regarding system specs, it's really hard to say - the engine is designed to scale from low end to high-end, functionality-wise.
The engine supports HDR on a geforce2 for one thing - considering every other engine that i've seen, period requires a directx9 or higher video card, we are pretty proud of this ;}
A geforce3 or higher can pretty much get the full spectrum of functionality that BV supports in one shape or another - things will scale appropriately with better video cards, but you can get normal mapping, specular mapping etc with a geforce 3.
it's amazing what you can do with ingenious programming ;}
Here's a demo someone just posted on the bv forum - shows you a bit of the kind of detail & level size you can get with BV without much difficulty:
http://www.beyondvirtual.com/smf/index. ... l#msg10736
It's a pretty nice interior 'cave' world - visually it's on par with anything i saw in oblivion, personally, and it doesn't even have normal maps applied yet.
Here's a simple demo i'm working on as a part of my class at Pacific Game Design - it's a simple racing game based off of the Racing template included with Beyond Virtual:
http://www.beyondvirtual.com/smf/index. ... 154.0.html
There's a video of gameplay if you want to check out some 'in action' footage:
http://www.gekidoslair.com/gallery/Drivin.avi
So it really comes down to what YOU, the designer want your game's system specs to be. Steer Madness targetted super low machine spec - we had it running on 300Mhz machines and still as playable as 90% of RF demo's i've seen on machines 4 or 5 times as fast.
Or you could target a super high-end machine & throw hundreds of thousands of poly's at the screen if you want. This is entirely up to you.
The scripting syntax is very easy to learn, so it's not hard to develop your own camera control systems or player movement systems once you get into it. Since everything is scripted, any deficiencies that you may see are in the lack of time we spent creating the scripts for the templates, not in the engine itself.
Again, they are meant to be TEMPLATES - starting points for creating full games - much like when you hit 'new project' in visual studio - it doesn't automatically create you a killer application, but provides the skeleton for one.
Now that people have been using the engine for a few months, there are some demo's & cool screenshots coming out - the next few months should really prove interesting as more people put the engine through it's paces.
