Wondering if you guys would have any recommendations for a diablo or torchlight style game engine? I am a third year CS student and I have made tons of small project in video gaming, tetris, pacman, snake, text based game, etc. Now I want to start on a big project for my winter break and I wanted to start making a diablo style top down RPG but the engines I have used wouldn't exactly work so any info would be awesome! Thanks, I am familiar with C, Java, Python, PHP if that helps.

Both Torchlight and Torchlight II use the OGRE 3D Graphics Engine I believe, however this is of course only a graphics engine.

Any particular specific requirements for your engine?

Personally I'd recommend the Unity engine which uses C# for scripting. (The transition shouldn't be difficult if you already know C and Java.) If you'd like to stick to using Java then there's the jMonkeyEngine.

Hope that helps.

Now I want to start on a big project for my winter break and I wanted to start making a diablo style top down RPG but the engines I have used wouldn't exactly work so any info would be awesome!

What engines have you already tried? In what way would they not work? I'm sure with at least some of them you can somehow kluge it around to get it to work for a top-down rpg.

But I would have to agree with Geraint about Unity if you want to go 3d. But if you're going for 2d (which may or may not be easier), since you already know Python, there's always Pygame. It's not technically an engine, just a set of modules on top of SDL, but it is definitely possible to make a full-fledged rpg with it. Both Unity and Pygame are pretty easy to work with (in my opinion), and have a lot of resources, info, and tutorials out on the Net.

There's also Panda3d. However, I haven't actually used this one before, so I can't tell you if it's decent or not. It has been used in several commercial games (some of which are almost like the top-down rpg thing you're going for). So you might want to give it a try, since it uses Python.

And I didn't think it existed, but google proved me wrong; there is a game engine with PHP as a scripting language, Raydium. I have no idea what it's like or if it will suit your purposes, though. But I guess it's something to check out if PHP is one of your strengths.