I''m actually very surprised that the WorldForge project hasn''t been mentioned in this forum. Especially UClient. Uclient is fully open-sourced and uses the SDL library (so that it works on Windows and Linux). Also I believe the worldforge project has some sort of license where they encourage people to use their resources like tilesets, sound, music.. probably even the UClient source. Check it out: http://www.worldforge.org and Uclient: http://www.worldforge.org/website/clients/uclient/ The source code is much easier to read then anything written in DirectX Later and sorry for the plug, Devin.

I don''t pay nearly as much attention to projects like these as I probably should.

I would like to talk about SDL. I learned about SDL shortly after my book came out (oh, i had heard of it before that, but I had never really investigated the matter). I have now used SDL, and having used it, I will definitely say that had i know about and had used SDL prior to writing my book, my book would have been entitled "Isometric Game Programming with SDL"

Just about every platform has an SDL implementation, windows, mac, linux. even better is that the EXACT same code(or pretty darn close) is used for each. That normally makes the open source people happy. Even better, SDL is released under the LGPL, so you can still make money on your SDL based apps without making them opensource.

Also, its a damn simple library to use. It supports not only graphics, but sound, event handling, threading, and playing music from a CDROM. I suggest to anyone who is doing Iso2D to check it out. http://www.libsdl.org

It''s funny... when I asked about SDL a couple of months ago, few people seemed to have an opinion on it. But now, nearly everyone is recommending it. I can say that it seems pretty useful and has lots of extension libraries to cover most needs. The downside is that the sound engine is a bit primitive (although that isn''t directly related to isometric games, I know).

the sound system is pretty darn primitive. however, you can use midas.

I''ve been going on about it for ages

Paul Groves
pauls opengl page