Hello,

I plan to make a 2D strategic game (or 3D iso) in which players will be able to build things, and gather resources from a infinite 2D world.

The game must have a client-server architecture, clients will download assets from the server, and may be able to upload some also.

They will be able to alter the world, for exemple, destroy rocks, build bridges, turn land into water..

Technically, i imagine that the player camera can see 256x256 tiles, and the player will be inside of it. To prevent seing nothing after the edges, the camera shall then render at most 3x256x256x256 tiles.

Players will then be able to change the tiles, and put actors on them.

I'm unable to decide myself between different engines.

What i expect from it:

* Ability to let me full control over map and assets loadings.

* Ability to load/unload chunks of the game world around the player screen

* Ability to create a decent amount of tiles/objects, and the user should be able to interract with it

* Possibility to export my game to android platform, at a fixed cost. I have no clue when my game will be ready, it will be one year or so, i dont want to pay 30 times a monthly fee.

* Utilises a written programming/scripting language. I'm fluent in C++,c#, java. I have notions in python too. Why written ? Have you ever tried to copy paste an image into a code ?

* Has written officials toturials.

What i tried:

- Unreal engine. I liked at first, but some points appaled me: most people use the "tokoy metro map" sketch scripting, its cool, but i feel like burning my fingers clicking around. And in C++, the few things i find, are already outdated. It's a wall in the learning curve. And when you do something wrong, the editor just crash , gives you a small stacktrace and your code isnt there.. And the worse of it, the speed of intellisence in visual studio for c++. I use 2013 community edition. It takes about 5 sec before the auto completion popup appears.

And then, i stumbled across ray casting to an "instanciated component" to detect clicks on tiles.. Couldnt manage it.

- Unity

I tried to instanciate my tiles, but it became reaaaly slow. I dunno what i did wrong. But i'm not a fan of unity. Mostly because of the fact that a few tutoriels are outside youtube.

Best regards,

You can probably make something work in unity, with more effort.. Unity forums are a good place for help.

If you want to go custom, use C++ opengl, C# monogame, or C# opentk.

It may be easier to author world streaming without the structure of unity, but you will be missing animation, shadow mapping, and lots of other things you get for free in unity. If your game is strictly 2d, you may not need them.

If you decide to forgo unity, to code it yourself, and you want 3d meshes, you might take a look at my simplescene. It is C# opentk, and a small library of pieces rather than an "engine". It is more educational than complete, but it has some useful bits (like shadowmapping, particle systems, and skeletal animation) and the source is small and free.

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/798054/SimpleScene-d-scene-manager-in-Csharp-and-OpenTK

You can take a look at cocos2d-x (http://www.cocos2d-x.org/download). It can be scripted with javascript, lua or c++. It is rather only graphics engine (with bundled box2d, simpleaudioengine and gui library). The performance is excelent. It primarily targets mobile devices, but it also supports desktop OSs without significant drawbacks. I did not try the scene editor. I would recomend it for you project because it is fast (performance), simple and it lets you do things by yourself.

and i can't help myself but to point out that, as long as you do not own hardware with infinite RAM and diskspace, there practically is not such thing as truly infinite maps. unlimited but not infinite, as some smart guy said (lol).