Hey Jeroen, I'm glad to see you back and rocking!!
Although everyone knows I love WME and for me it's the best engine on Earth for graphic adventures, I'm 99% sure it won't implement full 3D features, at least not in the short or middle term. And I think it shouldn't, really... mixing the 2D capabilities with a full 3D using the same interface and system seems very difficult, and if it could be done, it would be really a mess: People using 2D features would find the 3D features and options innecessary and annoying on the interface, and vice-versa.
I think that a full 3D adventure engine should be done since the start with that focusing, developing tools and a IDE completely tailored for 3D adventures.
I also agree with what you stated: WME currently is so good that when people start using it, they get delusions of grandeur about how a great game they could make with the engine. It even happend to me the first time I used it, back in the initial beta versions!! So I'm sure right now that "grandeur" effect is even bigger. That is a real problem because, again, as you said, the result is a lot of on-hold of half-finished projects, with lack of smaller but finished games like the ones made with AGS, which has a lot of games. I'm sure that newcomers are very surprised to see there are only a few finished games after almost 4 years since WME's first public beta version.
So, in conclusion, I think that WME won't and shouldn't become a full 3D engine. If Jan ever thinks that such an engine would be good and he's interested in doing it, I think the best approach would be to start making a new engine. I'm sure he would be able to reuse a lot of WME's code, but, specially on the IDE, he should make a new one from scratch.
So the next best option would be to use a general-pourpose 3D engine. At least I haven't found any 3D adventure engines, maybe you have been luckier. The best options right now in my opinion, in free LGPL-licensed engines are:
Crystal Space, with an example of adventure game developed with it being
Bonez (although the view is a la NeverWinter Nights and there are some fighting so for me it's more of a RPG...).
Some screenies of Bonez:
Ogre3D. In my opinion, this engine is much better than Crystal Space, specially graphics wise. There is already two commercial point-and-click adventure game released using this engine, and with very nice graphics in my opinion. They are
Ankh and its sequel,
Ankh - The Heart of Osiris. The best thing is that there is a Game Framework, by the name of
Yake. It is a general-pourpose framework, but it means that you won't have to deal directly with the engine all the time, but with higher-level functions focused on game developing. It is still a very young project but there are some stuff I'm sure you'll find very useful. There are other game-focused tools for Ogre3D under development, like
GOOF or
Ogre Studio, but I think they are less developed than Yake nowadays.
Here some pics from Ankh 1:
And Ankh 2:
You can see high-res (1024x768) screenshots at the
Ogre3D gallery of Ankh and of
Ankh 2There are also demos available for each of the games:
Anhk 1 demo (in english)Ankh 2 demo (in germanOf course, developing a game in any general-pourpose 3D engine is going to take much more time, money and resources than in WME... so it's something one must think deeply about.
In any case Unity looks good and it seems specially good for quick development.
I've been completely busy.