What do you look for in an engine demo.

[hallsofvallhalla]

What do you mean them saying the hell with it? As in they wouldn't buy it because it is marketed towards beginners or they would just use the demo over and over?

Being able to compile it in the demo shouldn't stop people from buying it unless you are trying to sell something not worth the money. If it is a good engine and worth the price more people will buy it because they can see it in action. Especially if they can compile their progress and show it off before buying.

I would place a huge logo or watermark and limit the size of the project that can be compiled. I would not limit the features, like shaders. If you do you will have piles of people making screenshots of their demo projects using your engine and they will not show off the features of the engine. Others will see all these screens and say eewww no shaders? Or that's the best it can do?

[Torniquet]

what kinda engine u plannin on making??

im not really clued up on all this engine bussiness.... only one i have used is RPG toolkit.

[Noctrine]

@Halls: I like your suggestions, I think I may go that route instead of removing compile totally. Though, their is the suspicion of people hacking the watermark out and hacking for a larger compile size. But that then becomes a job for our legal team doesn't it :p

@Torniquet: The engine is a 3D Action RPG engine. Depending on what version you have you could compare it to something like RPGmaker or Torque (Except not natively turn-based, nor natively FPS) The plan is for it to boast an extensive scripting system (Both visual and traditional) a simple and easy art pipeline (Deconstructing popular file-formats is a future task) with alot of modern engine creature comforts.

So far we are expecting to have 3 versions. Indie, Pro, and Source. They all come with differing levels of features and support, and they have different update schedules.

In laymens terms.:
Source will get updates first because these are the more skilled users who semi-direct access to the developers, they can help us with testing of the new core features and what not. Pro users are the people who would be using the engine a lot more seriously we would expect most of these people to not be visual scripters so they will get new features a short bit later after we have extended them to the scripting system. And we honestly expect Indie users to be mostly kids who see this as more of a cheap sandbox game than a full featured development tool.

End Requirements for Indie: Use approved Splash Screen / Animation. Mention on Game Credits page, and on project website.
End Requirements for Pro: None
End Requirements for Source: None
-----
Personally I think that providing some sort of demo would be good. Compiling options in a demo of an engine with the estimated price point is where it is, is what I am not to sure about.

[hallsofvallhalla]

A little off topic but I am really anxious for this engine.

[Jackolantern]

A little off topic but I am really anxious for this engine.

Me too, actually. After really getting into Diablo II about a year ago (I know, I was a bit late on that one lol), I searched and searched for a 3D Action-RPG engine. When I couldn't find one, I looked for any Action-RPG engine, and could not find one. So, to my knowledge, your engine would be the first Action-RPG system available.

If only you could get it to a state where you could start showing videos and getting people excited by the time Diablo III comes out, you will have a real winner on your hands