Eldiron: A Next-Generation Retro RPG Creator

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Eldiron is a cross-platform creator for classic retro role-playing games (RPGs). Its primary goal is to enable the creation of RPGs reminiscent of the 1980s and 1990s while incorporating modern features such as multiplayer support, procedural content generation, and more.

Eldiron natively supports 2D (like Ultima 4/5), isometric, and first-person RPGs, allowing developers to craft a variety of experiences effortlessly.

Eldiron is open-source and licensed under the MIT License.

For a more detailed feature overview please visit Eldiron.com

2D Example	3D Example

Source Code

Eldiron is built on three embedded crates that I have developed over the last years. Each focuses on a specific aspect of the engine and editor, and together they form the foundation of the Eldiron ecosystem.

• TheFramework Handles cross-platform window creation, user event abstraction, and the custom UI system used by Eldiron Creator.

• Rusterix Started as a software rasterizer for 2D and 3D geometry, but has since evolved into the core game engine. While SceneVM now handles most rendering tasks, the software rasterization aspect of Rusterix is still used for example in in-game UI elements.

• SceneVM An abstracted, layer-based renderer for 2D and 3D built on top of wGPU. Each layer can define its own geometry and compute shaders, making SceneVM the main rendering backbone of Eldiron.

Over the past five years, Eldiron has gone through several major iterations. As a result, some parts of the code are in the process of being consolidated or phased out as the project moves toward a cleaner v1 architecture.

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Installation

Pre-built Binaries

Download the latest release for your platform from the GitHub Releases page.

Install via Cargo

If you have Rust installed, you can install Eldiron Creator and the Client directly from crates.io:

cargo install eldiron-creator
cargo install eldiron-client

Building from Source

Clone the repository and build:

git clone https://github.com/markusmoenig/Eldiron
cd Eldiron
cargo run --release --package creator

Linux Dependencies

Make sure these dependencies are installed: libasound2-dev libatk1.0-dev libgtk-3-dev

License

The source and all assets I commissioned for Eldiron are licensed under the MIT.

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in Eldiron, shall be MIT licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

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Sponsor

If you’d like to support the Eldiron project, please consider joining my Patreon, join my GitHub Sponsor or send a Donation. Your support helps me continue development, commission tilesets, host databases and forums, and more.