So you want to make a 2.5D game?

[lawrenceofarabia]

I am making this topic to address the issue that people keep bringing up about wanting to make an adventure game in 3d. Here is the "short list" of most popular 3d game making engines. In no particular order.

DarkBasic
Blitz3D
GameStudio
OGRE
CrystalSpace

By far the best one in my opinion is OGRE3d. Platform-independent, highly performant, stable, extensible, open source, well designed, based in c++ and its free... Ogre seems to have it all. Even better than commercial products (I can see someone putting Doom3 to shame with this thing). I'll gladly admit I felt like a little child opening a giant box of presents when I went through the samples folder for the first time. Not a lot of excuses left to not write that game you're talking about now.

It is however only a Graphics Rendering Engine, as the name suggests. You'll need to use other libraries for other functionality. For example;

Sound; Fmod, OpenAL, Audiere, SDL_Mixer
Physics; NovodeX, ODE, Newton, Caledyn, Tokamak (I have even seen ragdoll physics features wow!)
Networking; RakNet, etc
Etc; etc
There are many many posts on their forum discussing the use of such external libraries with Ogre.

If you want to learn to program games and have fun at the same time I'd also recommend that you join a MUD as a coder. A lot of MUDs are written using C or LPC and that'll help greatly in your mission to learn C++. Most MUDs will be happy to sign you on ( cause you're working for free ) and there will nearly always be another coder around who can help and teach you. For those newcomers who might not know what a MUD is think of it as a "old school text Everquest ".

If you don't know how to program in c++ though really I've got to tell you that your being overambitious in a way. Now maybe your a super genious like Stephen Hawking or something. In that case I would say sure, learn C++ and Ogre at the same time. But if your not going to win a Nobel Peace Prize someday you really need to put in the time to learn C++ before you even think of writing a 3d game. I know that sounds boring when you compare it to doing cool stuff in 3d but 3d is really " the deep end of the pool ". If you don't want to drown put on some floaties first and dogpaddle around the kiddie pool. 

good luck!

I am by no means even a decent programmer but thats my 2 cents.