a RTS strategy game

[kevinwilmink]

Hello,

We are a group of student who wanne make a strategy game for a schoolproject. We are a bit searching wich engine we should use.

Irrlicht is capable of making rts games but is it a good idea to use irrlicht for this? of are there other better options (game engine's).

I would like to hear from people who have Irrlicht experience if we should irrlicht (for a RTS game).

game idea is a fast playing RTS game in the style of C&C3. (singleplayer)

thanks in advance!

[JP]

Irrlicht is not a game engine. That's the first thing you need to know.

Irrlicht is a graphics engine, it's just basically got rendering functions and some simple collision detection.

But that doesn't mean you can't do an RTS game with it. Many people have tried making RTS games with irrlicht. I don't actually know of any that actually got finished but that's probably not because irrlicht isn't suited to RTS games or anything, more because a lot of game projects never get finished due to the hobbyist nature of most irrlicht developers. If you're doing this as a school project and as a team then you shouldn't have any problems really because you'll have to plan and design everything before hand (presumably that's going to be done as it's a school project) and a team will help you focus on individual parts of the game.

Personally i can't suggest any alternatives to irrlicht as i don't really know any.. I know of some other graphics engines but not of any game engines that might be better suited. So i'd say go for irrlicht, there's loads of help you can get from the forums here should you run into any problems.

[rogerborg]

Yes, Irrlicht is fine for a RTS. It has terrain scene nodes, and the collision/scene node picking should suffice. Most of the questions that you will need to ask have already been answered on the forums.

The full source to Warzone 2100 is available under a GPL license. I'd recommend having a look at that.

As an aside, for a 'school project', you should plan to fail, and concentrate on learning and documenting where you went wrong.

Your first error is probably in saying "style of C&C3", since that sets up high expectations regarding the quality of the content. The style of C&C3 is more or less the same as the style of every other C&C game, and indeed the grandaddy of RTS, Dune II.

Setting realistic and achievable goals is a vital skill for a career developer. Aim for a small but polished feature set, rather than starting with a feature list that's a superset of all the current RTSes.

[MasterGod]

Setting realistic and achievable goals is a vital skill for a career developer. Aim for a small but polished feature set, rather than starting with a feature list that's a superset of all the current RTSes.

Oh I had to cut so many features so get ready on time, and it was Painful. My deadline for NGE was 17.04 (last week) and I've accomplished making the version I needed to deliver (and will present in 6 days ).

Back to you kevinwilmink, my engine is not officially released and was reverted from beta stage back to alpha stage but it could give you a great start and I'm using Irrlicht for rendering so you won't have to study another rendering engine.

And a little tip from my recent experience. Design Design Design!!! You have no idea how much time it can save.