Game Engines

Hay guyz

I'm a third year cs student wanting to start my own (small) 3d game project. The trouble is I can't pick out what engine to choose. I skipped out on my graphics paper so I don't know much about 3d mathematics. I know how to program in C, JAVA, perl, python and (sigh) ActionScript. Don't know much about C++ but have written a few classes in it.

What 3D engine do you recommend?

I have tried some one the clunker ones, such as ORGE and Irrlicht(sp). I managed to write my own program in C that makes basic polygons, but looking at the math required to make it into a 3d model just confused me.

tl;tr

>>9
Because they'll totally not do it if it's distributed as binary, or if it's illegal to reverse-engineer and modify.
Sure they'll do it anyway, but with an LGPL engine you're not allowed to stop them; anti-cheating measures such as Warden or PunkBuster are illegal with an LGPL engine, and you risk getting sued by the EFF if you try to implement measures that disable clients who use modified libraries.

don't use open source for closed source! That's kinda bad. Keep it open source.
Great, so your solution is a total non-solution after all. Have fun stopping cheating and piracy with a GPL game; I'm sure your users will appreciate it.

The GPL is great for non-competitive games, but the majority of games being played worldwide are extremely competitive in nature (Starcraft, Counter-Strike, World of Warcraft, etc.) You can't create a fair and balanced play environment if you allow people to program shit like aimbots into their clients.

>>11
For crying out loud, he's a third year CS major. I think he's a little bit beyond graphical Hello World in Python.

If he's going to be writing a small game and then starting over, he may as well start in C++. There's only one way to get experience in a new programming language: fucking use it.