   ready-made engine VS your own coded by hand engine
  ive been coding my game engine in java, and its been a looooong road. mainly cuz i have to get paid to live, and so i got stuck in a dilema: keep my current paying job (3D modeling in a big industry and pretty good paycheck) or go for hunting an investor so i can dedicate myself exclusevely to my game. why quit my job? cuz based on the current progress I can make on my free time, its gonna take MANY YEARS until the game release :Pwell i ran into a few engines... they all seemed to lack something, then I found Kaneva, and it pretty much seems to be IT. my personal gold mine. then...with kaneva i can start the "game-making" right now, instead of making up the engine first. it has all i wanted to add, looks pretty stable and they offer big advantages for an affordable price.im stuck with this doubt: if i gofor it, i have a pretty good start out right now,  but ill always be stuck in what the engine has to offer, when if i make my own engine, I mod it freely, adapt it if needed be, but it takes freaking LONG.so how many of you guys coded from scratch and how many went for ready-made engines?   
Quote:ill always be stuck in what the engine has to offerThat's not true, my company is using the new Unreal3 engine, we can change what we want as we get full rights and access to the code. Although to be honest, I don't know if every engine offers that.   ;  Personally, I'm a more 'by hand' kinda guy. Nothing annoys me more than hitting a wall where the tech can't do something small which affects something large.As for the source code, yeah, I do believe pretty much all commercial engines provide the source code, but for a hefty fee. Even if it's not available there's normally a way to sweet-talk it out of them.Although sometimes I'm not convinced it's a good idea. We were using the Gamebryo engine at my old work, and while we hit a few walls now and again (Normally by the lack of extended debugging capabilities) we generally seemed to know what the engine could do and it kept everything stable.After we got the source code, however, critical things kept changing and made the lives of the artists fairly difficult, as the little tricks we'd cultivated and learnt to rely on started randomly evaporating, or a fair amount of assets had to be modified or re-exported. (Thankfully the programming lead was fairly merciful in most cases).Having a stable third-party engine helps with structure, I feel. It also encourages *using* the system rather than fighting it. We seemed to reinvent the wheel quite a lot.   ;  i am the purist ...means i don´t like ready made stuff, where i don´t exactly know whats happening in the background ...i am doing an own engine from scratch, ofcourse with gdnet experiences ;)@Elehisie: you could have made a poll   ;  I've done both.Way back in the day when I was making my initial foray into games programming I was teaching myself C and saw pretty quickly I wasn't about to make anything hugely gamey anytime soon. So I basically created a mod for Rune (based on Unreal tech).A couple of years ago I entered a competition, architected and built an engine for it along with another four guys. Ten week competition, we were creating the engine for just over half that time.If you want to get something out quickly, on a robust base then I'd use someone elses tech.If you want to learn or need some really specific stuff, create your own. It will take more time and probably won't be as robust as using a specific 'middleware' solution.   ;  ive always been pretty hands on and "ill do it myself"... and often i came up with better solutions, over a time...but this time ive been feeling like "reinventing the wheel" all the time to tell you the truth... I know I CAN do a robust engine... but at what cost? i guess that pretty much settles it :)im gonna go for the engine this time, at least until i can make a living out of games ... then i can make my own engine from scratchand i guess its not a bad decision, right? if i learn to accept the engines limitations...thx guys!I guess the decisive opinions were about reinventing the wheel and *using it* rather than *fighting it*   