There are alot of game engines that are out there now and that's why its hard for me to choose the best one.  The Project will be done in a full 3D interactive environment not 2d flat screen graphics like my last project was, so you will walk around in a 3d game environment and interact with everything around you.    So the game it will be in a series of 3d game modules.  So I have to:

* Build all the 3d geometry with brushes

* Texture all the brushes,

* Do all the lighting,

* Make all the movers if the module has any moving brushes and set them with keyframes

* Script all the events in,

* Script the 3d models, set up their nav and any fixed waypoints and so on,

* Put in the particle emitters for water, smoke, fire effects ect.  

That's what I used to do with Violition's Red Faction editor which came with Red Faction I, and that program was the most easiest for me to script a 3d world with from scratch because all you did was carve out your 3d world geometry and just texture it and just link up scripts to each other with events, it was the first stepping stone for me to making my own 3d game maps and to seamlessly load them.. Red was a powerful little editor and you could create your 3d world in a matter of hours and it also had Groups feature so you could load in pre-made custom brushes to speed things all up in building things, so it was very fast to build the 3d world.  But now I want to find an engine to do the same thing that I used to do in Red.  

The ship will be in several parts, Crew Cabin, Navigation, cabin, engineering, crew quarters, bridge, Crew Conference Meeting Room and so on and there will be about 100 people on the ship, some you can talk and interact with dialog to, others who are just there doing things as decoration.  There will need to be cutscenes diaglog which you can easily skip through with some boring people on the ship who just waste your time talking about stuff not even important, all the rigging, animation, the lip synching of the pawn model actors, that kind of stuff I don't know how to do.  And it would be good if the game also had voice diaglog with the text but I don't see those kind of resources on here. I also want to use Holograms and neon lighting for certain areas of the ship.

But unlike Mass Effect, where the Normandy was a beautiful ship was used just mostly as a cheap taxi service that flew you about all over the place with a cripple guy for a pilot who is desperately wanting people to feel sorry for his condition, I think I would like it if my pilot could get up and walk and interact with the crew, If I could make more use of a ship than just being only a taxi service but be more in charge also of the bridge ship commands where you can take your ship off into battle and you can fire weapons at the enemy and can also get the ship also destroyed if you silly enough to take on a firefight and screw up or if you enter some systems there may be hostilie ships wanting a firefight anyway. but you will probably find another ship anyway or convince those in charge of you to give you a new one out of their academy credit fund..

And some planets may also try to impound your ship as well or impose docking fees to try to slow you down or stop you from leaving their docks (if you make the choice to get involved in these shady opertions with those illegal criminal factions which are outlawed on their world), and you can also land yourself in their court systems if you break that planet's laws and they catch you doing, or some planets may even make up their own laws because they don't like you, or whatever the law is on their world..  On some worlds the justice system could be like Cardassia, you are found guilty before you even have the trial........ 

I may even have a bar enetaiment section on the ship as well.  so the crew can relax in and talk a lot of mudane silly nonsense to each other because ship's crew talk alot of mudane nonsense anyway about the factions, their life and experiences on different worlds..  And if they don't think you are doing a good job as their leader, they will murmur and complain about it within earshot and when you complain about it to your superior he will just tell you to keep them in line.

Some who do join your crew may join it for all the wrong reasons may also be jockeying for your own position or be trying to just get rid of you because they simply don't like you.  And in some systems there will be hired bounty hunters looking around for you as well if your inluence in the factions gets to the point where it starts to upset or annoy some of their elite crminal organizations.

I don't need to do a big huge space simulation of a universe just small modules.  I think there's ways to do it with simple cutscenes. I want this to be a game where the choices you make effect the outcome of the game.  

Also have in mind that, the easier the tool is, the less things you can do.

This is so true, alot of these others engines I looked at are simple BUT too LIMITED in what you can do with it.....and not always fully customizable.

Help, guys, I run into a problem with installing Unity.  Unity 5.01 and 50.00 install packages on their site wouldn't even install on my system.  the first one i tried, the full package ver 5.01 latest one which was 2 gigs gave me an MSIS integrity fail installation checksum error when it got to abt 99%..

So I download an earlier version of unity 5.0 which was 1.1 gb in size, and it passsed the checking process but then the install process suddenly died about getting halfway through with a file read error. (I did have "Run as Admin" checked because I'm running windows vista...

if I can't install Unity 5 on my computer then how the hell am I going to beable to use it? and as for UE4, it looks very impressive, but I noticed in reading the contract that they require you to agree to be bound to pay them up to several thousand dollars each month in royalty fees for using their game engine.. I don't have that kind of money to pay them for using their engine So that engine is not suitiable because I am not a company that can afford to pay their fees.  However if you were a small company with a team of developers or a big company then it would suit those needs.  So that engine is more suited for companies.

So Unreal3d would've been probably been ok for what i need but unfortunately their installer packages won't even install on my computer !

GODOT Verdict: Slow, cumbersome, has no brush building tools and relies on other programs to create gameworld environment, and as for Unreal, its unreal all right in the amount of time it takes to build something simple because Unreal builds levels from the outside so you have to assemble everything all together piece by painstaking little piece, whereas in Red you just hollow your world from the inside out which is three times more quicker.  What takes Unreal over half an hour to assemble all the walls to piece a simple room all together  and in lining all the pieces up, red does in half the time or less. 

Unreal is rather slow at buiding the brushes, but is powerful with static meshes.  

Ok I've Already Looked at Silentworks Boogle, its on the right track for that big batch game that i was doing, but not sutiable for the new project I am about to start.... Silentworks Is a little bit too basic i don't see any script support to extend its functions.  You can play movies in it, but the cutscenes diaglogs will have to be done in another program for this engine to play it as a video.,

Highs: You can import new custom textures

          Just need to only stick your custom 3d models in the model directory which is also good.

Lows, lacks scripting, the options that are avaliable are too one dimensional limited...

         Only 8 lights a level, way too limited.   Red can handle alot more lights than that.

         You can only have 255 registers to store your game values in.  limited.

         No Random function in this engine because there's no script support

         Limited menus. 

UNREAL DEVELOPMENT KIT. 

Highs: Has Powerful Texturing Fuctions, uses static meshes instead of just detail brushes, Alt-A copy function is very powerful. supports also groups. 

Lows: Very Slow in rendering/building the levels. Its script language looks rather complicated.

Conclusion: its a powerful but slow in building the level.

I've also been busy watching Unreal Level videos and I think I will use the Unreal editor for doing my new project with because i can at least do the geometry of the game now,  So it wouldn't make much sense to do a modern futurtistic type story driven game in a old school engine that can't even do any scripting.   But that batch game I was doing well would probably suit it but i don't think I can do all the stuff that I could do in the batch code with that engine because silentworks hasn't got all the necessary functionality because of no scripting support for me to beable to shape the engine to what I want, so I dont think I can make silentworks level up after getting so much EXP instead it gives you doors to exit to the next level..... 

Now as for my new project this story driven game, I think its best to stick with what's more modern and even though Unreal is a Hard beast for me to understand it may be worth the perseverance with it since I find it to be more friendly in some things which Red Isn't.... .  So now I can start the geometry and the texturing to make the game modules. 

But if I were to use Unreal for the batch game to do the terrain with, how would I seamlessly load that so it don't crash the engine. 

Unreal also has the option to select ajacent floors or walls to texture them all in one big slam, that's just brilliant.   saves me having to select every single wall in my level or room,  That's an option that red didn't even have.  Because if you wanted to select all the walls in your room and your room had over 20 or more walls in the middle or on the boundaries, you had to click on each one by holding down CTRL.. its great that you can just click on one wall and have the engine select all of them in the level and then just select planar to line all the textures up and scale them all in one go.  Whereas in red, you had to mess around for selecting everything individually and then mess around for ages pulling verticles around in UV wrap especially with doing PIPES... they required lot of UVwrapping adjustment.

We also need the player to climb things in unreal.  OH, and when I test the level, I don't see my Player with the gun but just see just the gameworld.