Frost Engine - WoWRL (formerly World of Warcraft: Raid Leader)

World of Warcraft may just be the most popular video game ever to be released, with millions of players constantly competing against each other. The huge amount of content it gathered over the years can keep you glued to the screen for just as long, especially if you like to explore every inch of the massive world designed by Blizzard.

Frost Engine – WoWRL is a game engine that enables you to import objects and models from the original World of Warcraft, in order to use them into your own adventures. Thus, you can devise new stories and landscapes, using the characters borrowed from the game and mostly everything else you are able to extract and import into the engine.

At the core of the 3D graphics provided by the utility lays the Ogre 3D engine, which is an open source library capable of rendering more than convincing landscapes to emulate the World of Warcraft environment. It is also capable of detailed animations, allowing you to control the way characters move and react on screen, depending the actions they undertake.

One useful feature built into the engine is the ability to change between viewpoints, thanks to the integrated camera controls. Thus, you are allowed to switch between the third-person perspective and the top view at the press of a button, depending on what you are trying to achieve. Using the third-person viewpoint, the character can be controlled the same way it is in the actual game, using your keyboard to move around and the mouse to control the camera.

The top view, on the other hand, is mostly useful in case you need an overall picture of the map, since it allows you to zoom in and out with ease and basically without any limits. Hence, you can design and edit maps much easier, thanks to the very useful bird-eye view that enables you to have total control over the environment.

In the end, although Frost Engine – WoWRL does not provide you with too many objects from the get-go, it is a very good starting point for anyone interested in game design. You do, however, need to be very skilled when it comes to programming, since you have to take it from scratch when it comes to model implementation and the rest of the gameplay elements.