Small questions in development

[palistov]

There's plenty of cool things you can do with HPL2, but it's not anywhere near as flexible as those engines you've mentioned. The development pipeline for HPL2 is much more constricted than in those engines. We don't have access to source, and a lot of the gameplay elements like AI and entity types are hard-coded into the application.

Anything you want to do you've gotta do with level-based scripts. We don't even get global scripts Also, the language used for scripting is Angelcode. It's very similar to C++ but they have some differences.

As for 3D modelling programs, lots of people use Maya and 3DS Max as well. Exporting can be a pain but I believe you want the openCOLLADA plug-in, not the Autodesk Collada one. Don't take my word for it though, I can't model for @(&$.