1) This website style and UI looks like 25+ years old.
2) Nowadays a game engine without Discord server for devs to hang out is like a engine that doesn't move forward with the time. Same for twitter.
3) Logo would be very good for a medieval RPG game, but not for an engine. Imagine a futuristic space shooter with this logo somewhere in.
4) About the "Clutter free UI". I and billion other folks really enjoy the layout Unity (or Unreal and most other engines). Having a window for stuff in scene, assets in project and inspector/properties brings order and cleanness to the workflow (things are separated by logic). For more space just get second monitor or wide one. Anyway this is highly subjective.
5) No Vulkan or Metal API!!!
6) The editor UI needs some work. For example text inside Buttons is to big, the 3D effects are lame and so on. Simplicity/symmetry and cleanness is the answer here. A good example would be Ue5 Editor and VS Code dark theme.

7) IK is a must be for a modern engine as well advanced destruction.
8) Area light is also a must be.
9) Easy Multithreading and compute shader support is also a must be.

10) Lighting seems very flat and makes terrain and meshes appear Pale in daylight. And I see no strategy for indirect light (GI, Lightmaps for static, probes...).

11) Some stuff in "Tutorials" project is broken with latest Engine " Main.cpp
C:\Engines\Esenthel\Projects\_Build_\04 - Lights\Source\Main.cpp(37,9): error C2039: 'ambient': is not a member of 'EE::Material' [C:\Engines\Esenthel\Projects\_Build_\04 - Lights\Project.vcxproj]". Maybe those examples need some Unit tests?

Otherwise very interesting engine. Keep the good work going!!!!!

hey !

agreed with most said, i think we are already talking into the other topic :
https://esenthel.com/forum/showthread.ph...2#pid58382

anyway wanted to add my 2 cents :-D

1)25 years old, maybe not quite, but i could agree to early 2010
2)there is a discord server made from user, i can understand that greg doesnt want to get involved to that point.
3)not a huge fan of the logo, but its not mandatory to add it, and its only of the engine, im sure people would understand.
4)subjective, i like the EE UI, tho there is some missing UI panel for sure.
5)yes vulkan/directx12 would be good to see at some point
6)the UI is not the most clear, for me the hardest part is to keep track of what UI style i use where, i always end up with 20 UI skins.
7)agreed, i would also add cloth is as much needed as those 2
8)Light/shadow somehow doesnt really work well in EE
9) threading already supported
10) same as 8
11) yes some a doesnt work anymore

Whilst I agree with many of the things you list as useful additions to the engine I find your expectations rather unrealistic for a single person developer as opposed to the huge development teams and the resources at their disposal of the two major engines you are comparing it to.

Esenthel is a nice stable and well maintained game engine that admittedly looks somewhat dated, but insisting a UI conforms to what's established in other major engines kind of misses the point. What matters more is whether it is functional, and it certainly is, I have had no issues working with it in the same way that I happily work with Unreal, as different as that is.

I accept that the initial impression may put potential new game developers off, but in some ways it attracts the sort of developer who sees beyond the veneer ... and that may not be a bad thing in terms of producing games that are in themselves a little different from the norm.

It is never going to be a direct replacement for Unity or Unreal, if that's what people are looking for, nor in my judgement should it be.

(08-27-2021 11:33 PM)Zervox Wrote:  "1) This website style and UI looks like 25+ years old."

Starting with a hyperbolic statement, 25 years ago forums like these didn't exist at all, heck in many cases I'd say I would be shocked to see anything else than Frame and Table

In addition to that:
I would rather see precious dev-time put into the engine
than into web-design. When there is more spare time for stuff like
that, why not. It's kinda the same with Urho3d, Torque3d, Castle Engine or EZEngine.

People that use that kind of engine are not the people who care about
website presentation or UI look. Heck, most of the user bases there don't even care about a UI Editor at all. Urho is especially ugly. No one cares. Lot's of stuff was done with that engine anyways. Is this bad to get beginners? Probably.
But they will drop engines like these anyways in a heartbeat.

The high-powered Heaps Engine has only a crappy middleware (HIDE IDE)
and Heaps has already quite the top-sellers under it's belt.
And this one is really really difficult. Basically zero tutorials, no physics, no nav no nothing, everything has to be rolled by yourself in Haxe (Language) and still people use it.

But again, very special crowd of people.

(08-27-2021 11:33 PM)Zervox Wrote:  "2) Nowadays a game engine without Discord server for devs to hang out is like a engine that doesn't move forward with the time. Same for twitter."

While I agree things like twitter is good for publicity, Discord server for devs to hang out, is either community managed or it costs more time and/or money from the developers, Unity and Unreal can "easily" afford such ventures, a single developer having to do other work besides developing the engine on the side, sadly can't

Have to disagree here about the "cost". I use discord A LOT and pretty much everyone is there. BUT: Having a discord that's not busy really has quite a bad taste to it. Then better to not be there at all.

I always chuckle when I visit Neoaxis for example.
When you go there from O3DE, Bevy or Flax this just is funny. And these aren't even big players, but they still have already quite the buzz behind it right now.

However Unreal is just nuts. It's just too much noise. At that size it doesn't even make sense for me anymore. (Don't care about Unity at all, so I couldn't say.)

(08-27-2021 11:33 PM)Zervox Wrote:  "4) About the "Clutter free UI". I and billion other folks really enjoy the layout Unity (or Unreal and most other engines). Having a window for stuff in scene, assets in project and inspector/properties brings order and cleanness to the workflow (things are separated by logic). For more space just get second monitor or wide one. Anyway this is highly subjective."



it is not just highly subjective your statement is hyperbolic, it is at best you and millions, not even tens of million because there is no such scale to game developers. if it were just a single billion that would be at minimum 1 out of 8 people on earth are software/game developers, which simply is not the case. so please try not using hyperbolic statements to justify that you and and some other percentage of total developers like the UI of Unreal and Unity, I myself have no preference over any of them.

Again, funny thing. I am already so darn fast with the Esenthel Editor, the one window design and the hotkeys that in contrast I find the Unreal UI ridiculously slow to navigate in comparison. And I still prefer Unreal UI over Godot and Unity all day long. And I am pretty darn fast and competent with Unreal.

See how subjective this all is? Godot has buzz and hype written all over it,
still, when I compare the time it takes to make a material and apply textures to it
- or the bullsh*t fbx workflow - it's not even funny anymore.

And I hope you poor soul never had to make a UI with Cryengine / Scaleform / FlashDevelop or
suffer through the incomprehensible mess that was Lumberyards .waf build system.

(08-27-2021 11:33 PM)Zervox Wrote:  "5) No Vulkan or Metal API!!!"

You've recently made a thread about "Is it time to move to more modern GPU API's?"
"DirectX 12/11, Vulkan, Metal, OpenGL"

[/code]

Quite a lot of engines still don't have Vulkan/Metal support (yet).
Again, always comparing against UE/U isn't a good thing to do.

Look at AAA-Monster Cryengine and (IMO) the most beautiful looking engine I've
ever seen: Unigine. Even there: No Vulkan/Metal yet.

You really need to have a wider point of view and not narrow yourself down to
UE/U like the Brackeys Idiot followers that can't get anything done without
spending $$$ on Udemy.

I however agree that at some point this might be necessary if
you still want the "next-gen engine" as a headline on the site and
not want to have egg on your face in the process... Compared with Unigine nothing is next-gen here. Does this matter? No. But it does makes me cringe sometimes.


[quote='Zervox' pid='58425' dateline='1630103607']?

"7) IK is a must be for a modern engine as well advanced destruction."
IK is supported by the skeleton, the engine however doesn't have any IK solvers made for the skeleton, you can add your own IK solver if you want, source is available so you can do way more than that if you really want to.

"a must" is debatable. But at some point it might be.

And yeah, it all comes down to the solvers. Urho3d has 'em.
It's open source c++. Maybe it's not even too hard to port em?
(As there are a lot of other things people have written for Urho3d, like SSAO, AreaLights, GI and so on...Mostly based on pure shaders, no engine code, so maybe worth a look?)


From my (subjective) point of view:
I think what might be more pressing is some kind of (basic) indirect lighting solution / GI / SVOGI or whatnot. Realtime or not. And stuff like
color grading (LUT support added to the Post Processing stack)
to further enhance the "looks".

These days "looks" seems to be the end-all-be-all most people/indie-devs.
Ironically the best/most sucessful indie-games did it through innovation/novel ideas/gameplay/story and nearly never through "looks". But that's another story.

Still, I also like "good looks". Don't we all?

And finally, I can see that Esenthel is an Engine and a game.
Most things I've ever seen from the "boss" is fantasy themed.
So that clearly looks like a darn passion to me and
I also can easily see that a lot of love went into this engine.

(Again, interestingly enough, with a bit of imagination you can see that the Urho3d logo follows the same "spirit".. kinda... lol...)

But seriously, people who actually consider to use engines like these
don't care one bit about a logo. So there's that.


Best,
tL.


(On a side note: What I found concerning is this statement from 2015 on Steam:

Quote:Hi!

Thanks for your interest in Esenthel.

The engine is being developed for over 15 years, it's my life's passion to make it, so it's not going to be stopped. However if it would ever be stopped due to unforeseen circumstances then I would make it free+open source.

Thanks!

However when I see what just happened in the last year and a half, it's still impressive work that has been done.And he might have proven himself wrong here. The old examples don't live up to the actual
capabilities of the engine at all... So we might want to change that... )

FJI, Discord is free and engine developers don't have to do managing there - just elect some trustful person to do it for free. People like being admins . And in general, It's one of those things you set up and then it's working on it self.

For starters there can be like 4 channels: #welcome, #rules, #general, #help and then add more with time. It can be done in 10 minutes.

Like i mentioned, there is a discord server for EE already made by the user

Discord is for chat, not documentation like a forum, it's very bad that discord has become so popular because centralisation of the internet will stifle innovation and brings about privacy and security concerns ( China via Tencent have shares in discord and epic )

Please, don't ever change the UI for a "modern" look. Modern UI is flat, there's no depth, it's not readable. I really liked the UI of the Titan Editor, it's UI as it should have always be, forever. Buttons that are real buttons

(08-28-2021 04:03 PM)trsh Wrote:  FJI, Discord is free and engine developers don't have to do managing there - just elect some trustful person to do it for free. People like being admins . And in general, It's one of those things you set up and then it's working on it self.

For starters there can be like 4 channels: #welcome, #rules, #general, #help and then add more with time. It can be done in 10 minutes.

Discord is not good for software development. Valuable knowledge keeps gated between closed servers and are not indexed on Google searches. It's hard to keep track of questions and answers, it's hard to ask, it's hard to answer, etc - because the chat is always moving, there's no classification, there's always mixed conversations. Discord is a chat, not a knowledge sharing platform.

The same question ends up asked 20 times on scattered Discord servers because a person searching for a solution does not find it online, because well... it was locked behind a random Discord server.

Software development knowledge sharing belongs to forums, posts, documentations and mailing lists, anything that is OPENLY and PUBLICALLY indexable. Discord was supposed to be a thing for random community chats, like game guilds, not to be the hub of software development. Imagine how much content the past 5 years are gated behind thousands of isolated Discord servers.

It's great that Esenthel embraces a good old forum.