Hi,

I am only a hobbyist game hacker and have just recently stumbled across Esenthel Engine. I was surprised to hear that the Engine itself has native Linux support - a feature that all of the other major engines I've researched lack.

UE4 has an unofficially maintained Linux branch but it is highly unstable and lot's of stuff is still stubbed out. The entire branch is pretty much a one-man-show. Cry has been announcing Linux support for ages and will continue announcing it for ages just because they are teasing !@#$%. HeroEngine is in the cloud, which I don't want. Lot's of other engines and libraries I've researched are too low-level or feature-incomplete. It is actually quite depressing and frustrating if you are on Linux and all you want to do is create a small game to have fun with a few friends and learn something while doing it.

So now here is this Esenthel-Engine that looks really nice on the screen-shots, really nice on the YT videos I dug out, seems close to feature-complete, claims to be free for non-commercial use and even has native support for Linux. How awesome is that?!

However, when I try to download the Linux version of the engine, the website tells me, I am only allowed to download the Linux client if I buy a license, while the Windows and Mac clients come for free.

Wait, what?!

So I thought I should register an account in the forum, introduce myself and ask if I am just not doing it right or if I actually have to buy a license only because I want the Linux version of the engine? If so, why would that be the case? I sooo hope that I am just not doing it right and that there is a statically linked binary for Linux that I can just download and play with, right?

Hi baccenfutter and welcome to the Esenthel forum. Nice to see your interest in the engine.

Regarding the engine licensing, this just recently changed. Please see the statement at the top of this announcement Small License Change

I can't comment on the lack of an available Linux trial binary, I guess that Greg, the creator of Esenthel, would need to comment on this.

Thanks for your interest in Esenthel Engine!

In order to use Esenthel you need to have an active license subscription.

You can download a free trial to check it out, the trial is available for Windows Mac only, sorry that Linux is not available at the moment. You'd need to purchase the license to access the Linux version.
Please keep in mind Ubuntu 14.10 or newer is required, or else you might encounter issues related to "libodbc.so.2"

Hi and thanks for all the feedback!

Just to clarify:
I am absolutely willing to pay a license if I decide to use Esenthel-Engine. My problem is, that I just don't know if I can use it, yet. I assume there is no refund for software licenses if the software turns out to not work properly in my environment. As far as I understood, I don't even get support with the subscription (other than this forum, which seems to be quite decent, after all). That's why I would like to evaluate it, first.

I bought a subscription for UE4 and it ended up performing so bad that I tossed it and felt very sad about spending money on it. I'd rather throw my money out my window and watch people dive for it, than investing it in a software tool that turns out to be unusable for me in my environment.

Regarding my environment:
I use Gentoo and the available libodbc is 0.2.5-r2. I'm making an educated guess that I shouldn't have any legacy problems on my platform regarding any libs.

I don't know... I am still undecided after all... Perhaps I should dig more into asynchronous programming in Python for another year before I get back to game-engines. After all, I can do that for free.

It seems as if the engine market still hasn't heard the big bang and is still focussing on the wrong operating system for the future of game development. The fact that Esenthel-Engine moved to steam because of SteamOS gave me some hope but that seems to vanish.

By the way:
For a moment, imagine a world where all the new-coming student hackers with no money in their pockets but a strong will to become a game-developer some day, learn game-development on Esenthel because it is free and open-source and they can play with it in their basements. 5 Years later, all these students will enter the market and the engine they have the most experience in will be Esenthel-Engine. But now they use it commercially and have to pay you a revenue-share.

Don't believe that thought? Which compiler do you use nowadays and why?

To round it up:
Yes, I'd definitely pay you for your efforts and even buy a subscription to stay up to date and keep development progress going. No, I won't do it if I can not evaluate if the tool actually is useful for me in the end.

Whilst I agree it's unfortunate a Linux evaluation download is not available at this time a months subscription should allow you sufficient time to evaluate it. If there was still sufficient interest at the end of the month then that would surely justify the 2nd month's subscription.

$11.4 dollars a month seems a not unreasonable investment to evaluate what could be a tool you used for years to come. If it turns out to be unsuitable then simply drop the subscription.

So after digging through this site some more, I became more and more impressed and excited. I really like your documentation as far as I can tell so far. I really like the short but dense tutorial videos. Made me think over it...

So I came back today and bought a binary license.

There where precisely two dependencies I had to manually resolve (due to my platform of choice Gentoo). They where dev-db/libodbc++ and media-gfx/nvidia-cg-toolkit. What impressed me most about it however was the fact that the dependency errors where thrown when starting the installer, not after installation when first starting the engine. It told me so much about the engine compared to what I had seen before, and I hadn't even started the engine yet. I was finished and had a running engine less then 10 minutes after payment. Loads in less then two seconds on my Core-i5 Laptop with an SSD. No additional compiling of thousands of shaders! Lot's of assets, content and tutorials included.

I am so impressed that I actually feel very bad about ranting. From what I have seen so far, this is the engine of choice for anybody wanting to tinker with game-development on Linux, having a low budget.

Great news ... good to have you on board. Hope you enjoy your time with the engine and here in the forum. Look forward to seeing what you do with it

Thank you for choosing Esenthel!
Hope you'll like working with it!

Goodness gracious, I am so happy I think I am gonna have to cry!
Not just that the engine actually works perfectly on Linux, you have actually created a fairly! decent! game-engine! Dude!

I think I must have invested like 12h or so and I have a basic test map, and a player actually running around inside it. Amazing.

I dug through all the included tutorial content (which I think is awesome that you deliver it!) and was able to patch together a WoW type of mouse navigation. This becomes truly unbelievable if you consider that I have never written any C++ before, except perhaps a hello world tutorial or so. As a matter of fact, let me throw my nav into gists so I can get some feedback in order to improve my learning progress. It's nothing big, I just copy+pasted it together pretty much.

https://gist.github.com/baccenfutter/d2b...a3edbbbbb6
https://gist.github.com/baccenfutter/48e...adbb17f21e

Granted, there is no collision detection on the camera yet. That's up next!

Compared to my one-month-subscription for UE4, this is mind-blowing! I am overly happy to have supported you and am definitely considering to continue doing so on a regular basis.

Forget 2-3 seconds... the engine loads in less than half a second. A project (even a tutorial project with some amount of content to it) loads in less than a second. The interface is clean! It's clean and intuitive to use. Nothing has ever hung for me so far! No hung up background thread blocking the entire GUI. It feels like you seem to really know what you are doing when you are writing code, Sir. I've seen open-source code not behaving this clean and straight-forward, but then again... I haven't looked at the code of the engine yet.

But nothing in this world is perfect and so I did notice some downsides, which I will happily share with you hoping you'll consider improving them sometime in the future.

My biggest issue is LOAD!


The 90000 stands for 90 degree Celsius. In comparison to around 30-35 degrees when Esenthel is not running and 99 degrees when I am compiling code with five build threads.

When actually working with the engine - rather than writing forum posts - my temperature usually balances at 98-99 degrees when using Esenthel. My laptop has halted due to overheat protection twice since using the engine. That happens at 100-101 degrees and hasn't happened before using Esenthel. Even now when the engine doesn't even have focus and I am in my browser the load is up and the temp around 90 degrees. I see room for improvements here. Running hot is OK. Overheat-protection kicking in is not so good. It actually corrupted my shell's history file the last time it happened.

All in all: I am hooked!

I am glad you enjoy the engine but sorry to say your computer not being able to cool itself is not because of EE, this would be your case for any engine or game(I simply won't believe EE is the only application that makes your computer hot),
in anycase even if CPU is loaded 100%(using something like Prime95) constantly the temperature should not ever rise even near that number.
You've got some issues with your cooling fan(not rotating) or your computer has borked fan settings(eg fan won't speed up even though it can go higher rotations) or huge amount of dust buildup.

[joke]Can I borrow your computer to make omelets? [/joke]

As much as I'd like EE having a custom fps capping functionality available(for certain applications they never need to exceed 25-30fps).
Also on EE's way of handling window out of focus is a matter of the editor, I don't think I've seen anywhere in the editor some form of handling out of focus using Time.wait() to reduce load while nothing serious is being processed in the background.

There shouldn't be high CPU usage in the Editor as it handles Time.wait when needed.
Unless the app is active and you have Screen Synchronization disabled.
You can verify Screen Synchronization via F12 key (Video Options) - the screen monitor icon located at the bottom.

You also might want to look at your graphics card and the drivers for your GPU. Linux support for GPU drivers is not always as good as it could be.

And if Esenthel is the only program which generates this much heat, it might very well be that the other software you use doesn't use the GPU like Esenthel does. Have you tried running recent 3D games on it? It would be interesting to know what the impact on your cpu load is.

It's been a while since i worked with EE on Linux, but I know that on Ubuntu, the default drivers for my GPU didn't render very good results.