@MrTAToad
The only entry i can't speak for out of your so called "competitive" list would be Truevision but as far as i know this is not a complete gamedev tool, it's primary a rendering engine plus physics (newton 1.x?), some external editors and windows only.
For the rest, do you really think that any of these tools even comes close to Unity in terms of publishing options, stability and fallbacks, art pipeline, easyness of use, documentation and feedback from the developers?
The indie version is available for a very attractive price, just make a list and see what's provided in there. The only bad thing is that due to that Unity isn't available for Windows yet the Indie version is missig here and so if you're after Windows at least in terms of publishing you'll have to go for Pro, which compared to a $100 region is a lot more expensive.
Unity never wanted to play in the $100 region. Actually they wouldn't be able to pay their bills with it. Featurewise they more play in the $1000-$5000 region, and that's were they wanted to compete, against tools like Director, Virtools, ... Feel free to compare the product with such tools and you'll notice why also here it's the best which you can get if you're interestd in 3D.
You once owned a version of Unity and weren't comfortable with it, although i don't know if you were using 1.x or a 2.x licence for the time you've invested into it, i doubt that you really got a feeling for it. I use this product since the very beginning and still there is new stuff to be encountered.
It's fine if you don't need all this and you for sure can also make nice things with other tools, like for instance BlitzMax, but for the 3D sector i'm happy that due to testing my stuff also works on other systems and when problems show up i can talk to the developers and broken stuff get's fixed. In the end you get what you pay for.
The only entry i can't speak for out of your so called "competitive" list would be Truevision but as far as i know this is not a complete gamedev tool, it's primary a rendering engine plus physics (newton 1.x?), some external editors and windows only.
For the rest, do you really think that any of these tools even comes close to Unity in terms of publishing options, stability and fallbacks, art pipeline, easyness of use, documentation and feedback from the developers?
The indie version is available for a very attractive price, just make a list and see what's provided in there. The only bad thing is that due to that Unity isn't available for Windows yet the Indie version is missig here and so if you're after Windows at least in terms of publishing you'll have to go for Pro, which compared to a $100 region is a lot more expensive.
Unity never wanted to play in the $100 region. Actually they wouldn't be able to pay their bills with it. Featurewise they more play in the $1000-$5000 region, and that's were they wanted to compete, against tools like Director, Virtools, ... Feel free to compare the product with such tools and you'll notice why also here it's the best which you can get if you're interestd in 3D.
You once owned a version of Unity and weren't comfortable with it, although i don't know if you were using 1.x or a 2.x licence for the time you've invested into it, i doubt that you really got a feeling for it. I use this product since the very beginning and still there is new stuff to be encountered.
It's fine if you don't need all this and you for sure can also make nice things with other tools, like for instance BlitzMax, but for the 3D sector i'm happy that due to testing my stuff also works on other systems and when problems show up i can talk to the developers and broken stuff get's fixed. In the end you get what you pay for.