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Hi, I’m a total noob almost a moron, despite that I’m seriously playing with the idea to try to make a game so please have mercy over me and my stupid questions..
I’d like to know what is the best engine for an isometric mmorpg, also is it possible to use more engines like e.g. use some features from isogenic engine libraries and other features of some other engine?

I have to say Isogenic Engine is most definitely not a beginner-friendly engine. What programming experience do you have?

Well, I guess amateurish would be a tiny bit of an overstatement when it comes to me and programming. I’ve checked quite a few programming tutorials over the years but the instances when I applied some programming skills were very rare (some basic to intermediate php with mysql back in the days).

My knowledge of programming fundamentals is next to none. I know of value type and reference type data, stack and heap but that’s about it, there are many other expressions (e.g.: managed/non managed structs, command line runtime etc.) I’ve heard but have virtually no idea what they are about.

Its just lately I started to look more closely at java script after stumbling over one of Gene Howell’s tutorials.
I have to say js is quite unsettling to me. It has too many weird ways of instantiating things and calling events. I still can’t wrap my head around creating objects without names (if my observations were right), in some cases I couldn’t figure out how some data was passed into a function etc.

I checked isogenic engine and it looked quite complicated but seemed like perhaps with some struggle I could get into it. Impact or game maker look much more user friendly but as far as I know there is no networking, I’m not sure some basic node.js based chat that I would be capable of making would be sufficient for a mmorpg game.

Using an engine like Phaser or Impact plus Node.js and Socket.io would be easier to create something from scratch that works than struggling through Isogenic with very little JS experience. Isogenic is based on Source networking, which is a complex beast.

Obviously you would come out with something more professional using Isogenic, but I have to wonder how far your patience could be stretched. I have years of experience with JS, and Isogenic broke my dam of patience lol. I have said this before, but it reminds me more of a commercial MMORPG server that became open sourced (like Ryzom) than a standard open source JS engine. That is both amazing and daunting.

If you want to go Isogenic, I would suggest checking out an open source JS engine first and get more experience with JS. Phaser or Kiwi.js would be good. Both have good documentation, however, Phaser's is a bit hard to find. There is no link to the Phaser docs page from the main site.

I was sort of hoping that ige provides rather easy to use functions on its surface and I wouldn’t have to dive deep into the nuts and bolts. I’ve seen this tutorial where they were placing isometric tiles of buildings and it seemed like something even I could learn, haven’t seen any networking tutorial though.

I had this naive vision that I would struggle through until I had at least something to show and then I would gain over someone smarter to help me turn it into something more professional.
I’m just afraid that if I use low level and second rate tools it will have from the beginning no bigger potential than to end up something that I can play by myself on localhost ;(

When you say that ige could produce more professional game do you mean specifically that the Source networking feature has the power to accommodate more players and handle them and chat more effectively as opposed to some more simple method or are you referring also to something else?

uh oh wrote:I’m just afraid that if I use low level and second rate tools it will have from the beginning no bigger potential than to end up something that I can play by myself on localhost ;(

Gaining experience before you try to take on a project that is far too big will get you much further. No, I'm not going to give the old advice of starting with pong, then breakout, etc. But jumping into an MMORPG is probably ill-advised, since it will probably only lead to frustration and throwing in the towel.

What I would suggest is to check out Node.js + Socket.io and create a multiplayer card or memory game. No game engine required, since you could do it with Javascript right in a regular webpage. I think you will learn a lot, because you will be using Node.js extensively, whether you go from scratch or Isogenic engine, since they both use it at the server.

uh oh wrote:When you say that ige could produce more professional game do you mean specifically that the Source networking feature has the power to accommodate more players and handle them and chat more effectively as opposed to some more simple method or are you referring also to something else?

It isn't actually Source Engine networking, since that relies on C and Berkeley Sockets lib, but it is strongly based on its design which is described in the link I posted above. Isogenic has a ton of engineering to deal with latency, such as client-side predictive movement and much more.

You can get away without some of this stuff in slower-moving games, including MMORPGs. Isogenic is meant to support even twitch-based online games, which are very complex from an engineering standpoint.

I am not trying to scare you off from Isogenic. It is the most advanced MMO-ready HTML5 engine by a long shot. But you really need to understand how node and asynchronous programming work quite well before tackling it.

Thanks a lot for advice I thing I’ll go then with basic node.js with sockets for now. Hopefully I’ll grow into it enough to be able to handle more advanced tools.

No problem! You may find that basic node and socket.io are empowering enough that you can realize some pretty complex projects just messing around. I know learning node was a major turning point in my programming, and it opened up a huge door of possibilities.

Writing from scratch is not as hard as it sounds

I built this in about 4 hours

http://indie-resource.com/forums/viewto ... =35&t=7956

Jackolantern wrote:No problem! You may find that basic node and socket.io are empowering enough that you can realize some pretty complex projects just messing around. I know learning node was a major turning point in my programming, and it opened up a huge door of possibilities.

Jumped into node, so far it seems quite comprehensible, just a little confused about when should I use which module, like should I use connect or express for server management.

hallsofvallhalla wrote:Writing from scratch is not as hard as it sounds

I built this in about 4 hours

http://indie-resource.com/forums/viewto ... =35&t=7956

That looks great, created with node.js and impact engine?
Would you recommend impact engine for an isometric game?