Can you compare these different adventure creator software for non programmers?

i appreciate all the good info in this thread, but i think i m all set now with Visionaire, it has *almost* everything i could hope for!

my journey has started with RPGMaker, which i soon realized it was no good for adventure games, then i tried game maker demo, and it was better but more geared toward side-scolling platformers, so i found Unity, but man its over my head scripting wise... then i found a thread on a forum where someone was talking about Adventure Maker and i almost pooped my pants, it was just what i wanted... but as i researched and was about to buy it i found a Visionaire discussion and i finally found the game engine i needed!

I have made a game with Adventure Maker. it's perfect to create something for fun. The soft is easy to use, has plenty of possibilities, but I would probably advise it for 1st person adventures, not 3rd person. I think it's easier to use than Visionaire. HOWEVER it is an old software now, and it has some limitations. The most important one is the resolution, which cannot go over 1024. Despite the restrictions, I still like this soft.

Visionaire is much complete however, and cheaper, and will allow 2.5D soon. I just think it takes more time to understand the logic of VS (how it works to create a game), the help system needs some improvement at this point (except for the community), and I find it a bit slow on some aspects (v3.7.1, let's see the next release). It's just an early opinion, I'm new with VS ! But it seems you have taken your decision to use Visionaire among others Well done !

I think Adventure Maker's main issue is not supporting PNG files.

One notable adventure game engine that has not been mentioned yet, is the Dagon Engine that is developed by Senscape for their upcoming horror game "Asylum" and has been released as open source. It is geared towards a 1st Person, node based perspective and uses LUA as a Scripting language: http://www.senscape.net/dagon/

@Mensmaschine: I will check it out, thanks for the link!

@Mensmaschine

very cool link, i like how you can program the game in realtime... making some setpieces in daz then using a panorama stitcher could be kinda fun