You can test it for free, afaik.

Also, depending on how heavy your game is, you could use the same code for the 360, Windows, and Windows Phone, and just change the code that relates to input controls. Basically, you're developing for three distinct platforms at once... not to mention, it is so awesome developing with C# and Visual Studio. :p

With that background, you either are not looking for game engine but a scriptable and moddable game. Using any game engine itself will require you to learn to program.

While C# is nice language with fairly good set of stock libraries, Visual Studio on the other hand is anything but awesome. I use VS at work and it is definitely among worst IDEs out there, unfortunately there is little choice in tools when doing windows development.

Among the worst? :D Can you name what is better for you?

I must agree with what he/she said^^

I've never used them, but probably Unity (that you mentioned) or Shiva could be a good middle ground that still requires you to learn some scripting/programming but could be easier to start with for someone with no programming background.

It's a Microsoft framework for game development using .NET. It's free to use and is targeted at indie developers. There are a lot of resources and examples available online. (Ugh, I'm sounding like a Microsoft ad - I'm not) It's good for both 2D and 3D stuff - Terraria, Magicka and Sol Survivor are written in it.

Here's a pre-alpha screenshot from a game I'm working on.

The above was made completely by myself and one other student (there were two other guys involved but they didn't do any programming or art, so they didn't directly contribute to what you see there). We did it in the space of a couple of weeks, while we each had three other subjects to worry about. It was our first time using XNA. We had animation, gravity, shooting, object/person interaction, collision detection and heightmapped terrain working as well, but they're not really apparent in the pic.

It doesn't look fantastic due to time constraints, but it looks better now. Unfortunately I couldn't get a proper screenshot because we have all this debug stuff visible like bounding boxes etc.

Basically, you're limited by your artistic and programming skills as to what it looks like, as well as how quickly you want to make it. We're using C#, but I believe you can use visual basic and C++ as well. You won't be able to make something as powerful or fast as say, UE3, but you make up for that in ease of development and the ability to customise it as far as your imagination allows.

I highly recommend it if you want to achieve stuff quickly. You do need to code everything yourself though, it's not just scripting.

I tried out Ogre3D myself last year and it is quite nice (but I got stuck at one point and moved on to other engines *gg*), but you don't need Microsoft stuff to code.

I used Code::Blocks with MinGW to work with Ogre and it was really handy. Easy to configure and use :)

What do you mean a 'student'? Anything in particular, as in, have to be in university, etc?

Well, that is correct, that would be most useful to me. As I said, I have tried Unity, but what is Shiva?

You are right, that is exactly what i want, but I don't want to be limited to it being a mod or even being limited to staying non-commercial.

What I really want is to make a freeware game as a start, then I will have the engine to continue in whatever direction I choose. ;-)

If you can register at dreamspark, you can get free app hub membership.

Shiva3D is an engine/development environment (the concept shouldn't be much different than Unity).

As I said I never tried, so I don't know much about it honestly. Give it a look.

I've found Eclipse to be one of best alternatives. And it's cross platform to boot.

As for VS, It really shines as a block of legacy code that even microsoft does not know how to fix. Project/solution management is awful, VS2008 kept crashing atleast once a day often several times, VS2010 crashes less but is sloooooow, so slow that it interrupts constantly my work flow. In VS2010 just stopping debugging can take upto 30 seconds and opening any xaml file is like waiting death (and this on 4 core i7 and 8GB ram). Not to mention search that does not support any sane regex syntax and search and replace that crashes VS if it needs to touch more than 4 files.

If you want to be able to put out a game you need this http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial.html before you look at any game engine. There are no shortcuts to what your looking for.

I do use Eclipse occasionally, but mainly for Java programs and usually only the night before a job interview, saying to myself "Yeah, I really should get used to using this so it looks like I know what I'm doing", and then not touch it for months, in which time I completely forget the UI. I haven't had a single crash on VS2010 despite using it for hours nearly every day, and it seems to run fairly quickly for me, on similar specs. *shrug* Lucky, maybe?

The search *is* a bit crap, though I give you that. It's not perfect by any means.

No crashes here either, so far. (talking about 2010)

Well, I am trying to learn C++ as well, I already got a tutorial for it from a friend. ;-)

Ok, will give it a look.

Well, if it is similar to Unity, that might be a problem. I will look into it all the same.