So I haven't touched Esenthel Engine in 5 years... I left it behind just before the guy did a big redesign because of his objectives no longer aligning with my interests (lets just say that to this day the idea of a world editor runnable on mobile devices amuses and saddens me at the same time, and trying to also push into the multiplatform engine market IMO was a bad call for an engine with such a small dev team (one guy?)).

I received a notification E-Mail last week about a new Demo being available, and went to watch the Demo video on Youtube... and actually liked the new effects.

Now, the engine was way ahead of its time in the early DX11 era when Unity was still trying to get its graphics looking good with DX9, and Unreal wasn't on UE4 yet. And sure enough, thanks to good assets the Demo did look good.

But the looks of what could be achieved with the engine was never the problem. Problem was the severly dated Editor and the obscure command schema to use it, and concerns about performance raised by some people (and I also saw the engine perform poorly in my case, but then I was making a loot of newbie mistakes still while using that engine, so might be on me in my case).

So did anyone use the engine as of 2017? Has it improved on the Editor front? How is performance looking, is it usable for anything larger (outside of eye candy demos)?

Thing is, the engine had a terrific asset importer that always imported my 3D Coat exported assets without any issues that never imported right into Unity 3... Unity just recently improved their importers to a point where I no longer constantly struggle with issues after an import.

And the terrain system was pretty good. In Unity we still wait for a terrain system that does half of what the Esenthel terrain system did back in 2011.

So I still have a soft spot for the engine... I HOPE that the engine dev did realize that his priorities shifted in the wrong direction back in 2012/2013, and went back to make his engine run as well as possible on PC, and update his world editor.

I am a fellow user from way back, Still using it personally, I love it due to its stability. the latest updates has had quite some optimization passes.

Couldn't tell you much directly about the editor as I tend to limit my usage of it quite alot(my projects are mostly based on my own handling so I do not mess around with it) mostly I just do asset import through the editor and thats it.

Okay, optimization passes sounds good. If I may ask (and you happen to know ;)), what are the devs priorities looking like at the moment? Are they still all over the places and going off on tangents, or has he decided on a certain course? Is he again developing on improvements for PC games use cases?

Has there been a rework of the editor since the last rework in 2013? I mean, I haven't given the new editor really a chance to impress me given I returned to Unity 4 at the time and found it to be everything I needed at the time, so maybe some of my criticism of the earlier world editor has been fixed even in that round of upgrades. But what I have seen back then in videos at least still looked somewhat dated, even if there clearly where improvements, so another round of upgrades would clearly be preferred.

Any changes to the pricing model? Back then there was a lot of experimentation with different ways of monetization, which wasn't always reassuring. As one of the guys that paid for the editor source access I was not so keen on having to pay again, and again and again. I understand that the editor rework wasn't free. Charging for an improved editor to an existing engine was... unusual, to say the least. And I guess then I would have to pay again for the engine sources given my project at the time relied heavely on procedural texturing the terrain. And while I didn't exactly mind his "pay for dev priority" crowd funding idea, AFAIK not everyone was happy about that.

In the end I am happy he scraped by and I hope he got a more steady stream of revenue from somewhere, but I would guess he has changed pricing a lot since I stopped checking the website, so I guess its a question that has to be asked... again, if somebody is in the know.

16 minutes ago, Gian-Reto said:

Okay, optimization passes sounds good. If I may ask (and you happen to know ;)), what are the devs priorities looking like at the moment? Are they still all over the places and going off on tangents, or has he decided on a certain course? Is he again developing on improvements for PC games use cases?

 

Has there been a rework of the editor since the last rework in 2013? I mean, I haven't given the new editor really a chance to impress me given I returned to Unity 4 at the time and found it to be everything I needed at the time, so maybe some of my criticism of the earlier world editor has been fixed even in that round of upgrades. But what I have seen back then in videos at least still looked somewhat dated, even if there clearly where improvements, so another round of upgrades would clearly be preferred.

 

Any changes to the pricing model? Back then there was a lot of experimentation with different ways of monetization, which wasn't always reassuring. As one of the guys that paid for the extended source access I was not so keen on having to pay again, and again and again. I understand that the editor rework wasn't free. Charging for an improved editor to an existing engine was... unusual, to say the least. And while I didn't exactly mind his "pay for dev priority" crowd funding idea, AFAIK not everyone was happy about that.

In the end I am happy he scraped by and I hope he got a more steady stream of revenue from somewhere, but I would guess he has changed pricing a lot since I stopped checking the website, so I guess its a question that has to be asked... again, if somebody is in the know.

He is still doing updates for all platforms he supports, thing is now that the platform support have matured it isn't as much hazzle for him anymore, latest updates are actually quite noticable for both desktop platform and mobiles.

dated? you mean the editor or the visuals? as has been the case for a while EE lacks somewhat in the shader department still(when it comes to visuals)

the extended source pricing back then was quite expensive compared to the new licensing, so yeah that is no longer an issue(although the new one is recurring, it is paid once a year) but still compared to the 1.0 source access cost and 2.0 extended source access costs I'd say it is more than ok.

Let's see 2013..that was initial EE2.0 if I remember correctly? if so yes there has been changes around the editor. the pricing model is available on the website.(full source access is available as a subscription as well as the non source) I do not consider the prices to be too steep(it's possible to download the editor and run it for free, although it is a bit limited(not in features but in limitations in things you can have, max object count in your project), a bit too limited according to some people, although I would say it should be enough to test alot of things still).