NetGore is a free, open-source 2D online RPG engine written in C# that has been in development for about 2 years now.



(View all images)

Purpose: The idea behind NetGore is to provide a strong foundation to build a game off of, and to provide the implementation of all the fundamental components involved in 2D online games. That way, people can spend their time with what makes their game unique and stand apart from the rest.

Target audience: NetGore is intended for online multiplayer 2D games only. Although the focus is towards platformer RPGs, most any kind of 2D game that is not twitch-based (such as fast-paced shooters) is fine. You can also switch to a top-down perspective easily enough.

Features: More details for features can be found on the site, but in short, most of the basic online RPG features are there. There is chatting, items/equipment, skills, stats, a GUI system/skinning, particle engine, NPC dialogs and AI, shops, and all those goodies.

Links:

Home page
Download page
Google Code project page

Any feedback is appreciated, either here or through the NetGore forums.

Looks interesting I know a lot of people have been wanting a side-scrolling MMO engine similar to Maple Story for some time now.

wahoo Spodii is back in action!! And has another new engine! Sweet stuff man. Definitely checking this out.

I actually never really stopped "being" in action, just took me about two years to get this engine far enough along to feel it is worthy to announce it. You'll just have to take my word that it is a LOT better than it looks.

I tried to fix all the aspects people complained about with vbGORE. Basically, its a lot easier to use, focuses around being as easy to change/add things as possible (from the code, still not a "MMORPG version of Game Maker"), and tries to hide most of the implementation details.

its looks great to me.

How hard to integrate it into silverlight

Silverlight probably won't ever happen. Just not really much point since you'd have to download the whole game first anyways. I also am not really a fan of large games being browser-based. It just seems like a pointless limitation.

ah the download the whole game first might be a major turn off. Makes sense then. Oh well client download works well anyways.

Just saw on the site that this engine uses XNA. Are there any plans to port it to XBox 360? I think that could have huge interest if it is possible (I haven't seen much networked stuff on XBox Live Community, so I am not sure to what extent it is limited).

Unfortunately that wouldn't be possible. To use networking on the XBox (or even Zune), you have to use the Xna.Network namespace, which will limit you to session-based networking with a max of 32 players, and only talking to other XBoxes (or Zunes). There just isn't any decent way (through XNA) to make an online game with lots of players, or even a persistent world, in XNA's networking.

I'm quite sure you can get up to about 128, but that's still shy of what an MMO would probably want to support.

Well, that stinks. Maybe they could eventually move it forward and allow for more complex networking that would make it possible. That would be awesome to be able to put indie MMOs on the 360. However, I guess they are worried about people sending players adult material or security exploits if they allowed any networking functionality, which would be a reasonable concern.