2D Game Engine

[Nalgas]

It's been many years since I've really done much that's directly game-related, but I've accumulated enough ideas over that period of time that I'd really like to play around with some of them to see if they're as much fun in practice as in theory and if they're worth doing anything more with, since I have plenty of free time at the moment.  While I'm capable of putting together a basic engine/environment for testing things out in, I'd rather not waste too much time doing that and would prefer to take something already existing and modify it to meet my needs (if needed).

Ideally it would be something free, cross-platform, and reasonably well supported/documented.  For the time being, I'm likely to be sticking to 2D stuff, and I suppose tile-based is the easiest way to go.  Some of my ideas may get a bit hectic and action-y with a bunch of scaling/scrolling/rotating, so I'd go for a bit more complex but efficient over easy-to-use and slow if I have to.

I honestly have no idea where to start.  I've written code in all sorts of languages for various purposes, from Fortran to Python, but the last time I did much graphical stuff, my OpenGL 1.2 book was considered up-to-date, so I'm not exactly up on what languages/libraries/frameworks/tools the kids are using for stuff like that these days.  Heh.

[Ixiohm]

Hi Naglas,

I have tested out some 2D game programming myself lately and here is two resources that I come to think of that you may find interesting:
The first one http://create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/sample/roleplaying_game is a tile based RPG engine (C# / XNA).
The second http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=914 is the source for 'Revenge of the titans', a tile based RTS (Java / Open GL).

There is also the book "Beginning .NET Game Programming in C# / VB.NET" that demonstrates how to build a simple game engine (with accompanying source).

Hope this helps and looking forward to an update when you have tested some of your ideas to satisfaction 

 

[Nalgas]

Thanks.  I started to look at the RotT code, because I was curious after having heard about the game itself earlier this spring, but that quickly led to refreshing my Java knowledge, because I haven't used it in years, and I didn't do much with it back then, either.  Then I got further sidetracked by looking up formal definitions of various concepts through MIT's OpenCourseWare, partly because I don't always remember how some things are implemented in different languages and what the different terms are that they use for essentially the same thing, and partly just because it's fun to see what they have to say about stuff I've used forever but never really studied in a formal setting.

Eventually I'll get back to actually working on my own stuff, but it might be for the best that I'm just reading a lot at the moment instead of writing code.  The quality of it (and my attention span) tends to suffer when I'm in the middle of an anti-seizure medication change.  I guess I'll have my own personal mini summer school session for a couple weeks so I'll be ready to go once everything else settles back down.