An Isometric RPG [in Progress]

[Elevations]

Hello everyone!

I’ve recently started learning the Irrlicht Engine 2025, and I’m working on a new isometric RPG project. The goal is to create a vibrant world in an isometric style with plans to add online server functionality in the future. I'm starting off small with my main goal to get everything "functional"

Here are some screenshots and a video showcasing the progress I’ve made so far. Feedback, suggestions, and tips are more than welcome as I continue this journey!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PvvnHYzJcg



While I’ve made exciting progress, I’ve also encountered some interesting challenges along the way, such as:

• Shadow Volumes: Balancing performance and visual quality while implementing realistic lighting.
• 16-Bit Triangle Limitations: Adapting models and scenes to work efficiently within these constraints.
• Trying to load .fbx files through IrrAssImp but failed and instead went with .b3d files using the .b3d exporter and blender 2.79
• Using Mixamo animations for easy animation

Things i still need to finish:

• Finish implementing networking
• Full inventory System
• Main Menu, Class Selection and in-game GUI
• Enemies and player Combat
• Loading world objects positions from text files for easy map creation

Using irrlicht 1.9 latest SVN

WHY IRRLICHT ENGINE?

I tried using unreal engine 5 and found the experience to be annoying too many visual editors and hit too many walls and dead ends while trying to implement all the systems and features above. Also found the performance on older systems way too slow.

Despite these hurdles, I’ve learned a lot and am eager to share some screenshots and a video of my progress so far. Feedback, suggestions, and tips are more than welcome as I continue this journey!

If this project interests you, or if you’d like to offer help or collaborate, feel free to send me a private message.

[Brainsaw]

That looks like a cool project, I hope you can keep up the motivation. You could try xeffects instead of the volume shadows, I just it in the past and it works fine.

[CuteAlien]

Isometric RPG, that gives me flashbacks to my Diablo2 addiction ;-)

If you want to try XEffects for a shadow alternative, I'd recommend my fork (https://github.com/mzeilfelder/xeffects). Not many changes, I just made it compile with Irrlicht svn trunk, so saves a bit time.

16-bit triangle limit is slowly getting removed, but yeah, b3d still has it I think (for static models you can use .obj which supports 32-bit by now).

And yeah - fbx loader would be nice.

[n00bc0de]

This looks pretty good so far. I noticed that collision didn't seem to be working in your video. Have you already started on that?

[Elevations]

Thank you guys so much for the feedback, Yes i did try using Xeffects but i ran into a problem that i wasn't able to solve, The xeffects lights seem to use a kind of "spotlight" which didn't look too well since i needed the light to kind of fade out rather then produce super rounded spotlights i need pointlights with light drop off so i ended up sticking with the default ShadowVolumes however i have had problems with that also because i had to cap ShadowVolume draw calls to 20000 triangles because sometimes when move the light too far away from certain objects it blows up their mesh size way too high and creates odd bugs that im still working on smoothing out. I'm not sure if thats something that can be addressed in another svn trunk but i did notice that the default shadow volumes seem to mention that it has limited ways of detecting the light is not inside the shadow itself or something like that.
Edit - I fixed the bug and posted a bug report here: viewtopic.php?p=308047#p308047

As for the collision yes i accidentally turned off the rock collision in the demo video, but i am using Latest Bullet Physics version 3 which is working very well for rigid bodies.

Right now i've been fighting with the ShadowVolumes bug above as well as getting Normal Maps to work on Animated Meshes so the light correctly illuminates meshes.

I did get IrrAssImp to load FBX files but ran into some weird problems (They only seem to work as static meshes) and the FBX files just would not texture correctly and would also appear rotated wrong so i just gave up with that again and continue exporting to B3D! lol.

This whole thing has been a real learning process but i am really enjoying it. I still much prefer irrlicht over traditional engines because i feel like im learning so much more.