Isometric engines

So this should become a listing of different ISO engines available? Okay, if I understood it right I'll do the first step with our engine.

Name:
FIFE - the Flexible Isometric Fallout-like Engine

Platform support:
Win32, Linux, Mac OS X, almost all X11 based OS'ses

Technology used:
C++, SDL, OpenGL, OpenAL, Lua 5.x
2D engine with optional hw acceleration through the OpenGL 2D API

Project status:
11 months in development
alpha status
3 public releases on sourceforge yet

Current version:
2006.1 (stable)
2006.2 SVN (experimental)

Aim of the project:
We want to create an open source source cross platform 2D engine that is very easy to mod. There are a lot of great open source projects out there but a lot of them fail in the long run as there is no satisfying 2D engine available and they're overstrained with the task to create a whole engine from scratch. We're using the original file formats of the Interplay RPGs Fallout 1 & 2 as example implementation to show how flexible the engine is.

The games that are created with our engine can be entirele written in LUA. This way you can speed up the development by using a fast scripting language that is less error-prone than C++.

What does already work:
- Tile rendering using a tile abstraction layer (this allows the community to define their own tile formats so they're not bound to a specific tile geometry)
- Object rendering
- SDL software render backend to ensure that FIFE works on as many platforms as possible
- OpenGL render backend that supports hardware accelerated 2D effects like alpha blending
- Sound support through OpenAL; ogg vorbis support
- VirtualFileSystem with automatic endian handling to ensure compatibility on big / little endian platforms
- Example extension for the VFS to load Fallout DAT files (type I & II)
- Example Fallout maploader to load Fallout maps directly into the engine (FO1 & FO2 maps supported)
- PNG and a bunch of other image formats supported through SDL_image
- FRM Fallout gfx format support to use the original Fallout art
- Basic flexible map model integrated
- Asynchronous scripting model for AI scripting
- Scriptable (LUA) GUI system based on the open source library guichan

What does not work yet; what is planned:
- The scripting & map model need refinement; they're still very simple proof of concept pieces of code
- A qt-based map editor
- Stable Mac OS X support (works in theory, but we're still searching for a Mac coder who builds the binaries for us)
- Stable scripting API (the current one is pretty much proof of concept)
- Support for at least one more game to show how flexible the engine is (a RTS game would be great as we're already supporting a RPG)

Conclusion:
FIFE is surely not ready to be used in production yet; however we're making good progress. ATM we're working on the FIFE modding tool FIFEdit. As soon as the first stable editor version gets released you could start to create your games based on FIFE. If you want to support proprietery file formats (e.g. you're trying to make a modern remake of an old RTS game and you want to support the native file formats) you'll need to write a maploader (an example maploader for the game Fallout comes with FIFE). If you plan to use the native file formats of FIFE you can write your entire game in LUA.

Important links
Project homepage
Development wiki

Example screenshot:
(this is a Fallout 1 map rendered with FIFE)



Download:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=148160

Wow, thats actually really impressive, and such a tribute to such an amazing game [fallout]

Quote:

Original post by Peachy keen Wow, thats actually really impressive, and such a tribute to such an amazing game [fallout]

Thanks :-)

Ahh common guys: FIFE can't be the only 2D engine available. I would like to hear the opinions of more guys who worked with 2D engines and their pro's and con's. I guess this would be very helpful for us to create a good engine to hear what others like / dislike about specific engines.

I know that Torque offers a 2D engine now. Did anyone test it yet? I would like to hear opinions about commercial 2D engines :-)