NetGore

Eh, It's kinda big, but Top Down support. Sidescroller MMOs are a bit niche, so you probably wont get *that* many people looking for them.

I had the feeling that would have been one of the first things mentioned.

I'll add it when I come up with a decent way to make the demo game switch between assets for top-down and side-scroller without making a mess. The idea of adding the top-down support is more appealing due to the fact that I can rip off vbGORE's graphics that way, too. Content-wise, its very little work for me.

Deployment, the only reason I haven't been helping with development is its too much trouble to set up. A one time installer with XNA and every other module so it runs straight out of the box would be nice.

I think the side-scroller aspect is ok, you might need to pay someone on pixeljoint to create some original side-scroller graphics.

Yeah, I'm definitely not going to pay people to make graphics just for the demo game.

One-click installation would be nice, but:
1. It'd make the installation file HUGE unless I had it stream-download stuff that was missing.
2. It'd be a huge pain to perform a reliable check to see what is missing and stream it in the installer.
3. I am pretty sure I'd be breaking some usage terms, at least with XNA, by doing that. I remember some people talking about something related to this a while back with the XNA installation and auto-downloading it if it was missing.
4. There would be no reliable way to check for MySQL automatically. It could be a huge number of places, or even on a different machine.
5. Same goes for MySQL GUIs.

At most, I'd probably be able to group together the MySQL .NET connector, XNA, and NUnit. Though only two of those are even required. It'd save all of like... a minute, at most.

Setting up the project itself should be pretty simple. The InstallationValidator checks a lot of things for you, and even offers to do stuff like import the database dump if your database it outdated or missing. As far as project setups go, NetGore still is one of the easier ones.

Trust me, I wish I could make it easier to install, but I just don't see there being much that I could do.

if you make it too easy its gonna be like the other game engines, Download, install, play.

This engine is too badass to be easy to install, some knowledge should be required. What you could do instead is create some sort of support page that lists common issues, how to resolve them and other explanations.

i believe the setup guide is a great help.
its not a 1 click installer, but a very nice checklist!

some fundamental features i would use a lot would be:

channel based chatting
(Guild chat, alliance chat, party chat, local chat, global chat, whisperchats (so one would basically open a chatroom when he whispers to someone.would be handy for a group of friends or so. its something MANY mmos lacked when i was communicating between 2 users!)

lineage 2, guild wars and many modern mmos have tabs where you switch between which chat you are writing into.
and additionally one could add in chatoptions (dont display alliance or guild chat, etc)

that way you would end up with a very complete Chatsystem

Player Shops are a very common used feature, though they can be added quite late too.

How is the engines support for summons/pets (player owned npcs)
Because suzmmoning and having pets (2 very beloved mmo features) are basically player owned npcs,
this is quite essential (IMO).

Classes (though it would be nice to have the option: use classes, or dont use classes. my game for example doesnt use a class system as anyone else would design it in a general way)

Elements
A very nice feature some people were missing in vbgore.
Brings a LOT of variety to any magic or items!
(elemental resistance as status is also neat here)
with this system many can also make orcs resistant to blunt weapons and weak against slashing weapons, if they like. One basically adds the attributes slash/blunt/pierce as "elements".
what would be unhandy would be: all fire mobs have +50% damage weakness to water.
thats not very reusable

"seemingly endless single map"
basically preloading map parts around oneself and displaying them (with npcs etc)
so the player never has "warps" where one doesnt need them.
when you go 200 fields east in a desert, why have a warp?
I personally think this makes many games look VERY cheap (and mirage like)
if it has tons of zones (like pokemon has it)
this feature is quite big, but many people had different ideas against the "mass warps"
on vbgore.

I myself am too nooby to contribute.
though my first stuff to look at are items.
Extrending them by having variable stats, item conditions, elemental attacks, etc

Especially the CHAT, MAP and ELEMENTS would be stuff i would be looking too.

Hmm, will have to think about the seamless maps, as the focus is still on platformer. But might be do-able, and sure would be appealing.

Elements would be a nice thing to have, would just have to come up with a good way to implement it so you can easily use it or easily ignore it.

Classes, I don't think exist at all right now. Again, would have to come up with a good way to implement it, but the code itself would be quite simple.

Pets would be a good one. You should be able to do that quite easily. Alliances and persistent NPCs take care of a lot of the work already. Could probably hack it in in just a day, and implement it a bit more nicely in a few days.

Channels would be very, very easy to do. I might wait a little later to do that, though, once there is guild and party support. Will also need input on how to do it (i.e. how the MMOs do it), since I haven't played a MMO in ages.

I think the graphics are a huge priority , i mean it takes no effort code wise and would massivley improve visuals and the "WOW" (not WoW...) factor.

well visual wise yes a custom or royalty free platformer set would rule.
I might look around a bit if i can find something appealing...

code wise for elements:
having a default of 0% resistance [codewise have a variable go like from 0-200 for -100% (weakness) to 100% (immunity)]
so then the devs just ignore it and it will always calc as no weakness or resistance stats.
and the weapons would be non-elemental so they wouldnt care.

the seamless maps are something not ONE 2d MMORPG engine can give you.
so if netgore had it, platformer or top-down, it would be one MAJOR advantage.

of course, in platformers teleports are ok, but for topdowners, this would be the "killer"
to all other engines ^^
imo it would be extremely seductive

+1 for seamless

Oh, voice chat

voice chat.... hmmm
think thats going too far, not everyone needs voicechat in an MMO

one solution would be to host a Public Teamspeak Server,
and on party creation, create a private room with generated password and
connect all users into it.

but voicechat on the mainserver would be bandwidth. :/

If I did voice chat, which I may at some point, it would definitely just be using an existing voice chat API. No reason to re-invent the wheel.

what I belivee netgore has to do is look at itself featurewise in comparance to modern MMOs.
(the really modern good selling ones)

as netgore cannot compare graphicswise,
I see the games using netgore needing very good game mechanics and story etc,
ut also featurewise it shoiuld seem as modern as other mmos

voice chat, seamless maps, the npc alliance stuff is quite modern,
and a particle effect engine make an engine look modern.

I see no future for pay2play games with netgore,
due to graphics (the project would seriously need KILLER 2D graphics)

but I'm sure that netgore has potential to bring some commercial free-to-play
(with item shop or something)

and for this I believe we should focus on the modern-seeming features all modern mmos have.

to the voicechat the bandwidth would be my only concern.
I mean its an entire voice server in nearly any direction at the same time.
I think one would need an own server for the Voicechat Software,
and have netgore support an easy implementation.

Like: Optionally entering some Teamspeak Server Data
and have it connect with a password (which is invisible to the user)
and netgore manages the rooms or so.
this is maybe a stupid example with teamspeak, there is probably far better software for this cause.
its a simple example.

but the voicechat audio is too big for a server hosted by the sizes of netgore users, IMO.
if people use it, i think they would prefer using a sideserver to do this dirty work.

Not sure why you think MMOs have to be 3d. Who cares whether it is 2d or 3d? It doesn't make a game worse or better, just different. Hell, my favorite online RPGs have all been 2d, but that is likely just coincidence, and that I am not a fan of "massive" games (which tend to be 3D).

As for competing against modern MMOs, that is definitely not my intention. No way I can afford the time required to even attempt that, especially for a free engine.

Who said MMOs had to be 3D? The only reason I even brought up voice chat is its a nice alternative if people are making fast paced action games. When your in a map with 30 enemies jumping around on platforms trying to kill you, you kinda don't have time to stop and type a message.

Well for the voice chat, if I do it, what I will likely do is have support for third party chat servers that you can access and manage via the game. So you can host a voice chat server on your game server if you want, or you can allow guilds to set the address to the guild voice chat server, party members to set the voice chat server used for the party, etc. Almost no overhead to the game server unless you actually host the chat server on the same machine.

the public masses all look at the graphics and when they hear 2d they first think "lol"

my fav games are for NES and SNES

and competing to most of the 3d free to play mmos is not too hard if you get people to look past the graphics.

Doesn't really make sense to concentrate on something like voice chat when most people aren't going to be using it.

Sure, it's a nice thing to have on the feature list, but it's a lot smarter to focus on other things like top-down support, multi-channel chat, mail, etc. first.

I got quite sick twice since I have been on break. Combined with Christmas, I haven't had much free time when not feeling like crap. Though I am finally better, so hopefully I'll get to work on these. Top-down support is the first thing on my work queue. After that, not sure. But I have the feeling I am not going to want to work on top-down specific things like seamless maps.

of course that would mean dropping xna which would just be silly for you to do at this point.

I spent a bit of time looking into what it would require to replace XNA with something else, and unfortunately it seems like a ton of work. It'd also be way too difficult to get XNA to work side-by-side with another renderer so you can just "choose" what renderer to use.

Still think it'd be something fun to do in the future, though.

A NetGore template for VS might be cool. Like how you can choose to start a new XNA Xbox360 Game or Empty Project etc., you could choose to start a NetDore Topdown Game and it'd set up the flags for you.

I haven't looked at how you'd go about doing that at all, but it would probably end up being something to look at later on if it takes some work.

IMO once you finish Netgore probably you could just create another (lean) top-down engine based on it and provide 2 separate downloads. Having a top-down engine sitting alongside a side-scroller engine to me would seem quite overbloated, a whole lot of code a side-scroller engine modder doesn't wanna see and visa-versa.

Well I have pretty much finished the top-down stuff. I have maybe 30-40 preprocessor directives related to it, but most of that resides in the engine, and doesn't make it too much more difficult to follow. If I wanted to have a lot better top-down support, I may just have to do separate projects, but honestly I don't think I am going to. I like to make a good engine everyone can use, but not if it means I won't have time to make my own game. I have been engines and not games for way too long now.

To switch between top-down and sidescroller, all you have to do is define the TOPDOWN preprocessor directive in all the projects and recompile. I added a build setting (DebugTopDown) to do this for you, too.

well these basics of stuff like mail, chat, rpg elements, etc are all shared between the 2.

of course sidescroller has many features you must focus on later,

but having a topdown netgore base is wicked...

for one the topdown and the sidescroller devs can share their code for chat systems, GUIs, skills, classes, what do i know

Dialog boxes with mugshots.

Like these from Latale
http://i41.tinypic.com/2vbkj8h.jpg

Something like RPG Maker would be nice too.
http://ui01.gamespot.com/544/game2_2.jpg

I wouldn't know how you would do that but I guess I would add a mysql field for each npc that would contain the mug grh or what ever so it hits the mysql field when it wants to display the mugshot grh for the character.

I'm confused as to what you mean. The text would be from the database, however having the graphics come from the database would be overpowered.

The dialog boxes use a tiling system. I actually used breezes RPGmaker windowskins to make my own GUI system as part of my portfolio for doing exactly what you showed. Its a very small tileset, but you set separate them with texture coords and create quads etc. Place, stretch and repeat them as necessary relative to the size and position of the element, that way you can resize the box and it will still look pixel perfect.