Just took a day off to just experiment a bit with this engine coming from Unreal originally and Unity etc. I like the overall editor and i think that there is tons of potential to this engine as a whole but a lot of things is currently keeping me from using it and most of it boils down to just polish - figured i should drop it here just for some useful info to the devs!

First of all this DDGI implementation is just too broken for any reasonable production of games and projects and needs to be looked into, too many artifacts. Source 2 ships a great GPU lightmapper thats used for CS2 and Deadlock and more, so i am really curious why there is no such alternative to GI in this engine thats built on top of Source 2? You guys could really benefit to just bring in their environment light probe volumes and bake systems, they are brilliant, runs well, looks accurate and visually looks good.

This GTAO implementation also has weird graphical issues and doesnt respect walls etc from angles so a wall can turn dark by just looking away from it. As primarily an environment artist i would currently not be able to really use this engine for anything environment based with trust that stuff will turn out good looking or correct
Then the second thing i immediately noticed is that gizmos, responsiveness etc is also kind of funky in the engines current state. Just selecting a surface has the mouse spazz out and flicker, moving gizmos around feels kind of strange and unresponsive. And then when selecting for example this mapping object, there is 0 visual indicator that this is the object I'm currently holding, no highlight around the object no nothing - 0 visual feedback to indicate that i am in fact holding it, its pretty much pure guesswork. A little bit more of a "me" opinion is that the gizmos are kind of unappealing visually but that's ofc not something everyone will agree with

Then ofc the known thing about the engine being quite split up currently design philosophy wise is also funny with modeldoc, animgraph or hammer still looking like source 2  while the editor itself has its own design - clashes quite a lot but i know thats a heavy WIP so im just throwing it in here.

Now why do i post this when these things are relatively small (except for the graphics stuff)? Well i think the engine is still super dope and has tons of potential, but it lacks some fundamental polish that other engines have, but also lacks alternatives to 3D graphics like a GPU lightmapper (which i understand isnt beginner friendly with lightmaps etc but it could still be a useful and more accurate alternative). Again this is more of a suggestion to the engine and i know stuff is always improving on here so i am excited to check it out again in maybe 6 months or so, but in case these stuff wasnt planned or known about then here they are!