   Engine to mode for.
  I currently have the Half-Life CD, version i am unsure of though. If i want to play counterstrike i need to update halflife, but for some reason the halflife update installer doesn not recognize an internet connection even though i have Verison DSL now (with no router/firewall).I was wondering, anyways, what engine out there would be best (easiest to use and with cool features and with tutorials and support and stuff). I know the halflife engine has such a thing with a big MOD community for it. But i was wondering if the Unreal engine, and how it compares to the halflife engine. I dont have Unreal, is there a place to download it for free so i can develop a MOD for it.?Otherwise, i will stick to the halflife engine...but must get the updates to work before i do.thanks.in hindsight i realize that this post doesnt necessarily fit here...but im giving it a try since it is about game programming. 
  just download the update exes..as for engines.. there''s some good freeware engines, especially OGRE and Cyrstal space, depending on what you want... OGRE just renders 3d, where as Crystal Space is more of a 3d game engine   -----------------------"Without a sense of humour we couldn''t react to a lot of things" ;  This is an interesting question as I''ve been researching into it myself.  My suggestions:If you want to learn 3D game programming you would either want to write your own game engine and realize that it probably won''t be as good as the next generation game enginges or you could use an open source game engine like jhavna suggested.From what I''ve seen modding is quite different.  Just yesterday I downloaded the Half Life SDK and was going through it.  With that you just make function calls to the games dlls to do what you want so you don''t even need to learn much if anything about 3D programming.  It was easy for me to say increase the bullet count in weapons and so on.  If you want to go the last route I would suggest either choosing the half life SDK for right now to get acquanted with it because there saying that Half Life 2''s SDK for their source engine will be very familar to Half Life.  Or you could do a mod for the quake 3 engine. They even have a book called something like "Quake 3 Mods".  Anyways what I''m doing is programming my own 3D engine but in the meantime i''m slowly learning half life''s SDK so when half life 2 comes out I can use a professional engine to make a fun  MOD.Just my opinion. 