Lately I started working on my own game engine for 2.5D Isometric games in C++. It's been going surprisingly well these are the systems I've created so far:
Engine: Custom 2.5D Isometric Engine (C++)
Core Systems Built:
- Tile-based rendering with 3-layer system (Ground, Object, Roof)
- JSON-configured tile system with 66+ tiles (dungeon + farm tilesets)
- Rotatable multi-tile buildings (4/16 rotations, footprint blocking)
- Binary map format with save/load/create
- A* pathfinding (8-directional)
- Depth-sorted rendering with roof transparency
- Animated sprite effects system (JSON-configured)
- Player movement with 8-direction animation
- Attack system with directional effects
- Docked ImGui editor UI (Unity/Photoshop style)
- Tile palette with search/categories
- Shift+drag painting, ghost preview
- 3D character model loading with skeletal animation (WIP)
- Weapon & Effect loading
- Inventory system (basic inventory toggle on and off for the flex, can dual wield 2 weapons so far only 2 swords)
Libraries:
- SDL2 (windowing, 2D rendering, input)
- SDL2_image (PNG loading)
- OpenGL 3.3 (3D rendering)
- GLEW (OpenGL extensions)
- GLM (3D math)
- Assimp (3D model/animation loading - FBX, DAE, etc.)
- Dear ImGui (editor UI)
- nlohmann/json (JSON parsing)
Asset Support:
- 2D: PNG spritesheets, tilesets
- 3D: Collada (.dae), FBX with skeletal animation
I think I am going in the right direction so far and I like the result, I have a cool small map editor I've built to make creating maps easy which has tile painting object loading basic collisions .etc
Effects are mostly sprite based, I am currently working on rendering 3D Effects.
My question is:
How does Conquer do it? I've forgotten all about it, back then when I worked with Chris he explained a lot of the stuff to me and we were creating skins .etc also had a c3 model viewer.
I assume Conquer has tile based system like I am creating, but loads effects, characters, weapons as 3D assets?
I am currently working on the map editor again I am adding scalability to objects and just trial and error basically but are there any pointers any of you can give me some explainations things to look out for or overall how conquer does stuff if anyone has figured it out yet?
I don't know how many of the OG people are active but would be nice to see some of you.
Edit: This is just a hobby project to sharpen my C++ skills. I am not making a MMO (yet). If I notice that this takes faster than I thought and my single player game and core systems are fully working and actually fun, I might move over to networking and databases as this is something I understand way more considering my line of work and how many 500-600k+ users projects I've done. So Networking might actually be the easier part for me but we will see. I will start a blog soon where I post progress and over time if I notice a lot of interest I might look into funding or investing through my own company for helping hands, I am already talking to an agency for my first map and some models because it would just hype me up more to have decent models and custom assets.
