Recommended game engine with strong character support

[Gilbetron]

Hey All!

We're starting up a project and looking around to see if any game engines out there have strong "character" support. By that, I mean we need a game engine where we can twiddle with graphics a lot, but would like one where we can import a character mesh/skeleton and some animations and get the character to move around and collide with the environment very quickly. We want to mess around with rendering and do some strange things, but want the animation and AI parts to be easy and quick. We don't mind working around some limitations.

We've been through all kinds of reviews and looked at a goodly number of engines. Right now I'm close to picking NeoAxis, since we've already used Ogre for other projects and are familiar with it. Unity seems great ... if only they'd get their Windows version out. Visual3D.net we were not too impressed with (at least their demo).

We're all professional programmers, so we can handle whatever language. Although if the AI system has scripting capabilities, that'd be a plus.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[starstutter]

I would say neo-axis is your best bet. From your description you need something that can handle shader support and preferably SM 3.0. It's not the most graphically advanced engine but you may be able to mod it or at least modify the shaders to be more sophisticated.

[Gilbetron]

How well does it work for character animation and just plopping characters into a setting and having them "work"?

[fireside]

How well does it work for character animation and just plopping characters into a setting and having them "work"?

That always depends on the modeling program you are using and whether the engine provides an exporter or uses a general purpose format like directX. With Blender it's always dicey. The best thing to do is go onto the engine forum and do a search related to your modeler. If the engine has finite state machines built in, it might help a little for programming ai, also pathfinding can be useful.