OpenMW becomes a general-purpose engine for isometric RPGs
openmw.org
openmw.org
Going back and seeing it now, it looks like nothing special at all, but for the time I remember it being a huge leap forward graphically.
But yeah the graphics are awful and enabling the expansions from day one causes you to suddenly be assassinated in the night when you are still a nobody. On a plus note if you survive and are determined you can use the paralytic effects of the assassin's daggers to win a really powerful sword from a depressed Orc, he wants to die a noble death in combat... Not sure getting paralyzed so that your opponent can drink gallons of Sujamma and smack you with Hulk strength into a wall counts as noble but hey we all have our quirks.
The addictive thing about Morrowind was clearly the stories we told ourselves. You knew the people who would get really hooked because they spent hours on that “what’s your name?” screen.
Certainly people have for a long time licensed engines made available as a side effect of the creation of a certain type of game to build further on what's been accomished, or to cash in by making derivative games. For example all the shooters made with the Quake engines, which no one would call general purpose. There's a few examples of reused RPG engines (e.g. Infinity Engine) and RTS engines, too. There's also plenty of toolkits dedicated to adventure games and visual novels.
Arguing growth is possible is not outrageous.
Multiplayer games require little content relative to play time. Single player do though and thus there are only very few open source ones.
I found that even with the simple set of features I was really pushing some of the limits of the scripting system, (there's a reason I referred to the forge as "the bane of my existence"), and some of the things I really wanted to do like generating new items from scratch weren't entirely possible.
But as an engine, OpenMW is actually one of the nicer experiences I've had.
(Note on building towards - Items and other objects were slowly being replaced, with the intention to eventually be able to start from scratch, but sourcing art was the hardest part, so starting with a total transformation seemed wisest.)
So 2040.
However, looking at the video on the OpenMW site, it does look perspective.
I think they just meant top down 3rd person.
Typical Minecraft "infinite" world data structure, handles binding up event system to component listeners automatically, (will soon) handles serialization, listeners are async generators ala Redux Saga for neat inversion of control and advanced patterns as needed. It doesn't have any specific frontends or clients (APIs and react hooks+utils exist but not super advanced yet, and a small WebGL renderer + react component), it's more a collection of objects that recursively process state updates in response to a user input until it finishes (like a classic console roguelike), and produce a serialized stream of events clients of any kind can listen to, completely agnostic to how any client may choose to represent it, so you could easily make a DM interface vs an interface for players connected to the same server, but it's also not something like Unity that is an all-in-one engine that's ready to publish (unless a proper ecosystem gets fleshed out). It's been a joy to architect and program in, and excited to someday publish it and document it (I haven't updated the examples I've written for the new saga-based event system so it'll probably all be gibberish to an outsider still).
Not going to lie, my heart skipped a beat at the headline.. It's selfish but would hate for someone to publish something that covers a lot of the same ground. Sometimes I think to look around again and stop myself.
unity is commercial production tier