Forums » Impact Engine » One question before buying...

I've done my research and I'm strongly considering purchasing this engine, but I have one question before doing so. Does this engine allow players to edit the map in real time? I'm planning on building a game that requires players to build bases and I'm wondering if they will be able to do that. Something similar to like Age of Empires or Command and Conquer. Can they add structures like that?

It's possible to edit maps in real time. However you don't need it to build bases actually.

That being said, there isn't any ready solution to change the map on the fly as far as I know. You need to code an in-game level editor to do that.

My opinion is that impact is more suited to platformer style games. For RTS type, you need to fiddle with the code.

I think you could do RTS-type games. You have bounding box collision, distance between entities, you can map where the mouse is pointing to where it is in the game world (selecting units).

I think it could work. You would have to disable gravity and you probably wouldn't have a collision map per-se... but I can see it.

In my opinion there's precious little you CAN'T do in Impact. If the is 2D, you can do it. One of my earliest games with impact was a bejeweled-ish game: http://krisjet.com/jahuweled/

It doesn't use any collision code or gravity but it's all written in impact, and I don't think there would be any issues with making an RTS other than the usual RTS type problems, like pathfinding and stuff. You won't get as much code for free as you would with a platformer, but in my opinion most games need a lot of custom code anyway.

Well I would plan on using completely custom code. I would hand write all of it. My biggest question is whether or not people would be able to modify maps or not. I would want this to be a multiplayer game, so I would want the map to get edited, updated for everyone, and saved.

There isn't much that isn't possible. If impact doesn't have something out of the box you can always write up a plugin to extend it's functionality. You also can easily access the Canvas 2d API to do anything HTML5 lets you do.

Thanks for all of the replies! I purchased the engine last night and accomplished more in 2 hours than I did in 8 hours using MelonJS. Definitely worth the money!