Developer Markus Moenig reached out to make us — and, by extension, all of you out there — aware of a new game engine that he’s working on: Eldiron.

Eldiron is cross platform and runs on all Desktops. The game client will work on Desktops but also on iOS and Android devices and any other device Rust compiles on. It is designed from the ground up to be extremely portable.

Eldiron comes with a range of freely usable tilemaps for environment and characters, however you can of course use your own tilemaps, see the instructions below.

The game engine contains client and server modules, although currently no multi-player options exist yet, the code has been written with multi-player support in mind from the ground up.

Support for retro 3D areas like dungeons is upcoming. In general I want to explore many different ways to display and create content, from procedurally created tiles to 3D assets. These kind of features will get implemented over time.

I’ve reached out to Markus to confirm how the game will work on mobile devices, and whether mobile support will mean that games developed with the engine will have to be hosted online. For the time being, his focus is on ensuring that the engine fully supports the creation of Ultima 4/Ultima 5-like games, though it should also support using Ultima 6-like tiles…or any other square tiles, for that matter. The two tilesets that ship with Eldiron at this time feature 16×16 graphics.

Because development is still in early stages, binaries of Eldiron are not yet available. If you want to check it out, you’ll have to install it using Rust’s package manager, cargo:

Eldiron is written in Rust, to run it you have to install Rust and its package manager cargo. Please follow the instructions on this page.

After you successfully installed Rust, check out this repository (or download the source via a .zip file), open a terminal, navigate to the Eldiron directory and start Eldiron with cargo run --release.

At a later stage I will provide pre-build binaries for each platform.

Eldiron is licensed under the MIT license, and you can follow its development progress at its GitHub repository. Markus also maintains a Discord server for Eldiron, and is accepting donations via Patreon to support continued work on the engine.