Isometric Networking Engine

[100LBSofDogmeat]

Does anyone know of any game engines that have networking capabilities and isometric view? A small team of people, myself included, is starting the development process on an RPG and we'd like to do it in isometric view. We discussed licensing an engine, building a new one from scratch, etc. I figured I'd hit up the board and see if anyone here knew anything.

Personally, I love the flexibility of the Aurora engine used in Neverwinter Nights 1, though it wasn't truly isometric... but you could get that view if you wanted it.

Let me know if you came across anything or have any idea. Thanks!

 

[mvBarracuda]

Depends on your plans concerning target aim: open source, freeware, commercial?

Are we talking about isometric 2d or 3d engine?

 

[Maphusio]

Err Tactics might do... then again, there is the whole issue with the engine being owned by someone and I think its not beth or Iplay.

 

[mvBarracuda]

Using a proprietary engine is only a choice when you actually licensed it.

EDIT: to clarify that: why would somebody use a prorietery engine if he has no access to its sourcecode? This sounds like a no go option for any project that aims beyond making a mod.

 

[Ratty Sr.]

Why not license one of the existing popular game engines (Torque, C4, NeoAxis) and simply write an isometric camera? It really shouldn't be a problem if you have a halfway competent graphics programmer on your team.

 

[mvBarracuda]

Depends on his plans. If he plans to go open source there are a bunch of free (of charge) engines that can compete with commercial counterparts pretty well: Ogre, Irrlicht or Panda3d.

And I second Ratty's proposal: if you want to use a real 3d engine for the game, simply pick the one you like after evaluating it and add some isometric camera code to it.

 

[Ratty Sr.]

Depends on his plans. If he plans to go open source there are a bunch of free (of charge) engines that can compete with commercial counterparts pretty well: Ogre, Irrlicht or Panda3d.

If that's the case, then seconded. Especially agree on Panda3D, because it's really easy to use (thanks to its intuitive Python API) and supports a ton of features out of the box. I'm especially impressed with how easy it is to set up an art pipeline - one of my students was able to import models of very diverse origins (a Half-Life model, a couple of WoW models, and a couple more unknowns) within minutes, while others on the team struggled quite a bit with Nebula, OGRE and Irrlicht.

Speaking of which, OGRE is probably the best open-source renderer in existence, but unfortunately it's just that, a renderer, so you would still have to do quite a bit of work to put together a game engine and set up an asset pipeline. The engine is pretty sophisticated as far as open-source engines go and it takes a fairly experienced programmer to really appreciate its capabilities. Luckily, the community is huge and very helpful, and you can find many well-documented examples of integrating OGRE with other open-source libraries, such as ODE for physics, CEGUI for GUI rendering, Lua for scripting etc. It's likewise with Irrlicht, except Irrlicht is simpler and has more handy stand-alone tools (world editor, lightmap generator etc.). Also, it's worth noting that on the Irrlicht official site there is a tutorial on building an isometric game, which you may find interesting given your inclinations.