which engine?

Yes, the HL2 engine can be modded to show top-down third-person cartoon-style graphics.

Crystal Space would work, probably. Other open source engines of note include Nebula2, and OGRE+ODE (although the last two don't give you a comprehensive whole).

Yet another option is Torque -- you can download the demo game and mod it around to see what it can do, for free! Once you want to program it, it's $100, which is pretty cheap.

The important thing is not to pick the right engine -- the important thing is to pick AN engine, and stick to it, because you can make your game in any engine!

>>the important thing is to pick AN engine, and stick to it, because you can make your game in any engine!

thanks for the tip.

i am probably more concerned about modellers and level editors. implementing the engine should be fine. i fear spending hours on a modelling package to find it doesnt address my needs (or is a nightmare to use). and then the headache of porting models to other modellers. prob best to start from scratch

it seems engines have better support for specific modelling packages. so maybe i should be finding the right modeller, and then selecting an appropriate engine

Any decent modelling package will import and export data in a broad variety of formats, so that should not be an issue. Blender does this, and so does Milkshape3D (my favorite, very simple to use if you've never worked with a modelling package before). You should be able to move seamlessly between them unless you are making use of some very modeller-specific features (eg some kind of special spline implementation that will get broken down into triangles when you export it, making it impossible to recover the original splines). As for getting data into your engine, there might be some post-processing work involved regardless of what your models are exported as, unless you write the exporter yourself.

However, I think that picking the engine based on the modeller is not such a great idea. You should pick an engine that you can easily understand and work with, that supports the features you need, that is flexible (if you want Nifty Effect A it should not be a headache to add it) and was more or less designed for the type of game you want to use it for. An active community where you can look for support if you're completely stuck is a plus, too. If you know what you're doing, having access to source code is a plus, since some of these are documented rather sparsely (nebula) or have outdated docs (crystal last time i checked). If you can see the source then you can just look at a given function to figure out what it does.

Today, I started testing out the Irrlicht engine. It isn't genre specific at all, and you can do your own input or use it's input. Sound is a separate entity so you can use OpenAL or DirectX or whatever sound library you want. It comes with many special effects and source code as well. It is under the ZLib license, which is the best one to me(free, commercial or not still free). See the license for details, but it is free. The only wannabe catch is that it uses JLIB code(or something like that) and you have to mention that in your documentation, but not inside the game, rather in the documents. It is a scene node hierarchy type engine, which comes with many types of nodes, and you can also create your own nodes. Take a look.

I'll give an endorsement for Irrlicht. This is a very easy to use engine. I got the tutorials to compile in just minutes and I am currently working on my own game with it. The only complaint I have is that when I load and render my own maps, some of the geometry is not rendered, but I haven't figured out if it is the engine or the modeller that is causing this. While I am here though, can anyone give me a place to start in figuring out why certain parts of the geometry is not rendered? Thanks.

-AJ

Quote:

Original post by hplus0603 The important thing is not to pick the right engine -- the important thing is to pick AN engine, and stick to it, because you can make your game in any engine!

I'm quoting this for the truth of the century.

Tell that to the folks developing Duke Nukem Forever :-P

The important thing is not to pick the right engine -- the important thing is to pick AN engine, and stick to it, because you can make your game in any engine!

If you mean that an engine is a must for game developing, if you mean that starting from direct x or opengl you will never develop a game...well..I agree

The important thing is not to pick the right engine -- the important thing is to pick AN engine, and stick to it, because you can make your game in any engine!

If you mean that an engine is a must for game developing, if you mean that starting from direct x or opengl you will never develop a game...well..I agree[/quote]

Huh. Maybe I misunderstood you. But you can make games without an engine. You can make your own engine. You can also make a game without an engine. Look at Space Battle 3d. I didn't finish it due to loss of code due to Hard Drive failure. A non-finished version is on NEHE's download site. I didn't use any engine, rather just OpenGL/C++. It IS a 3d 2 player game that actually functions, no engine. Now it isn't all that good, and has plenty of room for improvement. I can say that if I took the time to get it to commercial quality, it will take a long time. If I used an engine that is already done, commercial quality will take less time, but that doesn't mean that you have to use an engine.

Also, if that is not what you meant to say, sorry for the rant. I don't understand if you mean to say you can't or if you can make a game without an engine, starting with OpenGL/DirectX.