engine
Splinter Cell 2/3
Reality Engine
OGRE engine (witch is free)

I basicly need the kind of shadows Splinter Cell has, but from what i've seen it's not very moddable. I'm probably going to start tworking on it in about a year, I have alot of concept art and the storyline to finsh. I've considered using Unreal 3 and Stalker already, but i'm not quite sure about them.

EDIT: Does anyone know if BF2 supports indoor env. and is it able to have hi-quaity anims?

Edited by (in order): Sfisher7, Sfisher7

soft shadowing is not render-to-texture texturemaps

Cheapalert wrote: soft shadowing is not render-to-texture texturemaps

I know that, and why are you saying that? The engines I just listed had real-time lighting and soft shadowing, no HL2 style render-to-texture junk.

Edited by: Sfisher7

I think the best available engine at the moment is Monolith's new one. It's not too hot for very large open spaces, but it can cope with the rest.
It can cope with polycounts that high, but doesn't like it en mass (as to be expected) - although I've seen it pushing around 10x 3-4K poly models simultaneously at times.
It does however have beautiful support for your lighting needs and high res textures
The physics engine is top notch in my opinion, with a few bugs in the ragdoll features.

Otherwise, I'd wait and see what Unreal3 has to offer.

ambershee wrote: I think the best available engine at the moment is Monolith's new one. It's not too hot for very large open spaces, but it can cope with the rest.
It can cope with polycounts that high, but doesn't like it en mass (as to be expected) - although I've seen it pushing around 10x 3-4K poly models simultaneously at times.
It does however have beautiful support for your lighting needs and high res textures
The physics engine is top notch in my opinion, with a few bugs in the ragdoll features.

Otherwise, I'd wait and see what Unreal3 has to offer.

Sounds good, i'll look into it and see if it'll work, thanks.

EDIT: looks like it's got what I need, maybe i'll mod F.E.A.R. , is there a way to turn the gore off in fear? I felt sick just watching one of the videos

Edited by: Sfisher7

You should be able to edit the public source code (when it's released, if it isn't already) and simply cut out a lot of those effects. Additionally, there's not much gore outside of a few select map objects and shaders anyway

Sfisher7 wrote:

Cheapalert wrote: soft shadowing is not render-to-texture texturemaps

I know that, and why are you saying that? The engines I just listed had real-time lighting and soft shadowing, no HL2 style render-to-texture junk.

you don't understand much of real-time lighting, stencil shadowing, shadow-maps or soft-shadow technics, as otherwise you would know what getting real-time lighting and soft-shadowing (good looking, not badly faking) to walk hand in is something you won't pull of on medium machines. soft-shadows are a tricky thing if you don't want to cheat them. MOST implementations today fake it using shadow-maps or stuff like shadow-ledges. real soft-shadows like in deferred lighting algorithmes aren't really done in full-scale projects yet, at last not that i know of.

Oblivion is going to shadows, real time lighting and displacement maps, it's also an RPG, but no ingame movies.

You can script them, but not prerendered.

If you excuse the fact it's a floating piece of fecal excrement.

That and it's a total bitch to use (easily one of the hardest open games to mod).

splinter cell was made with the unreal engine.

You've lost pretty much all engines if you really MUST have soft-shadowing. Even Doom 3 doesn't have it.

SpaceCowboy wrote: If you excuse the fact it's a floating piece of fecal excrement.

That and it's a total bitch to use (easily one of the hardest open games to mod).

what engine are you talking about? if you're refering to Source, well, I think ur nuts. While Source isn't the best engine, it certainly isn't a "floating piece of fecal excrement" (although I did expect more out of it).

Edited by: nervousquirrel

Okay, sinking piece of fecal excrement.

you don't understand much of real-time lighting, stencil shadowing, shadow-maps or soft-shadow technics, as otherwise you would know what getting real-time lighting and soft-shadowing (good looking, not badly faking) to walk hand in is something you won't pull of on medium machines. soft-shadows are a tricky thing if you don't want to cheat them. MOST implementations today fake it using shadow-maps or stuff like shadow-ledges. real soft-shadows like in deferred lighting algorithmes aren't really done in full-scale projects yet, at last not that i know of.

As I said, Monolith's new engine has it - and it does it properly. Heck, FEAR even uses it, lol.

Torque Engine (I've used the editor, I don't want to go back to THAT evil thing, doesn't have what I need)

Actually it does have what you need and its quite easy to use.
But dont use it and keep looking for a worse engine.

for mod developing you're asking too much i think

you're not some development studio with the resources and time to take advantage of any of those, no one is expecting you to make the next half life or doom

just make something that's fun, you can make it standalone by sacrificing graphical quality and going Q3
with a little engine recoding you can have all your precious shadows

Sfisher7 wrote:
I can list a few:

Stalker

Not out yet.

Unreal 3 Engine

Not out yet

Splinter Cell 2/3

Faked render to texture shadows

Reality Engine

Bought out by epic, no longer available.

OGRE engine (witch is free)

Good graphics engine, but almost impossible to build a game with. Soft shadows are not directly supported in the engine, but are possible with vertex and fragment shaders (but will be very very very slow).

Any others you'd care to quote?

I have this list for you you might find something in here

Membres.lycos.fr

and also this list

Cg.cs.tu-berlin.de

like I said if you want lighing and shadows like in splinter cell......use the engine that splinter cell was made from...IE UNREAL

ambershee wrote:

you don't understand much of real-time lighting, stencil shadowing, shadow-maps or soft-shadow technics, as otherwise you would know what getting real-time lighting and soft-shadowing (good looking, not badly faking) to walk hand in is something you won't pull of on medium machines. soft-shadows are a tricky thing if you don't want to cheat them. MOST implementations today fake it using shadow-maps or stuff like shadow-ledges. real soft-shadows like in deferred lighting algorithmes aren't really done in full-scale projects yet, at last not that i know of.

As I said, Monolith's new engine has it - and it does it properly. Heck, FEAR even uses it, lol.

No. No engine today has real-time soft shadows... Maybe with blurred edges, but not real soft shadows.

MrTwister wrote: like I said if you want lighing and shadows like in splinter cell......use the engine that splinter cell was made from...IE UNREAL

the lighting/shadow system was added in by the devs, they did not come with the unrealengine2 license they used (same goes for Deus Ex 2 and Thief III)