openmw.org

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The question is more like why?

You can probably do a top-down view and make a Dragon Warrior style game.

d

OpenMW is sort of suited for making 3d RPG's, just due to its nature. While you could probably set up a 2d game, it'd require more effort than it would in Unity, which has a convenient switch for that. AFAIK, OpenMW doesn't support 2d physics, which means you could have 2.5d or 3d with fake 2d via rendering, but it'd be a little difficult to do full 2d without creating a dedicated pipeline for it.

OpenMW isn't an engine.

OpenMW uses Ogre3d graphics engine, and at some point in the future Open Scene Graph.

It is a game engine, using ogre as rendering engine. And don't even try to call osg a game engine.

Depends on what you want to define as an engine.

OpenMW is every bit a game engine as the modified Gamebryo that was used for Morrowind. In that context, you could say that OpenMW is OpenGamebryo, but that isn't the point of this project.

Ogre3D is a rendering engine. Says so on the webpage.
OSG is a rendering engine. They call it a rendering toolkit.

Both still require you to add OpenAl, Bullet, and other libs to make a full game engine.

Each one does more than the other in different contexts, but they are _not_ game engines.

ogre's more like a turbocharger in corvette or BMW

for sideways runner would imagine that taking vertex data from land to collision could do it. all out rampage enemies with fight to 100 and traps with activate and getdistance. same could be used to make tower defence. edit: cast maybe better.

getcollidingpc is another one. camera and skills would have to be hardcoded now but otherwise maybe.

rendering single patch of land with landscape engine... dunno technically

This makes me think of things that I would like to see done with OpenMW, like a first-person party blobber RPG ala Wiz 8.

A game engine provides a way to tie game logic to things like input, output, physics, AI, etc. A game engine can also happen to implement various non-game-logic things itself.

All else is "toolkits" or "libraries". An engine is the basis of the software as defined by the domain of the software.

Anyway, thinking of a 2d game with OpenMW is really funny.