I'm considering taking one of the ideas I've had floating through my head for some time now and actually giving it a shot, but I'd like to avoid having to do as much as possible from scratch (which may not be avoidable).

The basics of what I'm wanting to do is a CRPG style game, around the era of the SNES RPGs. however the world and all the maps and as much as possible will be randomly/procedurally generated when you start a new game, almost like a roguelike. I've been looking through the game engines on the wiki but it's been slow and hard to find one that is designed for that era of gaming that's still maintained; So I thought I might ask on the forums here if anyone had any recommendations.

Now given that to do the maps like I want I'm likely going to have to alter the source of the engine any candidate should be open source.

Have you considered RPG engine?

If you prefer something like C++ there are a bunch of Open source RPG engines available for them, but I think RPG engine will work best.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "RPG engine"?

The only engine I know of this type is http://www.netgore.com/. Spodi, one of our members is heavily involved in the project. (IIRC, it started out as his personal project)

_________________
10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

I'm guessing he either meant "RPG Maker", or that there is actually an RPG engine entitled, "RPG Engine" out there.

_________________
What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Dungeons, yes; world no. Why would you randomly generate the world? The world should be static. When I start a new game I would expect to find the same cities, areas, whatever where they were the last time I played. Randomly generating dungeons is fine.

_________________
Bored? Head on over to my blog and see what I'm up to.

Microsoft XNA MVP

^ what if the world remains static, but is nonetheless procedurally generated? So as you explore, the world grows with you. This way, it's possible to put the player character into a world as vast as earth, and detailed down to the scale of human proportions, but without needing to provide a terabyte data file.

_________________
I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

That's fine. If I play the game more than once, I just expect that world to be basically the same as far as where cities are and such.

_________________
Bored? Head on over to my blog and see what I'm up to.

Microsoft XNA MVP

Yes you are right
I meant RPG Maker! I have seen a few programs entitled RPG Engine, but that is mostly just RPG engines which you use with other languages, like C#, C++ etc.

That's kinda the point, I want to have the entire game different every time it's played (up to the point where I have to write the story anyway). I have a number of plans of having some of the story be different depending on certain features of the world.



Unfortunately none of the RPG Makers appear to be capable of randomly generating a map each time the game is played (be it a dungeon or the world). Along with that vital flaw it claims to not run under 64bit versions of windows (let alone other operating systems) so I wouldn't be able to get it going anyway.

They are all capable of generating a random map via scripting. They can be run on 64 bit machines with emulation... If you want it cross platform, there isn't really a "maker" for it. You will have to either make it from scratch with a cross platform language or use an engine with a cross platform language.

Speaking as an avid RPG player, I'd probably be pretty pissed off if the world changed every time I played it. There's no way a randomly generated world is going to be anywhere near as good as one that's hand-crafted. It's the details that matter in the world. When I play an RPG these days I expect to get the feeling that the world is almost real. There's just no way you're going to do that randomly.

Dungeons are smaller and not as feature-rich just by them being dungeons so randomly generating them is not a big deal.

_________________
Bored? Head on over to my blog and see what I'm up to.

Microsoft XNA MVP

For generating dungeon I'd try to proceed this way:

1st step is that you must definitely have a map editor for your game, and within the editor,
maybe it would be good to have a tile/wall/scenery random generator, BUT!!!...
with some constrains - to provide that majority of maps you generate won't be
looking awkward, to make sure the corridors will line up correctly, with the walls and the floor.
This way, you could generate 100 or 200 dungeon maps and then, you'll clean up all of them
from all the things that are redundant from the random generation.

In the gameplay, the randomizer will choose which of the large variety of maps will be loaded.
What do U think?

_________________
Even this world is "programmed" by a Creator, the most skilled programmer of us all. What do you think of all that exists and all the environmental phenomena? He that maketh all had programmed it all and whenever needed, He can call one of the functions with input specified by Him.

Well part of what's going on is that the ideas I've got for the story don't look quite like a normal story. If you picture a normal story as a tree, with branches coming off of it, this would be more of a cloth. All of the branches interweaving (I'd like to not get too many details out before I've got anything significantly started there). Basically the idea is that there will be a few different stories, different time periods/parallel realities (exact details of which aren't fully fleshed out yet). Each independent part would be reasonably short (maybe 3-5 hours for a single play through) and have lots of branches.

There is a larger story that I have fleshed out but it only fits in anything decently if you instead only start to see glimpses of it to start with, say a single scene or two from it down each branch of the "independent" stories.

The reason I'm wanting to generate the everything like I am is that each "world" would be a different game, slightly changed from one another, some things you had choice over in the first world you did you might be forced into a path, others you'd be given a choice when you weren't before. You would of course be able to play each world over and over to complete every branch possible. after you get some amount of the glimpses of the larger story involved, the game would begin to unlock the larger story going on and let you begin playing through parts of it that tie the glimpses you've seen together.

And given that none of the engines that I've investigated give a very good way to accomplish this I have started to make my own, using ClanLib currently. So far I've got good continent generation from FreeCiv tweaked to make town positions rather than starting civilization positions, it's not as flexible as I'd like. I can't currently make assertions like, Town1 has path to Town2 AND Town1 distance from Town2 < Town1 distance from Town3. That's part of the next step of generating these things. After that I'll need to make a set of tools similar to how one would change a map like that by hand (e.g. you can't go from town 1 to town 4 because there should be mountains in the way, so draw some mountains on the map)