vbGore Free Online RPG Engine

I'm a believer in this project; I've ponied up money to Spodi to help with development. Now that things seem pretty well stabilized, I'm wondering: What are the main disadvantages, if any, to choosing VBGore over other systems?

I'm pretty well aware of the advantages. I think I'll end up choosing VBGore anyhow. But I'd like to know what I'm getting into.

My game's (ideal) parameters:

-No 'hard classes', levels, or XP.

-Combat akin to 16-bit Zelda.

-Heavy emphasis on NPC interaction; dialogue trees, NPCs behaving differently in response to your choices, etc.

-A changing world around you; if someone overthrows the king, the king's actually overthrown, and the artwork on the walls of the castle changes, the guards change, etc.

-Lots of global variables (i.e. is the king overthrown), variables local to each player (i.e. how does the king feel about you), and variables local to NPCs (i.e. is the NPC currently resting at home or out in the market). No XP or 'hard classes', though, as previously mentioned.

-Lots of Zelda-y 'adventure/puzzle' mechanics. Kill all the enemies in a room, and a chest appears. Push a block along the floor to solve a puzzle. Walk on floating platforms that move you along with them. Break open a wall to find a secret area. Flip levers in a sequence to solve a puzzle. Fall down a pit and end up on a lower floor of a dungeon. etc. etc.

-Lots of content. No XP/level grind means a larger world than normal to keep people having things to do.

I'm looking for the best engine suited to doing this, either off the bat or with coding on the side. So far, that seems to be VBgore, but I'd like to know the limits I'm looking at.

The ONLY limits you will run into with using vbGORE are the limits of Visual Basic itself. It's open source, which means you have the freedom to change what you want, where you want.
So with saying that, I believe that one disadvantage about this is your knowledge of VB. It's not one of those instant-MMO engines. You really have to plan out your project, put some time and effort into it, and work with it. Unfortunately the majority of people who look for ORPG engines are the ones who expect to download the source, change the name, make a few maps, and think they can publish a game.
If you don't have more than average experience with Visual Basic, then the vbGORE engine itself can be looked at as a disadvantage.

Well, I used to use VB back when it was VisualBasic for Windows 3.1... but it's been a while. I suppose I can always hop back in, though.

You'll not have that much learning to do if you're already familiar with how programming languages work in general. =]

Of the general objectives I'd laid out above, would anyone be so kind as to tell me which are:

-Already included in the VBGore release -- no coding needed, only scripting perhaps or using the tools provided?

-Easy to do with a bit of coding, or the borrowing of simple code from common, opensource projects?

-Will require more intensive, specialized coding and time to set-up?

Sorry if that's general, I really appreciate the feedback though.

There is no scripting in vbGORE.
Small Changes:
Removing exp etc
Major changes:
pretty much anything

whats already implemented:
chatting, basic npc interaction, basic combat, etc

Well it really does depend if you know how to use Visual basic all together. But there is Limits.

Limits such as?

The limits of VB6 as a language. Time constraint limits, vbGore requires a lot of it.

Funny,

Whenever somebody is not sure whether to try vbGore, everyone goes out and encourages him to use it without knowing the guys background.

Whenever somebody says that want to do a change in vbGore but doesn't know how to, everyone goes out and tells him that vbGore is not an engine to be taken lightly, ultimately this guy is told to learn vb6.

My take on it is this. You NEED a decent amount of vb6 knowledge (not just programming in general but vb6 specifically). You also need a high amount of diligence, to do anything in vbGore takes quite a lot of time, in comparison to other engines.

Why choose vbGore? Because its the minimum standard required in making any multilayer online game. Simply put, the alternatives such as Mirage Source / Eclipse and other VB6 based engines do not achieve this minimum standard. If you expect to have more than 5 players simultaneously without writing your own engine, you MUST use vbGore or better.

Yes... multilayer.

I wouldn't count the limits of vb6 as a limit to the engine itself, after all you could write sections of code in C++ and use DLLs for parts of your code if you really wanted to.

Not wort the time if you ask me...

Basically I encourage anyone to use vbGORE, if they dont wanna wrtite from scratch.

Thats a fact xD

Well I wasn't suggesting that people actually do that. It's not worth it. You can add practically anything you would want to to you vbGORE code without having to use things like DLLs.

""Simply put, the alternatives such as Mirage Source / Eclipse and other VB6 based engines do not achieve this minimum standard. If you expect to have more than 5 players simultaneously without writing your own engine, you MUST use vbGore or better.""

The 'or better' part of this sentence is interesting to me. Is there an arguably superior alternative to VBGore out there? There's Mirage, Eclipse, and...?

vbGore is the only vb6 one that achieves this, and probably the best out of the overworld rpg oriented engines.

But there are other engines in other languages, like C++, Java, etc. A friend of a friend was making one in C++, hes been doing it for years and hasn't finished. You could get a Java engine, but theres the issue of deployment (unless its browser based). So far i think im probably one of the only ones making a 2d browser based game using a 3d api in Java, the current java ones are fake 3d or blitting.

The rest like JME (java monkey engine) and others are 3d based so there would be a lot of work involved in making a 2d game. I guess i was vague, what i meant was that obviously there are better engines out there like ones that cost money (Unreal Engine).

However, if your going to use vbGore you need diligence. Can't stress it enough, so many people have given up because of the effort required to edit and understand the code in comparison to mirage source, etc.

However give vbGore a crack, if you don't like it, hang around on the forums and wait for the C# engine to come out, its a lot better.

*coughrunescapecough*