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What engine for a top-down RPG?

Started by jonwil Dec 8, 2019 at 4:15 AM 10 replies 17.9k views

Original Post

Dec 8, 2019 at 4:15 AM

I am involved with a project (which I can't give out too many details of) that will be building something similar to a top-down RPG. Graphically we have a bunch of 3D objects of various sizes that get joined together to make levels (think of the dungeons in a game like Diablo 2 except that the tile pieces are in 3D rather than 2D and its an overhead view rather than an isometic view).

Can anyone recommend an engine that would work for this project? Already ruled out Unity but anything where the source (in C++ preferably) is available (and has no "non-commercial only" restrictions attached) would probably be worth looking.

Lendrigan Games

Dec 8, 2019 at 5:09 AM

Have you looked into Unreal and Godot as well? Being open-source, Godot's C++ source code is available for modification.

jonwil

Dec 8, 2019 at 9:07 AM

Unreal was my thought as well, just not sure if there was something else out there that is more suitable for the needs of our projects.

Alberth

Dec 8, 2019 at 9:35 AM

"more suitable" is not something we can judge given the limited information that you provide.

An engine with a community as large as Unreal or Unity is very likely to do the job or they would not be so big. There are a few other RPG games out there :)

The only possible exception is if you're doing something exceptional that totally falls outside the normal game implementation pattern. That does not seem to be the case here.

JTippetts

Dec 8, 2019 at 11:26 AM

You could take a look at Urho3D. I have been using it for most of my projects, and some time back I made an ARPG for a gamedev.net game jam. ( https://github.com/JTippetts/DungeonBot3000 ) The engine is fully open source, can be built for a wide variety of platforms, and is written in C++. There are a few active forks as well, including rbfx which is currently in active development and working on C# integration.

aganm

Dec 8, 2019 at 12:33 PM

Why did you rule out unity? I would recommend unity, unreal or godot, each has ups and downs.

Unreal is c++, open source, very powerful. I like everything about it except that it's huge. Takes a good machine to run, small projects build take hundreds of megabytes. And it's unusable on linux, at least not practically.

Godot is Gdscript (think of python), the engine is c++, but it's not supported out of the box like unreal supports c++ out of the box. I love that's it's lightweight, but godot's gdscript editor is awful imo. I don't know how the c++ side works, but it could be worth looking into.

Unity is like the best of both worlds, not lightweight but not too heavy, pretty powerful, it's c# but it has good dev tools. Best thing about unity is how easy it is to get high performance with the new data oriented approach.

The type of game you make doesn't really matter for the engine choice unless it's something very specific.

jonwil

Dec 8, 2019 at 9:27 PM

I ruled out Unity because I have messed with it before and didn't like it (and you are limited in your ability to make changes unlike Unreal).