When comparing Esenthel vs O3DE (previously Lumberyard), the Slant community recommends O3DE (previously Lumberyard) for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” O3DE (previously Lumberyard) is ranked 14th while Esenthel is ranked 19th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Quicker development by using the integrated code editor
Esenthel has a built-in code editor which drastically simplifies the programming process.
Programming with Esenthel is based on C++, however, when using the code editor there's no need to make separate .cpp or .h files. Code can be written once and the editor will be separating definitions and declarations automatically in the background allowing for quicker development.
Pro Can be easily extended
Built in pure C++ so it is easy to use and extend however needed.
Pro Available on Steam
Pro Can be used for collaborative development
Esenthel comes with tools allowing for multiple developers to work on one project at the same time in collaborative mode. Every change made is instantly visible by other team members.
Pro Engine issues are resolved quickly
The author is very device minded and able to handle any problem quickly and effectively and he has a good track record of listening to requests.
Pro Access to full source code
Having easy access to the full source makes it possible for any skilled developer to add features that a project requires.
Pro Attractive licensing
Free to try, with license as cheap as 9.50$/month (with yearly subscription), 11.40$/month (monthly subscription) or full source code license 228$/year.
Pro Incredibly stable
The engine is rock solid and stable which, considering its extensive feature set, is a huge plus for game developers
Pro Helpful and responsive forum
Pro Good support for Android and iOS
Android and iOS support is pretty stable and easy to develop on. It's possible to, for example, develop the entire game on Windows or Mac and then easily compile for Android and iOS.
Pro Can import a wide variety of formats
- 3D - FBX, DAE, OBJ, 3DS, B3D, MS3D, BVH, ASE, PSK/PSA
- 2D - BMP, PNG, JPG, TGA, DDS, TIF, WEBP, PSD, ICO
- Videos - VP9, Theora
- Sounds - OGG, WAV, MP3 (once decoding patents expire)
Pro Constant development and progress
New features or update to features are provided monthly.
Pro Supports in-app purchases
IAP support for both mobile and desktop devices.
Pro Supports multiple compression libraries
LZMA, LZHAM, LZ4, ZLIB, Snappy, RLE
Pro Oculus Rift native support
Oculus Rift API integrated into the engine platform.
Pro Supports modern graphics and sound APIs
- Graphics - DirectX 9/10/11, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, WebGL
- Sound - DirectSound, OpenAL, OpenSL
Pro Rock solid
Pro No royalty charges and completely free
Pro Amazon has announced 3 in house games using it developed from Amazon Game Studios
As a proof of how much Amazon is committed to the project.
Pro Advanced VR support and VR Samples to bootstrap your project
Advenced stereoscopic reprojection to save rendering time.
Pro Landscape editor
Sculpting and painting tools for terrain and instanced details.
Procedural generation of terrain.
Pro Roads and Rivers tool
Built-in support for roads and rivers to ease the design of rich game environments.
Pro Free development license, including source code
Full source code for Engine Editor and every tool.
Pro Easy to create full realistic natural environments
Thanks to built-in terrain, time of day, ocean and volumetric fog systems. There is also a gfx pack with various environmental meshes, cloud, particles, materials and skyboxes.
Pro Very lightweight and scalable entity component system
Multiple entity contexts, reflection, serialization, replication, script binding, event bus (EBus) messaging, fully cascading prefabs (slices).
Every reflected property can be fully exposed in the editor with a customizable gui control and can be animated in the built in animation tools.
Pro Cloud gems
Online oriented plugins composed by both client, server and administration components to easily add various online capabilities without further work (es leaderboards, login, message of the day, downloadable contents).
Since version 1.7 they has been released at a steady rate.
Pro In-editor 3D modeling tool for fast level prototyping
Very advanced 3D prototyping tool with many modeling features and UV mapping support available. If you want you can build any kind of fully textured static mesh without relying on external tools.
Pro Total Illumination v2 Realtime GIobal Illumination
Realistic looking lighting bounces.
It doesn't require long offline precomputation times like other static and dynamic GI solutions based on lightmaps or other similar techniques.
Pro Uses AWS cloud
Other than common aws functionality it supports game specific Game Lift for autoscaling game servers.
Pro Slices a very powerful nested prefab system with hierarchical property inheritance
Modular workflow and flexible cascaded propagation of changes.
Pro Modular system
To easy add and remove modular functionalities to a project and easy share them.
Modules are called Gems and can contain code and/or assets.
Pro Very Flexible Base Shader with many built in techniques
Tessellation and Displacement.
Various Parallax Mapping techniques(POM siluette).
Translucency and Sub surface scattering.
Detail Mapping.
Material Blending.
Emission.
Advanced uv transformation and animation.
Pro Rendering of volumetric fx with full light and shadows support
Global environmental volumetric fog and/or hand placed custom shaped volumes with featuring full lighting and shadows.
Pro High quality free assets packs
Amazon made available a selection of triple A quality scenes filled with high quality assets.
Pro Specular reflection antialiasing
Implements the most recent technique available (published in 2017) from Anton Kaplanyan.
Pro Flexible uber shaders with cache and hot reloading
You can modify shaders while testing the game.
Shader files are modular and annotated to setup the material editing gui and filter out mutually exclusive options. All shader permutation are compiled almost instantly from the asset processor and cached for later use.
Pro Built-in Twitch support even by visual scripting
You can create games that react to keywords entered in a designated Twitch channel and let streamers to invite targeted viewers into their game sessions on demand with ease.
Pro WWise LTX Audio
It is still possible to use the non LTX version with few changes.
Pro Lua scripting with the built-in IDE
Built-in Lua editor with remote debugger to debug Lua scripts running in any device.
Pro Virtual file system with live reload on any device
Optimized versions of assets can be streamed live to any device connected over the network.
This makes possible to implement asset types that hot reloads reducing drastically the time to test new content and little changes on device.
Pro Every aspect of the engine is made with scalability in mind
Multiple grain of control over any kind of engine setting and various kind of Lod systems. Settings can be grouped and applied in batch.
Pro Is the first engine to feature SpeedTree 8
Pro Perforce versioning system pre-integrated with the tools
Perforce also comes with a free version for a limited number of team members.
Pro Cutting edge character shaders
Has skin shaders with subsurface scattering and weighted wrinkle maps, eye shaders with refraction parallax, hair with anysotropic specular reflections, etc.
Pro Order independent transparencies
A must for problematic things like hair , vegetation and scenes with complex solid transparent objects(es glass of water with ice cubes).
Pro Implements the state of the art for Temporal Antialiasing from NVIDIA Research
Special iteration of Temporal AA to battle the ghosting issue omnipresent in engines using other Temporal AA techniques.
Pro New Fbx Importer adds support for every software exporting in fbx
It now works for both static models and animations and support advanced setups(es lods and physics).
Pro Full HDR renderer path with output support for HDR tv standards
Updated renderer pipeline to leverage the full spectrum of precision, luminosity and image processing features of the latest HDR tv.
Pro Cinematic multitrack tool with full featured animation editing
Animation Spline editor supporting huge range of keyframing and tangent editing tools.
Pro Advanced in-game UI with 2D and 3D placing
The UI uses the entity component system so it's fully modular and easily expandable. The UI is easily skinnable and supports border scaling images (scale 9). Powerful layouting system supporting multiple screen resolutions. Being based on the entity system every property can be fully animated.
It is elegantly managed in a separate entity context so it doesn't get messed up with other kind of entities and their components like in other engines, but it's fully decoupled communicating with entities in other context on specific event buses.
Pro Full source code repository with updated development branch now on GitHub
See here.
Cons
Con One-man developer
Although the complete engine is maintained by a single, highly-skilled individual, he can be limited to what he is able to see or perceive, and sometimes he doesn't recognize broken or incomplete features until he sees it firsthand and sometimes doesn't recognize valid reports from his users. But when he does recognize the gap in the engine's feature-set, he is quick to make adjustments and updates.
Con Lack of in-depth tutorials
There are plenty of beginner coding tutorials which serve as a basic introduction for a new user to get up to speed, but once having passed that stage there is a real lack of free more advanced tutorials/examples/code snippets demonstrating the finer details of the vast and varied API functions.
Con Slow roadmap implementation
Bugs are fixed promptly, but the developer maintains a growing 'roadmap' of features with no indication to users of time frame and priority of feature implementation.
Con Lack of editing tools
Con Web support practically non-existing
Web support exists only on paper. The way it works is that Emscripten is used to convert an entire project to unreadable Javascript. That practically only works for very simple demos, no real-world projects.
Con Expensive
Con Some Legacy systems are still incompatible or not fit well with the new entity component system
At first it is common to try a feature and then understand that it is meant to work with the legacy system and not with the newest one.
Legacy systems get replaced or updated to work well with the new entity component system in every new version, but there is still some work to do.
One example for all Flow Graph visual scripting is meant for the legacy entity and Script Canvas is the visual scripting conterpart for the new entity system, but it is still not available at the moment.
Con No source code repository with updated development branch (requests for Github support currently pending)
You need to wait up to 30 or 60 days for fixes as they are shipped with the next official release.
There is no comfortable way to submit fixes and changes to the engine as the forum is the only tool for sharing code.