Back in december, someone posted on gamedev.net about a proposed XNA Game Authoring System (those things where you've got a level editor as the development environment and programming is mostly optional) named XNAMagic. All that could be seen of the project was a nicely designed website full of marketing text on the great features this system was going to have and the only indication of anything substantial was a class diagram full of copied & pasted nonsense, so I decided to leave this project alone.
I had all but forgotten about XNAMagic when today, out of the blue, I decided to visit their page again. Much to my surprise, the guys there have been very busy putting together a solid game framework with lots of cool features. Due to legal reasons, the project's name has now been changed to Blade3D. There is a beta release up for free download and a commercial license for the 1.0 release will probably be $249, judging by the informations google could come up with.
The RealmForge Project's commercial successor Visual Architect 3D .NET has reached its first public beta as well, allowing us to see for the first time just what amount of cool features this system is incorporating. Its predecessor, RealmForge, had already gathered a lot of interest by being the first solid game development solution for the .NET environment, incorporating the Axiom Engine (a .NET port of the well known Ogre C++ 3D Rendering Engine), and various other efforts, like a Collada importer and the Tao Framework.
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Developers might soon be facing a hard choice between those two solutions. Only one thing is certain: If your goal is to get a game done without coordinating a huge team, or if you're an indie developer with the goal of putting something sellable together within reasonable time that's not yet another cute 2D puzzle game, the $250 will without doubt be worth it!
Blade3D Pricing
I just want to clarify the pricing structure for Blade3D.
The hobbyist version will be $99 and the commercial $249. These are per-seat costs and we also offer a discount for volume purchases over 5 units.
The only difference between the two are in the licensing terms, with the hobbyist version you won't be allowed to sell productions made with the product.
A lot of indie's and professional game developers that have looked at Blade3D already have an engine that they are happy with or aren't interested in managed code. For them the hobbyist version is still of great interest because Blade3D makes a great prototyping and shader development environment and the fact that it is built on the XNA Framework doesn't matter at all.
Cheers and thanks for the post!
Blade3D Team
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