Oppinions? thoughts? I am looking at it for the third installment of War of the souls. What do you guys think of the engine?

Like other commercial grade engines, it's tailored towards a specific market; what platform are you aiming to push the game to; and what features in the engine would you consider essential?

Well they come with a already made RPG sample I was planning to rip apart. Its just a shame it uses xml to place object on the map and what not.

I am looking for side view battle system. Compatible with PC and easy to learn. I know Java, C# cant be that hard to learn. I know the basics and it will take some time to learn. I would be XNA 4.0

To be honest; any serious engine will separate the logic e.t.c and store things such as object placement in XML (or similar) format. It's not a shame, it's a good thing.

Nothing would stop you from creating a side view battle system in C#. Our original prototype PC engine was essentially a combination of C and Lua; you're honestly not limited by what you want to implement (take the battle system on our blog; that's Lua on top of Obj-C).

I have been working with XNA for a few months now. You can do just whatever you want and of course it has plenty of additional possibilities if compared with RPG Maker (and I have done almost everything with RMXP). Not to mention the speed (which is the reason why I left RMXP). And you have a potential user base which is orders of magnitude larger than that of RPG Maker.
If you want to go commercial, the only problem is resources, certainly not programming your game. If you know C, Java or C++, C# is nothing to be worried about.
Btw, if you want to team up, let me know. Check out my videos to see what I already have done with the engine.

I agree with Akisoft and Charlie. XNA is a great engine to use and I considered leaving RMXP for it a few times. The main reason being, like Charlie mentioned, the speed. RPG Makers are very inefficient engines performance-wise and C#, despite being a language with a high level of abstraction, is much faster than Ruby.
And of course, you won't hit the same limitations that RPG Maker too.

While i like the coding aspect one thing i don't like doing by hand is the XML and mapping. Is there a rpg maker converter program that will allow you to say map, create items, classes and characters and just export that to XNA? or am I thinking too far ahead?

Why would you do mapping by hand in XML? Use Tiled and export it to XML format, use a parser to import the data (write one if it doesn't exist; we use a parser in our iPhone engine).

http://www.mapeditor.org (Tiled).

For the most part, you'll be creating your own storage system for items, e.t.c; you could quite easily write a simple GUI to insert this information. In our engine, we use SQLite to store data such as characters, items, e.t.c; so using the SQLite browser is an efficient way to insert data. Maps are stored in XML format (output by Tiled) and then read in to the engine and rendered.

I am assuming that tool exports to xml for xna? I havent looked at in depth as of yet

You'd have to write something to parse the XML, render the visual; e.t.c - you'd be responsible for implementing collision detection as well. There may already be an existing library to do this; but I'm unsure.

If you can't grasp C# there's always game maker, I left RPG Maker a long time ago mainly because of it's limitations even with RGSS.
Also I would not recommend or even think about using that RPG Template as it's pretty horrid if you ask me and that's from a programming perspective. I think you should learn C# efficiently before even tackling the RPG Genre.

XNA is a fantastic engine. I had the pleasure of working with it for a while. That is.... until I couldn't play my games at decent speed because of the lack of a good computer...
However it isn't too easy, at least, not to me, lol. The hardest part would be graphic design. You really need to have talent for that.
A fantastic thing about XNA is that you can make games for Xbox and Windows Phone. And it is 100% free!

Just don't get mad too easy, people without patience cannot complete a whole project with scripting by themselves. You would have to get a team for anything serious.

System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer (there's also SharpSerializer if you prefer that)

XNA is great; however it is not an engine. Its an SDK much like DirectX.

I'm referring to the overall system of parsing and rendering the map, not just iterating over the XML.

just so we're clear, XNA isn't an engine, it's a graphics API. it's just a raw interface to draw graphics on the screen. It may come with a few utility classes but over all you'll have to program most of the "engine" part yourself. that means all the classes that define how to display a map how to draw the character, how to animate said character. battle system. all that will have to be programed form scratch. you;ll have a lot of work a head of you, not that that is a bad thing, but you need to be aware of it.

XNA covers much more than graphics. It's still a library but complete enough to be called an "engine".
Although yes, on a pure technical standpoint it is not.

Necropost-lock.