Looks Interesting

[StevenP]

Hi,

The engine looks very interesting so I figured I'd introduce myself and ask a couple questions.

I'm a Senior developer and I have been programming since I was 11 (around 33 years). I've been wanting to get into game development for years and I have bought a few engines and played around but time is at a premium (at most I can devote is around 10 hours a week to it) so I need something that can get me productive in as little time as possible but will not constrain my creativity. I do plan on creating commercial games so having a stable platform and great looking visuals is a definite requirement.

Although I have developed in several languages in the past (C\C++\VB\.etc) due to my employment positions I primarily use C# (love this language) and JavaScript (with the libraries such as JQuery, AngularJS, Bootstrap, etc.) So adding C# support to this would be awesome (*grin*).

Engines I have played with include Godot (Open Sourced MIT licensed cross-platform game development)\UE4\Shiva3D\Reloaded (now GameGuru\Leadwerks v1) and a few others. I have been considering Unity 3D now that the Pro version is free (if your company makes under $100,000.) Godot is nice but weak on the 3D side. UE4 is awesome and is perfect for AAA games (and a big team,) Reloaded was fun and I was able to get something thrown together pretty fast but it seems progress is so slow and I am not convinced I like the direction it is taking. I recognize TattieBoJangle from the forums there (I am assuming that is the same person.) I wasn't very active on there because I was really hoping for some of the promised features to come out before I invested too much time. Also, I owned an earlier version of Leadwerks (v1) but Josh never completed the engine and jumped onto v2 at the time and required an update fee yet v1 was useless for making an actual game (screenshots looked good though.) As far as Shiva3D, it did support a lot of platforms but I found it's workflow very non-intuitive and I started going through some YouTube tutorials and a book I downloaded for it (great book BTW) but with the requirement to purchase a new license for the new version I just decided maybe it wasn't worth investing too much time to learn it. Oh, and I actually owned GameCore. Really, really nice engine for the time but the developers (who created their own games via contracts) would go MIA for long periods of time and without noticed just dropped support for it. If they were reliable and still around I would probably be using that engine now.

Skyline crushes Reloaded feature and direction wise and is more the type of engine I am interested in (although I did love the ease of use for throwing a level together in Reloaded - minus the glaring limitations.) Although I program all day and don't mind eventually sinking my teeth into some complex scripts I can only devote limited time to game development I really need to feel that a fun game is coming together quickly and I get some immediate satisfaction as I am creating it (if you understand what I mean.) UE4 looks really good but I don't want to spend weeks going through tutorials (due to my limited time) before I can even start having fun putting something together. Reloaded was nice in that I could get going within a day. Also, the royalties for a young Indie would just be too much of a burden, I think.

The price for Skyline looks reasonable but before I start playing around with Skyline (does look very promising BTW) I did have a few questions:

1. One of my primary focuses for game development is VR. Not just for Occulus but I am going to be purchasing Razer's OSVR headset. Their open source drivers will support at least 30 hardware companies (VR\AR and Input devices.) I think that would be a good choice for implementation into Skyline in addition to the Occulus. I realize realize you have a lot on your plate right now but would you consider including support for the OSVR SDK in Skyline and how long would it take to get it implemented (the OSVR developer headset comes out in June)?
2. It is currently Beta but if I purchase a license I get updates for 1 year? When it is out of Beta is the upgrade going to be more expensive or will the updates fees for current users be reasonable?
3. I will probably jump on this thread (Other Engines: viewtopic.php?f=41&t=902) to give some feedback but with the addition of VR I do love the suggestions the other members gave for desired features. As long as VR is added I can be very patient in waiting for the crossplatform featuers to be added since a lot of the other features would be fun to play with.
4. One concern is that the engine may be dropped by the developers sometime in the future (the way others have been) leaving those who have invested time and energy into it stuck. Any thoughts on that? (I am not trying to put the developers on the spot but I have been through this before.)
5. Will you offer support for other developers to extend the IDE (plugins, etc.) the way Unity permits? Those would be nice assets to create and put in the store.

@TattieBoJangle, what are your thoughts regarding Skyline vs Reloaded (GameGuru)? I realize this has far more features but I am talking mostly about workflow, ease of use at getting something playable fairly quickly, etc. I would love to hear your thoughts since I have a lot of respect for you based on your posts and work on the GameGuru forum.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I know the member count on here is currently small but everyone seems very kind and helpful. The word needs to get out about this engine.

-Steve

[StarFire]

Welcome to Skyline StevenP

Community
Yes we are a small community but there is very nice vibe between us all, after all Skyline is a fun product so making games should be about fun! and not get too serious. We all have a variety of skills and experience and no one has a god complex lol so even the person with little experience can feel at home with a seasoned dev. We the devs ( 2 of us ) work from home and are basically slaves to the Skyline Goddess so you can generally get in touch with us at any time and when we are not around our community friends are becoming very knowledgeable and will happily help you out if they can.

We have members who are creating some cool video tutorials ( TattieBoJangle ) others are helping out with some guides and documentation (Shando, liamgibbins) its a good good job as we are still way busy with the engine to get our official documentation in place. But when we get time we do add the odd page

You mentioned a book on Shiva, Shando wrote a book for Shiva, wonder if it was the same book

Talking about fun:
Over the months we will be creating new reusable scripts to make it easier to get some basic mechanics happening without too much effort plus we are nearly ready to roll with the new visual mechanics editor. We don't mind coding but if there is a quicker more chilled out way we are ready to use it, hence we started development on the new Visual editor. This will also make it easier for new users to get dynamic scenes up and running quickly.

IDE Extension:
This is planned as an extension to the visual mechanics editor as we can see a way to add editor side ui controls. This way you could design procedural placement of objects or other cool scene tools. It is a few months from development yet but we think it will be a great feature for Skyline, plus we can develop Skyline features without long build times

Development/Prototyping speed:
We are moving development focus to making Skyline one of the easiest fun workflows out there so you can have the simplicity of a game in a box with the full expandability of a pro system. We want to be able to make prototypes and poc scenes with ease and this should not be a laborious process. Making games should be fun!. We are listening to our friends and what they want to make Skyline a fun product and where possible we are implementing these features but it can be a slow process but we get there in the end
You can make some really cool stuff in one evening, most of our screen grabs on the gallery are done in a evening or two. We personally dont have time to play as much as we would like, so we need Skyline to be quick to come up with the goods.

Hope this helps answer some of your questions.

[SolarPortal]

Hi and welcome to the forum Steve We hope you enjoy skyline and end up making all your games here.

c#
We are planning on implementing c# through the use of mono, since it will give us a cross platform solution right out the box.
However, this is not going to happen for a while as we are still in the process of making our easy to use lua scripting language complete and powerful. Then on top with the Visual Game Mechanics editor, this will not be a high priority task.

VR
This is an interesting subject and we would like to support this feature. Going for a competitor to oculus might land us a deal with them to get a dev kit, which we can then integrate into the engine.
I have looked into the oculus SDK and found some resources for integration but they are expensive lol

If you know of someone who would be willing to donate their kit, so it can be integrated, then we are very interested to hear about it.

As you said though, we do have a lot on our plate and we do try to offer the features users require asap for them. Even though at times it cannot be helped if dev time is pushed back.

Pricing after beta
The pricing we have now is the pricing we are planning on offering after Beta.
£40 for the commercial license, £20 for yearly updates. But the engine version you had last is the version you can use forever.
This is subject to change and it may need to adapt to future industry changes. But the plan is to stick with what we have and not follow into the current industry trend of dropping it off to free, then charge everyone on plugins and scripts which ends up costing way more lol Our store is just for extensions and assets like the rest but the engine itself will be a capable tool set without the need of anything else.

Whether we are around after a while
We feel you do not need to worry about this as we have been developing for 4+ years with a very minimal budget and have no plans on stopping skyline as it is a passion to create this toolset for our own titles in the future. We do not feel threatened by the industry changes of a few weeks ago, and believe strongly that a single engine is no good for any developers toolbox. We were cheap before the changes as we feel this industry needs an affordable solution that isn't hindered by hidden licenses, royalties or costs after certain amounts. £40 to release all the games you want commercially with no limitations.

I hope this clears a few things up and i am looking forward to seeing where this goes with yourself.

[TattieBoJangle]

Hi Steve and welcome i don't think i have seen a wall of text like that since Uman from reloaded a good guy who talked a lot of sense like you

Not sure where to start but i will do my best, I found coming to skyline simple and easy takes a few days to get to know your way around but when you do i would say the workflow is in fact faster for what you are doing for example no fpe file to make for each and every model. The other big thing for me was characters you can plop a character in and within minutes have it working as the main character instead of a camera "you can have that also"

Another massive thing that will speed up your workflow is the "CAMERA" not to bring down reloaded but that top down camera was so bad if you needed to slightly move something then you had to test the map each time it was a massive waste of time you couldn't get a feel of your map, with skyline you can just fly around in the editor as if it were in game.

NO BAKING! this sounds silly but this was the final straw for me, we had to wait hours sometimes for a level to bake the shadows and it didn't give me any more fps then if you moved stuff around had to bake again lol this wasn't workflow for me this was me sitting around.

I know you only asked about workflow but i will list what i think below and i know it seems as if i hate reloaded (gameguru) i don't there was some good stuff there but i simply grew out of it

Pros
You can change the map size and it is a lot bigger good for open world.
Takes all sorts of file formats (This is another big one for me as .x is slowly becoming unsupported
Performance is better for me in skyline "30fps with a map in reloaded" i added 5000 animated trees and its in the hundreds
64bit coming soon this is another big + for me as it will increase memory and item limits
Graphics everything looks better in skyline "EVERYTHING"
Great support they have fixed everything i have put to them and even added a few requested (the good thing about beta)

Cons
It crashes now and again as do many engines "Save regularly" (still beta)
Some things could be made easy like sound zones (like reloaded)
Needs a better set of arms and guns for users who are just starting
No view culling (unloads models not seen) but i believe this is coming
Small community but it is growing each day

There are probably more but i am sure you are fed up reading by now

I would recommend getting Skyline you wont be disappointed

[StevenP]

Wow! I posted this message and left for lunch and got three awesome replies back. Thanks, guys!

@TattieBoJangle: lol, if Uman ever posted a message that wasn't a wall of text I was surprised.

Anyways, Skyline looks like what I hoped Reloaded would become. Placement and model format support was one of my breaking points. I struggled to get things placed the way I wanted and I have a lot of models that were a royal pain to import.

I am going to try importing some of my models, lay out some levels and see how it feels. If I like it, and it really sounds like I will, I will buy my wife some flowers and then, later on, ask if she minds me buying a license, lol.

As far as C#, that is a "nice to have" and is no where near that important to me. The lua and visual scripting will be plenty good. VR is something I am really hoping for, though. I wonder if Razer would donate a couple pairs to you if you agree to incorporate the SDK into Skyline? Worth a shot asking...

I hope to eventually add content to the asset market but it will most likely be logic related since my primary strength is programming.

[epsilonion]

Welcome Steve and welcome,

Welcome to the community, I am pretty new here myself but I feel like I am a part of a close knit community.

Personally I am impressed with the response times of all the guy's official or not and we are all friendly here.

I am producing a guide for novices, basically a guide of what some buttons do and what the separate editors do, as I am figuring it out I am updating the documentation (WIP).

For me it was the community along with the Road Map that made me buy this engine, it has so much more then the smaller engines have to offer with features and to be included features, the Dev's are friendly and even reply on a weekend.

There are a few bugs but you get that with all software that is in the BETA stage of development, I personally like the workflow and the "easy" to use interface and it is actually easy to use..

L

[StevenP]

liamgibbins, thanks for the reply.

I actually like the replies the devs gave to me above which makes me feel more at ease.

The road map looks great.

I did have two more questions for the devs. How long until it is out of Beta? How long until you think commercial games could be produced in this (even if that is before Beta is complete - which could happen?)

[SolarPortal]

great responses, thanks guys

How long until it is out of Beta?

This is still an unknown as we only entered public Beta at the start of this year.
I would say your looking at a year minimum, but it will be released when we feel that it won't fall over and when everything feels polished enough to be ready. We are continually developing and will do well past the full release, so it won't feel any different from any other.

How long until you think commercial games could be produced in this

Skyline is already capable of making many types of games. This is why we went public Beta, because we feel that we have a game engine rather than a scene editor. The wizard export is already able to output applications for the PC platform.
So please go make some games while its still in beta and sell them!

[StevenP]

Awesome! Thanks for the reply.

[StevenP]

I finally got a chance to play with Skyline. With the help of liamgibbins pdf and TattieBoJangle's videos I have been able to play around. Of course, it may seem easy but there is a lot there to explore and play around with before I can get productive. Once I play around I'll have to create a level and see how it looks (and that's the best way to learn, anyways.)

I have already begun telling my wife how cool this is and that I want it.

I am really hoping VR and cross-platform will be added to this because I really like the workflow so far.

Very cool so far. I can see there being a lot of fun with this.

[AuShadow]

@Steven, hey and again welcome, if you look closely you will find a few reloaded uses and some of us still play with it every now and again but have for 95% of things moved to skyline, as Tattie said EVERYTHING looks so much better in skyline and its nowhere near as restricted. Almost always short replies from me as I'm always on the forum on my phone, (PC time very very limited), but yeah I highly recommend skyline and watching all of tatties tutorials for it.

[StevenP]

AuShadow,

Skyline appears to be what I hoped Reloaded would become. I am definitely going to buy this. Unfortunately my father passed away three weeks ago and just yesterday I was told my step-mother died yesterday morning. So I will be traveling for another funeral this Saturday until next Thursday. When I get back I will buy this with the next paycheck that comes in. I almost gave up on game making when my dad died because him and I would get so excited about my ideas. My wife convinced me that he would want me to continue on with the game making so I will just be dedicating the first game I sell to him.

Anyways, I will definitely be sticking around these forums. The free version I have crashes a lot but when I get to buying the full version I'll be able to look forward to bug fixes.

@Devs: You guys are awesome for hanging around the forums answering questions and being so responsive. That is a big selling feature. Skyline deserves its own book (*hint hint* Shando <- it must have been your Shiva3D book I read and if it weren't for that I wouldn't have used Shiva3D at all. )

-Steve

[StarFire]

I am very sorry to hear about what has happened.
We ourselves are going through a loss and is why we haven't been around for the past week.

@Devs: You guys are awesome for hanging around the forums answering questions and being so responsive.

Thank you, our pleasure

[StevenP]

Starfire, I am sorry for your loss and thank you for your kind words.

Well, I am back home (after a 17 hour drive ending at 3:30 in the morning.) I am on my work computer now but later this evening I am going to buy a license. I may also buy one for my brother but that may be a week or two before I get that one.

I am loving the responses you two give on the forum and the amount of work you are pouring into the engine. Your reception to feedback from the community is amazing. Also, the community, though small, is still very helpful and kind. I look forward to being an active member here.

[StevenP]

Purchased!

[AuShadow]

another one converted to skyline awesome , the more people we get the more funding these guys get to make it even better

[SolarPortal]

Excellent! Thank you for the kind words and Thank you very much for your support

If you have any questions or problems, then let us know and we will try to help
Commercial Indie licenses also gives you email support too now, which makes it easier to send files, images etc...

[StarFire]

thank you StevenP we need all the support we can get to make our Skyline an awesome fun product