Middleware Engines

Lately I have been thinking about the prospects of using a middleware engine for some game/demo concepts that I have been kicking around. Don't get me wrong - I love my engine and I'll continue working with it for high end testing and graphics hacking. I honestly can't imagine not playing with it every now and then, but there is some incredibly useful engines floating around out there now.

Take the Unity3D engine for example. For $200, you get a fairly sophisticated engine with a pretty strong editor, a tested and ready to use lighting and rendering system, physics, networking, asset pipeline, sound engine, .net scripting - that is way more functionality than I could implement on my own even if I was working on it full time for a year. Not to mention the fact that most of the tech would be obsolete by the time I finished polishing it up anyways... It's really incredible what you can get for such a price. Plus the damn thing runs in a web browser and is cross platform to boot. That's pretty good.

So I'm in the process of evaluating if I want to plop down my money to try it out. I'm starting out with some of their demos to see how stable the tech is and what it is all about. Especially with the web browser player, I want to ensure that it is pretty stable before jumping in. I'm also going to be digging into their documentation for a little while before downloading and installing their 30 day trial. Hopefully I can get a decent understanding of what it is all about and how it works.

If all goes well, then I can get a full blown engine for the cost of 3 graphics books. Since I buy quite a few of those, I think I can cut back a little and get some pre-packaged technology to play around with.