My impressions, in a nutshell:

"Hey this looks cool. There must be a demo, right?"

"Okay well I had to follow like 4 links to the demo and do way more reading than I should have had to just to see a demo of something whose main feature is that it runs in a browser. Because I'm currently viewing all of this... in a browser."

"Finally found the demo link... cool, looks like it is loading up!........... Login via Facebook? Are you fucking kidding me?"

</close tab>

Thanks to HN comments I see that there is actually a way to demo this without a Facebook login, but lack of an instant right-in-your-face demo for something that is browser based is a huge failure of marketing this thing.

I really wanted to try it out, but unfortunately a facebook account is required to even see the demo, and I don't have one. I know developers these days hate writing any code they don't have to, but facebook only? Out the door to hang out in the gutter with spotify. Ah well.

This version seems fine: http://www.isogenicengine.com/offline/iso_city/

It seems very buggy to me, is it supposed to be? Otherwise, really cool demo.

Hey, could you let me know what bugs you saw and what browser you were using? Cheers!

Hey guys, appreciate the comments... I'm the dev over at www.isogenicengine.com. The demos are still works in progress and mobile support is coming soon.

I'm just one guy working on this in my spare time (I have a full-time day job too) so things move a little slower sometimes that I would like! Currently looking for investment to get a full team to help!

Regarding the Node.js requirement, there is an offline version of the engine that runs on any standard web-host. It has all the network and server-side code stripped out.

Agree that the demo page has a lot to read, but it's written for developers rather than players so tech info is there to explain what the demo is showing (and what it's not).

A much more complete demo is on it's way I promise! :)

Completely fails on iOS (iPhone 4). My browser is a fully featured html5 browser. I'm ok with it maybe being slower than a desktop, but it should at least run and resize itself to the screen.

This was very interesting to me, since I'm looking for an isometric game engine for a project I'll be starting in a few months.

Thoughts- The counter read 218FPS, but it FELT slow. Any action (bring down the drop down menu) took FOREVER.

I signed in with FB, but would not have if I was a consumer. I immediately revoked access, before closing the app. God, this is a bold ("dumb?") move on the engine developer's part. There's no way I'd even consider the engine if this is a real requirement.

Is there no way to zoom in? This seems to be one of the big advantages to this type of game engine, versus a straight-on 2d engine, like Monkey Island.. I should be able to zoom these..

This seems very dedicated to a SimCity type game. What about Diablo, or Fallout style games?

When I had a man standing on a plot by himself, not moving, it still seems to set the rectangle to be dirty. Why? Because he "Could" move? That seems unnecessary.

The CPU on this seems higher than it ought to be on modern HW.

Overall, interesting project, I'll be watching this.

I was actually just looking into this right before this was posted.

A big pain is setting up a Virtual Box just to use the server. Wish there were a Windows version of that. I also wish there were demos for other (non-isometric) multiplayer games. There's video of a platformer, but there's no live demo for it (nor is it multiplayer, far as I can tell.)

Still this is the best starting block for an HTML5/Node.js online game engine I can find. Will definitely be looking more into it.

I'm not sure if anyone else had this problem, but using Chrome (14.0.835.202) on OSX, I had my CPU shoot to 100% and pretty much become unresponsive. YMMV.

hold you horses everyone, we need to see the value in this.

1. it's a html5 game engine that helps you build isometric style games

2. the mobile version isn't working atm, but it'll be soon. Have talked to the guys abt this

3. they provide pretty much an end to end solution (writing the first line of code to server hosting )

4. with a single code base you can deploy to multiple platforms. Sure, the performance varies a bit now, but it's only going to get better.

You're using this Ben?

OK, those are the pros.

The cons:

1) Facebook 2) see #1

i'm sure you can modify the code to not use facebook. it's just javascript after all

So I can finally create that web-based sim city mmorpg I've always dreamed about?

All seriousness aside, however -- what in the world would you do with this thing?

With an isometric game engine? Some frigging awesome games have been built on such things - Diablo 1 and 2 for instance!

All of these games were made with isometric graphics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Video_games_with_isome...

That's along the lines of what you might do with it.

Well seems to be a good choice for casual facebook social games such as Farmville.