DimensioneX Multiplayer Engine
DimensioneX is an Open Source and totally free Multiplayer Engine designed for beginners and for quick development.
Aimed at producing browser-based multiplayer games and environments in general, it has been around since 1999 and has been used for MMORPG games, research, education and promotional applications.
Written in Java and supporting a number of languages including eastern languages such as Chinese and Russian, DimensioneX has been supported by SourceForge.net since its beginning.
Key Features
- The game world is defined via a simple dedicated language, named DXW (DimensioneX World) format. The syntax lets the programmer to define quickly rooms, doors/links, items, characters.
- All the remaining necessary interaction is then added via an object-oriented scripting language that is very similar to Visual Basic/VBScript.
- The engine is not a graphics engine, the client is a combination of a server-generated combination of HTML, Javascript. Scene graphics is obtained by stacking static images and icons provided by the programmer.
- The engine supports in-game sounds and music, as well as flash files and other types of files.
Games
- One of the most popular games written with DimensioneX is the Fantasy MMORPG Game Sottomondo whose English version is known as Underworld Online.
- Network Arena, sci-fi MMORPG.
- Another one that is fairly popular in Italy was Dragon Hunter
References
- Since 2003 it is successfully used at the DAMS Multimedia university course at University of Turin, Italy as a training platform for the development of multimedia multiplayer environments.
- In 2005 it was used at Tromsø, Norway in the FINNET project to experiment roleplay in training, in particular applied to language.
- Starting from December 2005, it was used in Bologna and Ferrara, Italy to teach programming to kids: in a few lessons they were able to develop MMORPG games from scratch.