Reviews - Rastar

I've been using the C4 engine for about two years now. The market for game engines certainly has changed a lot during that time, and I've also looked at the big names that are selling their engines for peanuts these days, but I always keep coming back to C4. There are a lot of reasons why this engine is such a great choice:

- Performance. C4 is highly optimized and runs very well even on legacy hardware.

- Stability. C4 is rock solid, it rarely crashes during design and run time, and those rare cases usually are due to some bugs in the GPU drivers of Nvidia and AMD and not the engine itself.

- Clean code. The engine's structure is well organized and consistent. This will reflect in your game code.

- Open source. With a license for C4 you'll have access to the complete source code.

- Support. C4's community is very friendly and helpful. In addition, Eric Lengyel (the author of C4) is present on the forums daily and will answer tricky questions, usually within hours.

- Functionality. C4 has a tons of features, some of which aren't apparent at first sight (and not marketed aggressively). It has a nice graphical shader editor, a very performant mechanism for indirect lighting called "radiosity space", a full suite of CSG tools, an out-of-the-box implementation for infinite oceans, impostors and much, much more.

- Cross-platform. C4 runs on all desktop OSs (and by the way has been available for Linux for years now), and an iOS version is coming soon.

- Price. With the new licensing model for version 4.0, the engine is just $88 per year. No royalties. And if you don't extend your subscription, your still allowed to use the engine and publish games with it.

Admittedly, C4's user interface looks a little dated, and the engine is currently lacking some graphical features like HDR (which is being worked on), but that shouldn't trick you into believing C4 isn't capable. Game development is hard, even if some big names seem to claim that you just have to buy some ready-made assets and stick them together with some scripting, but it doesn't work like that. If you're doing anything more involved than Tappy Chicken you will have to roll up your sleeves and get coding. And an engine that won't let you run into a wall at some point is much more important than a shiny user interface.

With the new pricing there is no excuse not to try C4 and see for yourself why this is such a great engine!