I'm determined not to make another Quake-clone here. Everything else is there. I haven't seen the latest from Epic yet, so I can't make a fair comparison with Unreal. Exist supports complex material scripts for any renderable surface, which would be comparable to Q3's shader system. Otherwise, my engine is probably similarly as different as Quake is from Unreal.
Every programmer has their own way of doing things.
I started research for the project in November '97 and began developing the engine in early March of '98. 5. The main reason I chose this sort of project was because there's so much to learn about. It's been an awesome experience for me. Before starting Exist, I had a considerable amount of experience with 3D graphics, and working on massive projects alone. I tend to believe that learning enough to build something as big as a game engine will become a harder thing in the future, as more and more technologies come into play.