Seeking an engine

[C-Death]

Hello everyone,
I'm asking around trying to gather info about good game engines I could use,
Pretty much the one that's easiest to take models from 3ds max to the engine,
and also supports high-polly models.
Any suggestions?
Thanks :thup:

 

[Accname]

How about the ogre engine? I once played a game made with that.
I dont know however in which format the models need to be in order to be used but probably you can convert them rather easy if it doesnt fit.
http://www.ogre3d.org/

Never used it myself though.

 

[Varine]

Ogre isn't a game engine, it's a rendering engine.

I'm taking it you're kind of new to game development. There are a lot of engines, and it depends on what kind of game you're developing to give much of a suggestion. What are you making? What platform are you planning on distributing on? What kind of programming experience do you have?

Unity and UDK are fairly popular for indie developers (Unity has both free and paid editions; UDK is something like 25% royalties on revenue after a certain mark. I think it's $50,000 but I haven't looked at the EULA for some time). I kind of like Shiva, but the terrain engine is a little bit complicated and hard to get used to, but it's altogether a nice platform and fairly easy to use once you get over the weird things they do. C4 is alright, I haven't used it much, but it's got some impressive features.

There aren't any game engines that will take 3DS Max's native format, as it's proprietary and the format will store a lot of unnecessary information. You'll have to convert it, which isn't altogether hard to do. There are plenty of tools that do that for popular formats, and most engines will have a script or plugin to convert them that support 3DSM.

As for the high-poly thing, that's not much of an issue. Most engines won't have any problem displaying tens or hundreds of millions of polygons; the constraint is on the hardware the game is running on, which is why you would typically make significant use of shaders and retopology and LOD. And there are a lot of other factors that need to be taken into account than just the poly count.

 

[Accname]

Oh i thought he was looking for a rendering engine since he was talking about 3ds max model format.
I didnt read correctly that moment.
Of course, there is a game engine build around the ogre rendering engine which is the neoaxis game engine, found here:
http://www.ogre3d.org/2012/03/18/neoaxis-game-engine-release-v-1-1-new-success-story

 

[C-Death]

Thank you all for your input. I'm sad to say I'm not really all too experienced at programming, and my goal is to sort of "learn as I go along."
Mostly I'd like to make a small little game for PC, nothing amazing really, just a stepping stone as it were.

EDIT: I decided to give the Irrlicht engine a try, mostly because I've read that it's built for those who have little experience.