Game Engines

I really don't know if this is the right spot to put this post, but whatever, here it goes: what are the best free game engines out there? I know some like Unity, Cry Engine and the Unreal Engine, but I can't quite understand the difference between each one of them. Can anyone help me?

If you cant understand the difference between Unity, Cry Engine SDK and UDK, Then you dont understand what a game engine is. Sit down and read their Forums, Wiki's and play with them. If you still dont understand them then ether your young or the concept is beyond you. You should not need to ask people what the difference is.

Unity is generally designed in mind of Indie devlopment.  Though it has AAA possibilities.  Unity is the most friendly of the 3 Game Engines and is probably the to start with if you just want to get your feet wet.  I develop games through Unity and it doesn't have the dynamics like Cry Engine and UDK has like the effects and power it can deliver.  Though Unity is able to do some amazing things with such compression and flexibility.  I find this engine in possibly 4 or 5 years to becoming "THE" AAA engine for aspiring game designers.  I would strongly recommend this engine for any aspiring game developer.

CryEngine is built based around physics utilization.  It's a very complex engine that's quite flexible, more similar to Unity than UDK.  I have messed with the engine a few times and i've enjoyed how easy the terrain editor is, almost exactly the same as Unity in that aspect.  Simple effects alone can blow Unity out of the park, but that's not what Unity is about.  Easy way to put is that CryEngine is based on the idea of the most realistic possible builds.

UDK is somewhat of the bad guy and good guy.  It's a bit of a pain in the ass to work with, but yet yields great result.  UDK is generally based on lighting and particle system as it's main focus.  If you have studied a little bit about film or photography.  Lighting can make or break any image.  UDK likes to use that ideology.  You can make some ugly objects and recover them with UDK's lighting effects.  Very forgiving in that aspect.  This engine though is quite strict.  It requires the most of the 3 engines, and lots of attention to detail on coding and model polygon builds.

It's a bit hard to explain what seperates them because all 3 engines are similar but different at the same time.  Coding processes are done differently and the way each Engine compiles and builds the game is different.  With Unity it's more about having the most packed into with the smallest file size.  Cry Engine and UDK you have complete atonomy in how much detail you want to put.  On the other hand UDK requires the user to have close objects.  Every polygon has to be attached, while CryEngine and Unity don't require that.  Same as the methodology of texturing; Unity utilizes Alpha channels to create dimensions and if you are up to the challenge, you can even script your own texture pallet. If you want you may use the main RGB to create the color of the texture and use the alpha to make bump maps.  While CryEngine and UDK require seperate files, and special formatting to utilize their full capabilities which require bigger file sizes.  

Personally i've just had horrible experiences with UDK.  It's just problems left and right and demands so much out of the user that in many ways it discourages.

This is confusing. The post is in the OpenSource subforum and OP is talking about "free game engines". None of them are open source and none of them is free.

Thanks a lot for the attention... Now I understand a quite bit more thanks to you

+1

Open Source Engines are Irrlicht (as used in Minetest for instance), Qfusion (as used in Nexuiz or Warsow for instance), or Blender Game Engine, etc...

Unity is free, unless you're publishing

Same goes with CryEngine, free sdk on the website

UDK is the only one you have to pay right out, unless you're a student.

He never said opensource, he just asked about free engines, 

No problem, i would also recommend checking out tutorials with texturing and model importing.  It's going to be a bit of a rough start if you've never done it before.  Once you do it like 2 or 3 times, it's easy as pie.

I don't know about unity for making a real game, it's more like virtools dev, a prototyping program before building the real thing with a proprietary engine.

This post is in the open source subforum. I also meant free as in freedom not free as in beer.

IdTech1-4 (and lots of engines based on those, mostly FPS), Cube 2 (Sauerbraten), löve (2d games in lua), Torque3d (all kinds of stuff), Adventrue Game Studio (used by Promodria and other games from wadjet eye)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines

There are also engines to replace proprietary engines like OpenXcom, Xoreos, GemRB and OpenMW.

Check out the unity website, there have been a lot of games published with that engine.  Proprietary engines  tend to be a lot of trouble in the long run because of budgeting for big game companies.  If you have a universal engine, then more money can be delivered to the engine, ultimately better performance.  Even though some engines like Hero work well, it's very limited because of the comapanys interest.

I don't know about unity for making a real game, it's more like virtools dev, a prototyping program before building the real thing with a proprietary engine.

Unity is a proprietary engine ,it's just free (as in beer) to use.

Also, I have like 10 games running on the unity engine and they work fine. The question always is what the artists and devs make on top of those things. Unity is pretty flexible.

yeah, that's one thing I really like in unity, we can learn a lot, just by seeing their tutorials