It's official - we're moving to Unreal 3

Since neither Bill nor I can spare money each month for land in SpotOn3D or SecondLife, and since using Unreal Editor 3 will cost only $40 one time (until we need to license the game), we're going to go with Unreal for now. Once the game is made, we'll probably port to SecondLife/SpotOn3D, but it makes more sense to develop with Unreal now.

Post-mortem note: Man, I wasted so much time fretting about the restrictions of the SecondLife development model that it blocked me on everything. But that's probably due to my all-or-nothing mental issue. :o) Must not let that happen again.

We still love you SecondLife/SpotOn3D!

Melissa showed me an awesome book, Mastering Unreal Technology, Volume 1: Introduction to Level Design with Unreal Engine 3. I'm going to use that to ramp up/refresh my Unreal skills.


Update: WOW, Unreal Editor 3 has some great improvements over Unreal Editor 2004! The new Properties window with better tooltips (see pic), shortcut tools, snapping to avoid BSP errors, better organization of UI elements, applying on materials to meshes and wrapping textures in the materials, fixes to packaging errors, giving a visual warning when you put your player start too close to the ground, etc. This totally validates our decision to move to Unreal. And when I read that Unreal was used to make Bioshock, I no longer had a fear that I wouldn't be able to take the harshness out of this first person shooter engine to create a mellow learning game for our target demographic.