The engine was developed by Act 3D. I believe some employees at VSTEP from the management side used to work there, so the integration of Quest3D pretty much went automatically if I recall correctly. But I think they also wanted to prevent the exact thing I've mentioned in my last sentence, that people would tamper with their code. The more obscure an engine is, the less likely there's a chance that competitors may dig up code or reverse engineer it. And it worked.
Professional wise I fully understand this decision since it's a dirty world we live in and people go great lengths to rip someone off for their own profit. Gameplay wise though, it's terrible since the game's expiration date has been signed from the day it releases.
Problem is that not the game is more or less dead, hate to say that but it is. What it could really do with is community involvement which we wanted for years! I agree that businesses want to hide their code in the software useful life there is no point of us being able to play with it anymore - Nautilus is years ahead (I recently saw a live preview of Rescue3D and it was impressive). I get VSTEP dont want ship sim to get close to it, we can go and make it how we want it to be and possibly have saved it.
Also looking at how many ship simulators have been made, there is likely to be a low chance of someone wanting to reverse engineer it.
I did look into Quest3D and I found it to be, weird... € 2,999. to € 9,999 licence is expensive for starters - That is a lot of money when you have tools like Unity that can do the job for a lot less - plus you have support. Quest3D hasn't been updated since 2012 Which means its almost 4 years old - Why should a company like VSTEP still be using something that a company hasn't brought new things out for 4 years?
Yes it might be good enough now but its not having the same release cycle as things like unity and that its not open source so there isn't a community behind it.
Unity is fine as its got big companies like Microsoft, Intel, Samsung working on them and it will stay relevant.
Open source software can keep going thanks to their community - someone will always maintain software while it got a use (look at SUCS Miliways - still having people working on in 20 years on (its the university old chat system).
But being a small piece of software which is closed off and is closed source which VSTEP still seem to be relying on in the new tools is a dangerous situations for them to be on - Just look at their forum, most posts haven't been touched since August 2015 - 7 months ago
Ok I guess I see things differently from how VSTEP want to go and thats probably my chances of ever getting a job at VSTEP gone in that rant and I know top management arnt going to give a darn about one upset customer from the product they don't support anymore but I wanted to vent myself...
If this is the company you were on about (they use to be known as act3d): https://lumion3d.com/contact.html
They seem to like high prices but seem to be interested in making models look pretty...
Do you know if many other games use the Quest engine?
1 or 2 other games: heres a link to all the samples - most of the people use it are for non customer products such as concepts.
