A big decision arises

While I had more or less figured out what I was going to do for the weapon system in the tutorial I had been working on, I am not sure if I am advancing in Ogre any further.  I had been talking to a few friends whose major deals with networking and computer programming, and they told me Ogre was not the best way to go.  While I have not completely given up on Ogre, I do have a few issues.  Te biggest advantage of Ogre is it is open source, so anyone can go in and really customize any aspect of the engine.  Other things I like about Ogre are the speed of compiling, my familiarity with the conventions used in programming and the relative ease to change levels using the DotSceneParser, one it is working.  But Ogre is a 3D engine, and every other aspect of the game needs its own engine: sound, networking, physics, and GUI.

So the recommendation to me was move over to the Unreal Development Kit, the free for non-commercial use version of the Unreal Engine.  Since I have not made a cent off of this game yet I am not real worried , though if I ever make any money off of people clicking on the Ad Sense links on the side of the page or I ever get a donation page up I will definitely need to go over their legal requirements to see if I need a license, though I am thinking it is only if I am actually selling the game.  That is my only big worry right now since the UDK has the financial stipulation, another problem I have is the engine is not open source.and with the UDK I do not even have access to the engine (they allow access to the pre-built binaries for free).  Right now those are my big complaints, though I am not real worried about them.  I cannot really comment on how it is to program or design a level or anything since I am still making it through a lot of the introductory documentation.  Though having all of the aspects integrated into the engine does seem like it would be easier.

So, I do not have much to show for the previous week, and probably will not have much for the weekend since I think most of my free-time will be spent reading the UDK documentation.  I will probably make the decision n whether to switch or not once I have read most of the documentation, made a level and imported a mesh or two.  My guess is in about I week I will decide if using the UDK would be advantageous for my project, because this is big and something I do not want to rush.
~gunnah