Sphere RPG Engine 1.0

Sphere RPG Engine project is a role-playing game creation engine.

Sphere is a RPGCE (a role-playing game (RPG) creation engine) that allows you to relatively easily put together an RPG along the lines of Final Fantasy 6 or Phantasy Star.

It supports 32-bit graphics (with 256 levels of translucency) and MP3, Ogg, MOD, S3M, IT, and XM files for audio (and WAV and SPX (speex) for sound effects), and does not place arbitrary limits on map, tile set, sprite set, or script sizes.

It also supports the three standard modes of input for games: keyboard, mouse, and joystick.

Sphere uses SpiderMonkey (Mozillas JavaScript implementation) for scripting. JavaScript is a very powerful, easy, and flexible language.

The core Sphere engine, after being installed, can run several games. This means that the games dont have to be distributed with the engine, saving download time and disk space. Also, the games can be run on other operating systems, such as Linux, if the engine runs there. On the other hand, you can include the Sphere engine with your game so that Windows users can run your game out of the box.

The Sphere engine is based around maps. Maps use tilesets, which are collections of tiles. A map of a beach would have tiles that represent the sand, the water, clouds, signs, and anything else on the beach. Sphere has support for animated tiles.

Torches could flicker in a cave, or waves could lap at the shore. Maps support unlimited layers, each with parallax and automatic scrolling.

Objects in Sphere are represented as entities. Townspeople are defined with spritesets, which are collections of frames. People can walk in eight directions, and have special directions (usually used for emotions or running). Unlike most RPG engines, spritesets in Sphere have a variable size. Large animal spritesets are used just as easily as people.