   Maplestory library
  Hi all I'm new to game programming. I around 4 years experience with PHP and minimal experience in C++. I am learning game programming right now by using the Allegro library with C++. Now the game Maplestory, if you didn't know is a 2D side-scrolling RPG. I want to create a came in a way like that, in the sense that you have a character with a certain amount of HP and MP. You go around killing little things and there are a few different maps. But before I dig deep into Allegro, is there another library or engine that would be better for this? Any tips and suggestions? I just don't want to get deep into it, to later find out Allegro is a newbie library that is of no use. I'm looking to learn a professional library lots of advanced game programmers use if possible. ;)Edit: I found a good example of what I want to do, but is an engine what I need? Anyways heres the video I found: Also can anyone tell if Maplestory is tile based with sprites? Also what do they make the maps with or how can I make similar maps with platforms, etc?   
  Does it need to be multiplayer? If so, your options are pretty limited. If not, there are quite a lot of choices.   ;  Well eventually it would be nice to learn to setup a server to play this game on. Either way, I'm learning SDL as I type this, but if SDL doesn't work over the internet then I might need to switch libraries.   ;  "Also can anyone tell if Maplestory is tile based with sprites? Also what do they make the maps with or how can I make similar maps with platforms, etc?"It certainly looks tile-based to me; I can see repeats in designs.It would certainly make sense from a MM perspective; it would allow the server to send down new parts to existing area reasonably quickly (because it's just a grid of numbers). You could fairly easily extend that to sending new tiles (send the graphics block, send the walkability data) making the map extremely flexible. This solves two problems -- getting new content out to the users and also neatly prevents people hacking the client and revealing the map..They're hiding the tilebasedness to some extent by using large background graphics; there's no reason these can't be either many tiles stitched together or images which simple extend over more than one tile.What could you use to do this? Look at projects like http://tilestudio.sourceforge.net/