xoreos is an in-development effort to create a free and open source game engine reimplementation of the BioWare Aurora Engine that powers games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
It's finally had a new release with xoreos 0.0.6 and it still seems like quite early days for games being playable. This release appears to have laid the groundwork for more improvements to come. The biggest change is that the original Knights of the Old Republic now has a partially working tutorial, it doesn't sound like a lot but for a reimplementation project it's quite a big step forwards to show what it can be capable of.
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On top of that, work went into x to have Knights of the Old Republic and Knights of the Old Republic II build off a 'common base', meaning they share a lot of code now and it makes things easier. Sounds like Knights of the Old Republic II has some early game interactions now possible too. Again, small but important steps. Having both of these games properly working in a free and open source game engine would be pretty awesome for modding, portability and so much more to extend their life further.
They mentioned that a lot of other user-invisible work went into this release too including:
- Partial implementations of ActionScript and Scaleform GFx for Dragon Age menus
- Partial implementations of XACT WaveBanks and SoundBanks for Jade Empire
- Partial implementations of FMOD SampleBanks and Events for Dragon Age: Origins
- Partial implementations of Wwise SoundBanks for Dragon Age II
- WebM (Matroska + VPx) support for the Enhanced Edition of Neverwinter Nights
- Support for big-endian GFF4 files found in console ports
- Support for resource files found in mobile ports
- Support for more Neverwinter Nights 2 structures
See the release announcement here. As it's such a big project like other reimplementation efforts, they could use some help. Be sure to check out the GitHub and get in touch with their team.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Still, good luck to them. KOTOR works pretty well under WINE (or Proton), but the exciting thing about a reimplementation is making it work better than the original.
As far as I understand, the reason is that xoreos is a bit too big for him to really sink his teeth in. Interestingly, he's gotten pretty far in a short amount of time (the current commit history doesn't really show it, because he flattened the whole thing down when he changed project name yesterday).
It's not a rivalry or anything, and not a "loss" for xoreos, just to make it clear. I'm hoping to basically take what he's learned and apply it to xoreos once his thing is further along. Or maybe he'll even put this into xoreos himself later, we'll see :)
The FLOSS space has a lot of people branching off to do their own, especially when they want to experiment more and have a cleaner test-bed for those experiments.
FLOSS is great and all when people can be creative, but maybe they should put their efforts together instead of having multiple projects doing the same thing.
KotOR 1 and 2 and DAO are all great games, both story and gameplay wise, and hold up quite well nowadays (unlike, say, Planescape: Torment, where combat is a chore). A full recreation could open a lot of possibilities in terms of quality of life, fixes, mods, or just pure compatibility in the future.
I guess it was the correct choice to stop recording there and not move on to the next rooms for further "combat" :PI've seen similar combat scenes with ReGoth. I think there are more important things at this point of development
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