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Engine Details

Esenthel Engine

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Esenthel Engine is a complete game development suit allowing to create fully featured AAA titles. It has been specifically designed for professional game development, which has been achieved by giving the developers full control over the game code mechanics, next generation graphics and a rich toolset drastically simplifying the game development process. While mainly targeted for the professional market, the engine is easy enough that it can also be used by independent teams or small companies with no prior game development experience.

Author

Grzegorz Slazinski

Graphics API

DirectX

Operating Systems

Windows

Programming Language

C/C++

Status

Productive/Stable

Documentation

Yes

Features

General Features

Object-Oriented Design, Save/Load System:

•	Streaming of "Unlimited" Sized Worlds
•	Automatic loading, unloading, updating and rendering of Terrain and Objects
•	Objects with custom class and set of parameters
•	References between objects
•	Instant Pathfinding even between distant areas
•	Waypoints with custom looping modes (Single, Loop, Ping-Pong)
•	Built in classes for objects: Static, Doors, Items, Characters, Lights

Built-in Editors

World Editor, Mesh Editor, Gui Editor, Icon Maker, Converter, Calculator, Functions, Pak Viewer, Image Viewer, Synchronizer, Mouse Extend

Physics

Basic Physics, Collision Detection, Rigid Body, Vehicle Physics:

•	Rigid Body Collision Detection
•	Ragdolls
•	Character Controllers
•	Vehicles
•	Clothes
•	Continuous Collision Detection
•	Actors - Sphere, Capsule, Box, Oriented Box, Convex, Triangle based (static only)
•	Joints - Fixed, Hinge, Spherical, Slider, Breakables
•	Calculating Actor Position, Matrix, Velocity, Angular Velocity, Energy, Mass, Damping
•	Actor Groups and User Data
•	Holding and Dragging Actors

Lighting

Per-vertex, Per-pixel, Volumetric, Lightmapping, Radiosity, Gloss maps, Anisotropic, BRDF:

Shadows

Shadow Mapping, Shadow Volume:

Texturing

Basic, Multi-texturing, Bumpmapping, Mipmapping, Volumetric:

Shaders

High Level:

Scene Management

General, Octrees, Occlusion Culling, LOD:

Animation

Inverse Kinematics, Forward Kinematics, Keyframe Animation, Skeletal Animation, Morphing, Facial Animation, Animation Blending:

•	Skeletal
•	Keyframed (Target Orientation, Relative Rotation, Position Offset)
•	Multiple Animation Blending
•	Facial Animation
•	Inverse Kinematics
•	Skeleton Animation Level of Details (lod)
•	Events
•	Item Slots
•	Highly compatible (one Animation Works on All Meshes with similar skeletons)
•	Creating Animations in Mesh Editor tool
•	Importing Animations from external formats

Meshes

Mesh Loading, Skinning, Progressive:

•	Vertexes (Position, Normal, Tangent, Binormal, Texture0, Texture1, Matrix Index, Blend Weights, Size)
•	Edges (Vertex Index, Adjacent Face, Normal, Flag, Id)
•	Triangles (Vertex Index, Adjacent Face, Adjacent Edge, Normal, Flag, Id)
•	Quads (Vertex Index, Adjacent Face, Adjacent Edge, Normal, Flag, Id)
•	Automatic UV Mapping
•	Transforming (Moving, Scaling, Matrix Transforming), Reversing, Mirroring
•	Correct Normal, Tangent and Binormal Calculation Vertex Welding, Edge Welding, Edge Subdividing, Face Subdividing
•	Joining, Spliting, Copying
•	Linking Vertex->Vertex neighbour, Vertex->Edge, Edge->Face, Rectangle->Edge
•	Convert Triangle to Quads, Quads to Triangles, Edges to Polygons
•	Logical Operations on 2D / 3D Meshes (Or, And, Xor, Sub..) - Beta
•	Add and Remove Vertex / Edge / Triangle / Quad Optimize (Remove Inline Vertexes, Faces, Vertex Cache, Simplification)
•	Level of Detail (Lod)
•	Binary / Text Custom Format
•	Importing 3ds, Ase, B3d, Dae, Obj, Wrl, X, Xml (OgreXml)
•	Creating Meshes out of geometry shapes
•	Automatic Tree Mesh Genereation

Surfaces & Curves

Splines:

Special Effects

Environment Mapping, Lens Flares, Billboarding, Particle System, Depth of Field, Motion Blur, Sky, Water, Fire, Explosion, Decals, Fog, Weather, Mirror:

•	Flat, Normal, Parallax and Relief Bump Mapping
•	Light Blooming , Glow
•	Hdr + Eye Adaptation
•	Motion Blur, Depth of Field
•	Volumetric Clouds, Layered Clouds
•	Ambient Occlusion
•	Sub-Surface Scattering
•	Soft Particles
•	Markers
•	Bullet Holes
•	Grass Bending on Wind
•	Leafs Bending on Wind
•	Fire, Water, Fur, Fog, Sun, Sun Rays, Sky, Explosions, Blood Effects
•	Laser, Electricity
•	Mesh Outlining
•	Cel-Shading
•	Holographic Images

Terrain

Rendering:

Networking System

Peer-to-Peer:

•	Downloading File from url address
•	UDP Socket based Peer-to-Peer connection

Sound & Video

2D Sound, 3D Sound, Streaming Sound:

•	1D / 3D
•	Wav / Ogg
•	From File or Memory
•	Custom Volume Groups (Sound Fx, Voice, Music, Ambient, Global)
•	Music and Ambient Systems automatically playing random tracks from given Music Theme with Crossfading support

Artificial Intelligence

Pathfinding:

Rendering

Raytracing, Raycasting, Deferred Shading, Render-to-Texture, Fonts, GUI:

•	3 Renderers - Simple, Forward Rendering, Deferred Rendering
•	Anti-Aliasing - Multi Sampling, Super Sampling
•	Color Operations - RGB <-> HSB (Hue, Saturation, Bightness) Conversions, Opacity, Inverse, Adding, Lerping
•	Screen Color Transformations
•	Gamma Calibration
•	4:3, 5:4, 16:9, 16:10 or custom Screen Aspect support
•	Shader Model 2.0, 3.0 supported
•	Vertex Buffering for simple graphics drawing (Images, Gui Elements, Geometry Objects, ...)
•	Screen Synchronization
•	Windowed / Fullscreen
•	Taking Screenshots
•	Custom Font Creation
•	Shadowed Font Drawing
•	Fonts in Any Language (Unicode support)
•	Point, Directional and Cone Lights
•	Dynamic Lightmaps
•	Occlusion Query support
•	Particle System (based on a single shape, or animated skeleton)
•	Viewports
•	Rendertargets (with support of high precision formats)
•	Smooth Fading between screens
•	2D Effects - Subtitles, Ripple, Fade using fade texture, Wave, Radial Blur

Features:

Ease of Use:

Stability:

Support:

Date Added

Fri, 24 Apr 2009

Last Updated

Fri, 24 Apr 2009

There are currently 33 reviews for this engine

License Name	Price	Source Code	Comments
Other/Custom	Free	No	Non-commercial use
Other/Custom	$100.00	Yes	Commercial use (First Game)
Other/Custom	$400.00	Yes	Commercial use (Next Games)
Other/Custom	$7,000.00	Yes	Commercial use (with additional Source Codes)

Member Reviews

NOTE: The ratings and reviews below reflect the opinions of their respective authors and as such, do not reflect the opinions of DevMaster.net or its staff. The reviews are not moderated and some are completely inaccurate. Therefore, most reviews should be taken with a grain of salt. If you find any inaccurate or inappropriate reviews, let us know by stating in detail why you think the review should be removed and any links/documents that support your contention.

Awesome!

Posted by: sil0o at Dec 5, 2009

an excellent cheap game engine with nice features and ease of use tht makes it perfect for Indie developpers. Unfortunately no code source, but it's really easy to implement nearly everything you want like LUA scripting.

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Very Satisfied

Posted by: Jack at Apr 29, 2009

I've been using the engine for quite a long time, and since I've discovered that it has appeared in the engine's database I've thought I write a short review about it.
I've tried many engines and this one suits my needs perfectly.

First of all let me say that it isn't another game maker, this engine is designed specifically for the professionals being built on c++ architecture. So it isn't click-click-play, but gives you instead the bigger control over the game codes, which allow you to change the behavior of game objects, add custom classess and so, giving almost limitless freedom. From what I've seen so far you can easily make any kind of game in the engine.
Some may see this as a disadvantage making it harder to learn, but for making pro games, this is definitely the way to go, once you'll check the tutorials you'll see that it's actually very simple to code games in it.

A few words about graphics, while being a man who pays very big attention to details, I must say that the engine has one of the most advanced graphics out there, very complex shader system, and a lot of special effects.

The other thing that must be mentioned is the speed of development. I was very surprised how fast the engine grows with new features and functionality, almost every few days I can launch the autoupdating tool, and incorporate new engine features into my game.

What else? I haven't mentioned the tools, the engine comes with a package of multiple tools, including most importantly World Editor and Mesh Editor. Tools are very well designed, after playing with them for some time, my opinion is they are both very easy to use and very powerfull as well.

As for the stability, everything works like a charm. From the several months of working with the engine I've encounter at most 2 issues, each of them were solved in less than an hour since reporting.

Final Word? Get the engine, it's worth it.

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Facts about Esenthel Engine

Posted by: at Aug 21, 2009

Here are some facts about my experience with Esenthel Engine:

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Supported features - once you check out the website you can notice that the engine is packed with lots of features, most importantly collaborative world creation, automatic world management, game object class management, modern graphics and a rich toolset.

The engine is very quickly developed, you can experience receiving new features every few days, and by that I don't mean small improvements, but big things, like recently added collaborative world creation or adding custom modes to the world edior, just check out the engine's version history on the forums, and you'll see for yourself.

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Ease of use - most of the things are very intuitive, like the tools or programming style. Most importantly I like the headers (.h files) which are very well commented, and somehow feel very clean. It's not a dense mass of useless text, instead it's short, very well organized which always lets you find things you need very quickly.

What almost needs to be mentioned is that the engine comes with more than 100 various tutorials. Their complexity starts from writing simple "hello world" application with text only on the screen, followed by tutorials describing the functioning of key classess, ending at tutorials presenting how to make fully functional game demos like "bloody massacre".
I was very amazed when I found out how little code needs to be written in order to make very good first person shooter game demo.

Next thing what comes in mind is the provided support through the Esenthel forums. The help offered there is very nice and friendly, questions are answered mostly during the same day.

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Visual Effects - the engine is packed with many of the latest special effects - realistic bump mapping, hdr, motion blur, glow, volumetric lighting, soft particles, dynamic ambient occlusion, and on and on.. It definitely stands out in a positive way when compared to other engines, which don't offer so good realtime lighting systems.

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Performance - I've tested the engine's game demo, with high quality settings, featuring 30+ characters on the screen, motion blur, parallax mapping, 2 dynamic lights with soft shadowing, ssao, achieving average of 60-70 fps on a Core 2 Duo with a cheap card like 9600 GT.

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Stability - I am using the engine for almost a year, and personally I haven't encountered a single bug or crash. From what I've seen on the forums, any issues which were found by other users, were solved during the same day.

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Overall quality and design - From the start you can notice that the engine is targetted for making professional games, based on the c++ architecture, with ability to extend it with custom classess you're not limited to simple scripts or predefined behavior like in other engines.
Engine has object-oriented design, additionaly it has been created this way where you don't have to play with pointers, but just declare objects. Prototyping custom gameplay features can be done very easily.

From the screens, tutorials, demos and list of features, you can see that you can make big things with little effort when using this engine.

Everything just works there.

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I am very grateful that I found this engine, and plan to use it for a lot more projects.
If you're wondering wheter to try it or not, my advice is - try it, and you won't go back to any other engine.

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Fantastic engine

Posted by: Harton at May 2, 2009

I use this engine about half year. I'm very satisfied.
For me, the biggest advantage in engine is support!
Mr Slazinski answered for my all questions and he is always helpful!
Esenthel is for everyone! Young programmer can be use it and quick create first mini-games, however experienced programmer can create big production.
Engine is frequently improve!
Esenthel is engine for games and other applications which use advanced 3D graphic!

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Engine which I was looking for.

Posted by: johnnyzib at May 5, 2009

I'm absolutely amazed by this engine, it has huge potential. Just by the look on supplied tutorials you can see that it's very easy to use.
The graphics are top notch - you won't find any better rendering quality than you can find in this engine.
Features are great and very well developed, everything is ready and awaits to be used.
The API is extremely clean and very well commented.
This is exactly the thing which I was always looking for.

Try it immediately - you won't go back to any other engine!

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Read The Review

Posted by: GeorgeGonzales at May 6, 2009

I'd like to describe shortly my experiences with Esenthel Engine:
- Watched the screens
- Downloaded the engine
- Checked the codes
- Tried out the tutorials

And finally, I thought to myself - This is holy s*** amazing!

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A perfect engine for game programmers

Posted by: Harrymaster at Jun 5, 2009

I have been using Esenthel Engine since February 2007 and I must tell that it is the best engine which I have ever seen. Everything what author of this engine wrote about it is true. It's fast, easy and has a lot of features. What's more everyone who work with EE has a brilliant technical support. I think that Esenthel Engine is really better choice than another engines like OGRE.

And finally - if you and your team wants to make a real game and work with professional engine you should try Esenthel Engine immediately.

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Great Engine!

Posted by: Barthap at Jun 6, 2009

I use this engine two months. I think this engine is great!
World and Mesh Editor are best features in engine. Engine has got very big support: 100 tutorials with source code. It's very easy to implement basic game code.
Engine autoupdate is very fine feature becouse I can always update engine without problems.

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This engine is Perfect!

Posted by: Koniu_Slincer at Jun 6, 2009

I use this engine from February 2007, and I'm very happy. Perfect support, very easy to use ;)
I command this engine warmly.

The Apocalypse: Slincer based this engine (www.slincer.com).

Licence is very profitable

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The best engine ever

Posted by: Eriks at Jun 19, 2009

I think that this is the best (free ;d ;d ;d) engine for young programmers. (((((sorry my english :P))))) Easy in use, perfect support, good features, stability and performance are excellent :) PERFECT ( FREE ) ENGINE

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perfect engine

Posted by: igorwojtowicz at Jun 19, 2009

Engine is perfect
Always Lord Grzegorz will help the wrazie of mistake.
Engine contains tools as well as shaders
You by perfect documentation will learn coding in this engine quickly.

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Esenthel Engine review

Posted by: TheCoder at Jun 20, 2009

If you want to have cheap (and free for non-commercial use), fast, stable, extremely easy to use engine with great support from engine creator and help from very nice community - now you know where to find it. Esenthel Engine is truly high quality, good optimised solution that allows you to create any kind of game in really short period of time. I recommend this engine to everyone - from newbie to professionals.

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Simply the best

Posted by: xenno_84 at Jun 23, 2009

What to say about this engine, It's simply perfect.
It has high end features.
Dozens of basic tutorials, and a little game demo.
Very good support.
Continuously updates.
Full of tools ( world editor, mesh editor, materia editos, particle, .... )

The best thing is that you can use the engien for free, and later, if you want, can buy a license and make your comercial game. And support still there, yes, esenthel admin help even you have not buy a license ( of course, licensed developers has priority by far =) )

And by now it's very very cheap ( i say by now because this engine evolve very quickly)

It's very easy to use ( specialy thanks to all tutorials ). And yes, you need to know C++ but much less than other engines becouse Esenthel has been programmed to be easy to use ( Lots of special class , structures, etc that will help you to make your game stable and easy to program )

My rate. 10.

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Short Review

Posted by: Melus at Jun 23, 2009

I use this engine short time, but I'm very satisfied. It's the best for learn, because he is easy and has very useful tool and large documentation.

I command this engine!

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This engine is so special

Posted by: hwlim at Jun 23, 2009

The package includes a lot of mini C++ projects to demostrate the features of the engine, very good for beginner to learn the features quickly. You will be impress when you look at those demo, and have a good excuse to learn C++.

The author update the engine very frequently, I really appreciate it.

Comes with a lot of good effect, with mini demo. (oh I repeat again)

You don't need to spend a penny to use all the features of the engine, and no trial period.

Very complete toolset, what else you want to complain?

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;)

Posted by: ptys at Jun 23, 2009

Esenthel is worth notice not only for his numerous advantages, which you can see above. First of all you should to check Esenthel engine because of its author. Grzesiek (drean) is extremely inspiring person! Despite of his young age (Hi is 24 I suppose) He works constantly on this engine for years! His commitment, passion and attitude are admirable :D

Secondly, you should check our growing and supportive Esenthel community. If Grzesiek will not help you within an hours, surely someone from old users will do :D (Esenthel support deserves 6 stars :D).

Its hard to rate "Features". Its too much of them and each month something new appears :D If you need something that is not included, this will surely appear in future :)
I have the same problem with "Ease of use" rate. Everybody learns in different way, and, if you have some troubles with learning Esenthel, lots of tutorials or/and Grzesiek will help :D
"Stability & Performance"... well, i have an old computer and I've didn't noticed any problems, so... :) You should check it by yourself :P

Yep, I know, this isn't an objective review but I've tried... and sorry for my English (this excuse is so lame :( ).

Don't waste this opportunity to learn something interesting and join Esenthel community! :P
Cheers!

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Best Engine!

Posted by: MoonX49 at Jun 24, 2009

The best free engine which has had one.
1. Very good support.
2. Very easy to use.
3. Very good tutorials.
4. A lot of helpful tools.
5. Large documentation.
6. Continuously updates.

Rate: 6/6

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Great Engine, Great Support

Posted by: Brainache at Jun 24, 2009

I have used many engines over the years, and Esenthel is in a class by itself. The rendering quality is what truley sets this engine apart. Soft shadows & natural lighting. Beyond that - the coding style used makes it quick and easy to prototype an idea. Includes all tools needed to import models from several key formats quite easily. Full physics with great frame rates.

Outstanding and always improving!

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The best engine.

Posted by: Krzysiek1105 at Aug 1, 2009

I use the engine less than a month.
I am very happy that I am using this engine.
Forum offers quick help. .W all helped me. is really a great engine has a lot of guides, many of which can be learned.
Sorry for the mistakes but I am not good with English

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I love it!

Posted by: McRoyal at Jun 30, 2009

Very professional, very powerful, tech support is very fast and helpful.
I can honestly recommend this engine to anyone, both professionals and indies.
Try it out, you won't get back to any other engine.
5/5 Stars!

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Good engine at the cost.

Posted by: Aurora at Nov 22, 2009

After using the engine for some time, i can only say this so far:

The engine is packed with features, for the price you pay, you get top dollar in features in return (and they work!).

The engine is easy to use, however, some things can mess up, like the Material editor wich i wished where by itself and not build into the mesh editor, and some functions is more annoying then useful (like rotating textures on mesh by accident, almost everyone use UV mapping).

The engine is stable, i have yet to have anything crash on me, and the FPS is really really good (but still need alot of optimization.

For support, the forum is decent for support, the "owner" / creator is there to answer what you might have of issues, and quick to fix eventual bugs.

However, if you can use UDK for your project, i highly recommend that one too.

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Esenthel Engine

Posted by: JoshHeartnet at Jul 4, 2009

Normally I don't write this kind of reviews, but this time I wanted to make an exception.

I've tested a lot of engines out there, some of them looked good at start, easy editing, they looked simple and fun, but when wanted to make some more complex games in them, it appeared that it just can't be done.

But when I've tried Esenthel Engine, things started to look totally different.
No limitations, no poor scipts, instead you get full access to the game mechanics, you do things in c++ where you can program the game manually or use already available classess.
Existing functions are so easy and very well commented.

The tools are great, very intuitive, everything what needs to be done is already there.

So far this is the best engine I've found.

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Esenthel engine

Posted by: Adventura at Jul 15, 2009

Very, very good. One of the best engine I've ever used. I've used this from some time and I can truly recommended. Easy, stable, still developing. What else I can say, try it!

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Graphics good, performance horrible.

Posted by: zbyh at Jul 19, 2009

All below comments, 50% of them are friends (from poland) of Grzegorz, author of this engine. These reviews are not obiective.

Anyway this engine have cool features if you want good graphics, but horrible performance/speed. You need do many tricks if you want make more than 10 actors, with good speed.
Better way, make your own engine instead buy this thing.

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Good Engine, good Developer

Posted by: Jachu123 at Aug 2, 2009

Hello, esenthel engine i very functional and easy to use game engine. visual capabilities are at a very high level and programming capabilities have no restrictions.

This is very great engine for all. :)

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Facts about Esenthel Engine

Posted by: Miguel Del Terro at Aug 21, 2009

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Super, once you start useing you'll never go back.

Posted by: Stratosphere at Oct 15, 2009

This engine can do thing most other engines that are free can't. I can really only compare it with Open Source engines because until now I've only used Open Source engines. It's very stable, and the support is great even if you haven't bought a license.

I gave it a minus one ease of use just because it's c++, but it have over 100 tutorials that come with it so that's not really a problem, you just have to read a few programming books ;p

Highly recommended.

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EE Review

Posted by: Hu Meng Shou at Oct 9, 2009

We are using the engine in our company for almost a year. So far we are more than satisfied. The support and vast amount of features is excellent. The development of the engine is so fast it's sometimes hard to keep up ;) There are no problems with stability (literally zero crashes or issues). The engine is becoming more powerful with every day.

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Very professional engine

Posted by: Masterxilo at Dec 24, 2009

Features) Everything listed above is actually in the engine and works. The graphical quality of the renderings is great.

And, other than some engines which turn out to be only renderers, this is really a fully featured game engine. The tools provided are helpful and useful. (Best is, everything they do can be reproduced with engine commands, there's nothing hidden)

And even more than that. This engine has commands for everything you'd ever need when developing a game, e.g. even FTP routines and XML parsing functions.

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Ease of Use) The whole thing is really well organized. The class design is understandable and easily expandable.
The included tutorials and documentation are good starting points.

My only criticism is that transforming things in mesh editor and/or world editor, the whole moving, scaling and rotating is quite inaccurate and hard to do.
I hope numeric input and proper standard transformation arrows will be added.
Also the camera is somewhat hard to steer in these tools. I didn't find a simple button to get a free flight camera. And I also wouldn't know how to pan the cam.

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Stability & Performance) Never crashed for me yet, and if there was any bug, it would for sure be fixed very quickly (see "Support" section).

The overall performance is acceptable, there might some room for improvement left though.

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Support) Fantastic. Updates every couple of days.
Fixes are done very quickly even for lower priority non registered users.
Even features seem to be implemented upon request: I asked for resize-able windows and refraction (for the water effect), one update later both things were there! (maybe I just had luck and this was planned anyways :D ).

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Overall I'd say this is one of the best engines I ever found.
(However, one thing I didn't/couldn't try yet, which I really liked doing in other engines is writing my own shaders. Unfortunately THAT requires a license.)

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Researched stopped here

Posted by: Sarrene at Jan 4, 2010

I usually do not write too many reviews. Generaly I tend to read them with a grain of salt and then try something out myself.

In this case, I must say that this is one of the best engines we have tested, tried and used. And we have tried everything from RC Pro to Torque 3D (and all other Garage Games products) to... well more then I care to admit. However, We found the engine for us.

I am a graphic designer first, and lead dev second. Coming from working professionally to trying our hand at making our own game/demo, this has been an amazing engine.

First I would like to say the support is phenomenal! We started out with the free version and was helped to no end. The developer (yes only one) answered all the questions a silly graphic designer/cell designer could think of. After a lengthy review of the product from myself and the two coders we have, we purchased the developers licence. It was well worth it.

Cons: (ill list these first)
1) Not as intuitive as a few others out there. There is a learning curve for non coders
2) Learning curve for most artists in learning how to add assets and textures.
3) does not support dds (yet)
4) (not really a true con but limiting right now) client ui development/creation is a bit outdated yet. Need to be creative and patient.

Pros:
1) Amazing, fast and friendly continual support
2) Amazing engine capabilities. Everything we have tried to break the engine has worked. What has not has been on our part.
3) Easy integration of 3rd part api's
4) Can support and produce graphics as in depth as you want to make them.
5) True streaming and mega terrain support
6) Rag doll features already inside
7) Rendering is only limited by what you can do
8) animation is easy to import for my coders
9) continually updated and bugs attacked immediately
10) Able to adjust/change source code easily and intuitively (from my coders mouth)
11) ability to add new engine system scripts (such as a custom dialog system) easily and seamlessly- with support!

There are more im sure that this engine has, everything that we tested and more in others, even some of the high costing ones we bought.

Do remember that not one game engine will do everything a team will want. It does require some work and development, but for all the basic features we could want, this has.

I think the largest thing that engine has going for it is the support. It is AAA+++

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Engine

Posted by: Jonass at Feb 17, 2010

I've use this engine from some time and I must say that it's great. I'm starting my own business with games development and Esenthel Engine is exactly what I need. Try it because it's worth!

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My review

Posted by: bomberman at Mar 2, 2010

I sincerely recommend esenthel to everyone, to big companies making big games, or to indies that are just starting their bussiness.

The graphics are superb! Quality of graphics is at CryEngine level, per object motion blur rocks.
Support is amazing, creator of the engine is very fast to provide help when you need it. Even free users without any license receive decent support.
Set of features is growing very fast, and already offers wide variety of functionality.

I've tried lots of other engines, some of them are:

Torque - nice toy, their marketing is great, however the quality of their engine is much lower, shaders are very poor, good community though.

Leadwerks - nice graphics too, however support is not that good and basically its just a renderer without more complex actual game engine functionality.

Unreal - hyped by marketing, being mainly the one good engine in the past few years, has made its name and fame. very good, but when it became publicly available, you can see that it's not that "awesome", it's just as good as many other new engines. oh, and big disadvantage is that it doesn't support C++ :O

Cryengine - it has the best graphics, their editor is good, but seems very "glitchy" lots of graphics seem to pop and disappear.

Out of all I decided to stick with Esenthel, it has graphics comparable to Cryengine, support for C++, excellent support on forums.
Did I mention that it seamlessly supports unlimited sized worlds?

Overall, it's the best!

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Not bad, but definitely not spectacular

Posted by: Stewie at Jul 12, 2010

I heard a lot of great things about this engine, and there are a lot of stellar reviews here, so I thought I would give Esenthel a try. First, let me say that I am an expert professional game developer with over 10 years of experience, so I know what I'm talking about. I am writing this review because there seems to be a huge amount of unearned praise (a.k.a. marketing hype) for this engine and I feel the need to point out the flaws as well as the good parts in an unbiased way.

The first thing I noticed was that to install this engine, you first have to download 7-zip to extract it. That's a real pain. It should either be in zip format so Windows can extract it, or it should be a self-extracting archive. Then on the first run, it tells me I have to install PhysX, so I had to go download that and install it separately. This should have just been included in the engine install.

I finally get the engine running, and I see a large open landscape with lots of vegetation. The artwork for the trees and grass isn't very good, but that's not really what I'm evaluating. The point is that there's a lot of it, and it renders with good performance. The trees cast shadows over a large area, apparently using some variant of cascaded shadow maps. You can see the boundaries between the cascades as you're walking around, and it's kind of an irritating artifact. The shadows also have some kind of dithering along their edges that I find to be unpleasant.

The engine uses a deferred renderer by default. This seems to be the latest craze, but the technique comes with several inherent problems. The biggest problem is no hardware support for antialiasing, so you see lots of jagged edges. The engine does have a supersampling mode to help with this, but this just causes everything to be rendered to a much larger back buffer and get downsampled. The performance is so horrible that this feature is unusable. There is also a forward rendering mode, but it appears that the engine developers didn't give it much care. Several rendering features are not available in the forward renderer.

The engine supports full-screen motion blur, and this is enabled by default. However, it has some pretty bad leakage problems between stationary foreground objects and a moving background.

I saw some rendering errors as I was playing through the demo. Sometimes the glow on an object would suddenly pop on and off. The lighting on bump maps near a point light source was sometimes backwards, appearing as if the light was coming from the opposite direction.

The particle effects are particularly unimpressive. The fire on the torches was some of the worst I've seen.

Overall, I did not see anything special about this engine, and the demo artwork doesn't help. I'm led to conclude that the other reviews here came from Esenthel's marketing department or from fanboys. The engine isn't a bad start for the developers, but it has a long way to go before it could be compared to the big high-end engines.

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