My Games Design

The maybe most user friendly and complete FOSS game engine jMonkey Engine 3 , has recently released the final version 3.0 of their very nice SDK . Here is a list of the full changes: Engine - LWJGL base now works on MacOSX 10.7+ incl. Applets - Hardware Skinning - Shader Nodes - Better Character (beta) -  New LOD Generator! -  TangentBinormalGenerator was refactored - Better physics debug view SDK - Now bundles a compatible version of the JDK - Now bundles a version of Blender for conversion and more - Shader Node Editor (!) - Code completion for assets - Texture Atlas creation and packed texture handling - External editor mesh updates for j3o files - Seamless 3DS and Collada import through blender - Improvements to model import tool, allows to locate and import textures - Attach custom AppStates to the SDK editor scene - New help and error log system, look for the monkey in the bottom right! - Improved Font Importer - Improved support for using other IDEs for code - Improved...

In my never ending search for a FOSS game engine that is usable for game modding with out having to reinvent the wheel (nor requiring to be a C++ code master) & having decent tools for content creation (because I am spoiled and think that is a minimum requirement for a game engine) I have become quite disillusioned lately. That is because *spoiler alert* sadly there is none so far... but a few are close luckily. The usual contenders for 3D action games are your mixed assortment of idTech based engines, most notably ioQuake3 . There are a few upcoming contenders like Unvanquished's Daemon engine (which is a mix of ET:Wolf, ioQuake3 and Xreal) and a yet to emerge idTech4 based champion (my uninformed guess is that it will be dhewm3 ). But all of them lack a decent game-play scripting function. On the other side of the idTech spectrum, there is the idTech1 based granddaddy DarkPlaces , which while having advanced to an quite impressive feature set, suffers a quite a bit from its...