Hello, I was wondering if anyone could recommend a good, free BSP game engine. I like the BGE, but I want an engine that is BSP based for my next project. What I’m looking for is:
any suggestions for an engine that fits these categories would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Well, I work(ed) with two game engines so far and both seem to fit your requirements. First, Id tech 3 engine (Quake 3), which uses gtkradiant as a level editor and is heavily bsp based, with some support for models. It’s quite old and not many people work with it anymore, but there are still a handful of active people. Second, Unreal Engine 4. Very modern engine, very easy to learn, very easy to do complex stuff with, very active community, very good documentation.
I would suggest the latter, UE4 is just so much superior to id tech 3. If you have any questions regarding those two engines and blender, let me know.
I second UE4. If you use it be sure to set scene units to metric and 0.01 scale and resizing everything for things to export correctly. You can also check out the official video tutorials on youtube.
I’ve tried out UE4. The problems I have with it is that it’s very resource intensive for both developers and end users. Even though it has static brushes, it’s not a “true” BSP engine because it uses the painter algorithm for rendering. I’ll be sure to check out the Quake 3 engine, thanks for the suggestions.
You asked for a game engine that runs on modern hardware so UE4 comes to mind. I guess it doesn’t have true BSP though. Why is that required? 
The next release (4.11) will have performance improvements, but you will have to optimize in any engine. Well I guess you won’t have to in the Quake 3 engine since it’s over ten years old.
Oh, I see what I did. When I said “runs on modern hardware” , I meant that it could run without hitches on multi-core processors, and that it could preform stably on modern 64 bit operating systems without crashing. (For example, many older game engines require quite a bit of tweaking to get right on 64 bit Win7)
I just used UE4 a few minutes ago, and while I like the BSP features, I didn’t reach 60 fps even when I was in an empty map :no:. I have the UDK (UE3) on my computer too, but blender to the UDK is a headache.
Isn’t BSP a bit outdated though, I don’t recall a lot of modern engines under active development that still see that as a thing.
For one thing, BSP trees are notorious for taking a long time to calculate, they are also known for requiring the levels to be watertight in terms of volume and as such are inefficient for outdoor scenes. Conversely though, there are plenty of modern engines like Leadworks that offer CSG-based modeling for level geometry if that is the thing you are looking for.
You can try changing the editor settings, under scalability in settings you can change the editor preview to low quality. Then when you create your project you can choose scalable 3d or 2d instead of maximum quality. This should give you better framerates.