I'm not really gonna enter this discussion in an 'OMG AGS rules. U all suxxx' manner, mainly because I've only ever used AGS and can't really compare it to other engines. However, squinky, every single good thing you listed about SLUDGE applies also to AGS.
The games also run natively in Linux, although the editor doesn't. Dunno how well it would work under Wine though.
The AGS IDE has come on in leaps and bounds since the DOS days, and is no longer DOS-based and ugly. It's purty now. The scripting language has also recently been overhauled (although the old style still works for those unwilling to change) to be far more object oriented, a la Java and C++.
You're free to sell your AGS games, for free (free to you, not the buyer
), as long as you use a special MP3-free version of the engine. This is due to the MP3 people wanting huge fees to use their codecs in your product, rather than any restriction imposed by AGS's creator. The other-codecs-only version is fine for you to sell games made using (as evidenced by the relative success of
The Adventures of Fatman.
So uh yeah, AGS does stuff too!
From a games-playing perspective, the fact that other engines may be harder to use, even if that does breed a better class of game in the long-run, is not really that good of a thing... There have been two good games made with SLUDGE I can think of off the top of my head, two with AGAST, 1 with Wintermute. All those games were high quality (yours was one, Squinky
), but two games in what, 3 years of engine development in some cases, is kinda slow going. AGS may have a lot of dross released, but it does have tens, if not approaching hundreds of excellent games.
