it really depends on your skills.

i mean, there are engines with just incredible possibilities, but you need to be a very good programer to squize anything from them.

on the other hand there are many engines which needs just the basic programing or even no at all.

I have not much skills yet.

But I want to pick an engine and stay with it. So that when my skills increment I will be capable of making nicer graphisc and games.

My basic concern is: which engine is capable of doing this outer-space type game without big problems.

another vital question then. Want the game to be 2D or 3D?

2D are easier to pick up but obviously limited. 3D are harder to learn from the basics if you havent worked with one before, have limites set much more further then 2D ones but also the work you will need to do is at least 5 times the value

3D!

In fact I want to use 3D (stereoscopic) monitors too!

Its no problem when I have to learn.

Hello Melomania don’t know much about game engines myself but have a look through the mod section of the forum as few have bean mentioned there.

general-mod-and-coding-discussion-f40/

also dark basic might be worth a look as the pro version I believe is used by the devs of the Evochron games.

You might want to hit up the guys making the X32i game they are using the UDK (Unreal Development Kit) this is a free and is a very nice engine. Dark Basic is another, we know that all the Evochron games are made with this engine. FSO (FreeSpace Open) engine is another using the FS2 game engine. There is a few of them out there that have been used successfully.

I would recommend Ogre

http://www.ogre3d.org

there are a surprising number of people working on space sims with ogre... some implementing a planetary engine with it.

https://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic ... 99&start=0

http://alexcpeterson.com/ & his vid

Ogre3D is a great graphics engine. It's what I'm using for "salvation prophecy". But be aware that it is just a single component (graphics). It does not include any support for physics, sound, networking, user interface, or even an official content creation pipeline. So to use Ogre3D, you need the skills to incorporate different middleware libraries to create your full game engine. For example, I use PhysX (physics), FMOD (sound), CEGUI (user interface), and ogitor (landscape editor). But none of this works "out of the box". It makes for some heavy-duty and time-consuming programming to get all this working. Although there is a lot of information on the Ogre3D site about how to go about this.

So if you don't mind getting your hands dirty, and you have the skills, Ogre3D is a great approach. Plus it's totally free in cost, open source, and has no commercial use restrictions.

Conversely, if your main goal is to jump in and get a game running as soon as possible, one of the fully packaged game engines, like Unity might be a better approach. Although I can't say for sure how geared towards space games they are.