xoreos is a FLOSS project aiming to reimplement BioWare's Aurora engine (and derivatives), covering their games starting with Neverwinter Nights and potentially up to Dragon Age II. This post gives a short update on the current progress.
Note: This is a cross-post of a news item on the xoreos website.
The xoreos team is proud to announce the very first release of xoreos and xoreos-tools, version 0.0.2, nicknamed "Aribeth".
While xoreos is still far from being useful to end-users, all targeted games work insofar as that they at least show basic in-game areas. You can start the game, xoreos loads the game resources, loads a campaign or module, and then shows an area of the game. This accurately demonstrates what the xoreos project wants to accomplish.
Within the in-game area, you can fly around in a "spectator" mode, using the common first-person WASD control scheme. Moving the mouse while holding down the middle mouse button rotates the camera. With Ctrl+D, a debug console drops down, allowing for general resource dumping and the loading of different areas, modules and/or campaigns.
A few games, specifically Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic, also show a main menu, although the latter's is not as extensive yet. The former also shows a few in-game menu elements.
Additionally, Neverwinter Nights also has a script system hooked up, and preliminary dialogue support. This means that clicking on an NPC opens up its conversation dialog, and some of the script commands will be executed. For example, the door in the first area of the original campaign's prelude opens after speaking to Bim and telling him that no tutorial is necessary. However, triggering the tutorial leads to the scripts looping endlessly, because the necessary game functions are not implemented yet.
Further gameplay is still missing. At the moment, none of the other games have a script system.
The current graphics are very basic: only flat-shaded, textured meshes are shown. No lighting, shadows or shaders of any kind are currently available.
Please note that xoreos is still missing a GUI and needs to be started from the command line.
The accompanying xoreos-tools package includes command line tools that can be used to inspect the games' resource files and, as such, are meant primarily for developers.
Binaries for Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X are attached to the GitHub release, here for xoreos and here for xoreos-tools. Additionally, packages for various GNU/Linux distributions can be found on the OpenSuSE Build Service (here for xoreos, here for xoreos-tools) and in Arch Linux's AUR (here for xoreos, here for xoreos-tools).
Alternatively, the repository and the source tarballs contain PKGBUILD files in dists/arch/ and a debian build directory in dists/debian/, which can be used to build Arch Linux and Debian/Ubuntu packages, respectively.
And as always, we're looking for more developers to join us in our efforts to reimplement those 3D BioWare RPGs. If you would like to help, please feel free to contact us. :) Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Note: This is a cross-post of a news item on the xoreos website.
The xoreos team is proud to announce the very first release of xoreos and xoreos-tools, version 0.0.2, nicknamed "Aribeth".
While xoreos is still far from being useful to end-users, all targeted games work insofar as that they at least show basic in-game areas. You can start the game, xoreos loads the game resources, loads a campaign or module, and then shows an area of the game. This accurately demonstrates what the xoreos project wants to accomplish.
Within the in-game area, you can fly around in a "spectator" mode, using the common first-person WASD control scheme. Moving the mouse while holding down the middle mouse button rotates the camera. With Ctrl+D, a debug console drops down, allowing for general resource dumping and the loading of different areas, modules and/or campaigns.
A few games, specifically Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic, also show a main menu, although the latter's is not as extensive yet. The former also shows a few in-game menu elements.
Additionally, Neverwinter Nights also has a script system hooked up, and preliminary dialogue support. This means that clicking on an NPC opens up its conversation dialog, and some of the script commands will be executed. For example, the door in the first area of the original campaign's prelude opens after speaking to Bim and telling him that no tutorial is necessary. However, triggering the tutorial leads to the scripts looping endlessly, because the necessary game functions are not implemented yet.
Further gameplay is still missing. At the moment, none of the other games have a script system.
The current graphics are very basic: only flat-shaded, textured meshes are shown. No lighting, shadows or shaders of any kind are currently available.
Please note that xoreos is still missing a GUI and needs to be started from the command line.
The accompanying xoreos-tools package includes command line tools that can be used to inspect the games' resource files and, as such, are meant primarily for developers.
Binaries for Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X are attached to the GitHub release, here for xoreos and here for xoreos-tools. Additionally, packages for various GNU/Linux distributions can be found on the OpenSuSE Build Service (here for xoreos, here for xoreos-tools) and in Arch Linux's AUR (here for xoreos, here for xoreos-tools).
Alternatively, the repository and the source tarballs contain PKGBUILD files in dists/arch/ and a debian build directory in dists/debian/, which can be used to build Arch Linux and Debian/Ubuntu packages, respectively.
And as always, we're looking for more developers to join us in our efforts to reimplement those 3D BioWare RPGs. If you would like to help, please feel free to contact us. :) Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The goal is to have a game engine working or to fully port those awesome games to other OS'ses?
Last edited by khalismur on 27 July 2015 at 9:39 pm UTC
Well, to port them, but also to have the code be FLOSS. For me at least it's also an ideology thing. :P
I also doubt Aspyr would port KOTOR or NW2. Maybe DA: O...
Last edited by khalismur on 28 July 2015 at 4:33 pm UTC
Well, Aspyr has just ported KOTOR 2, why would they not port also KOTOR in the future?