Brief
xoreos is an ongoing FLOSS project to reimplement BioWare's Aurora engine (and derivatives) as used in their 3D games, beginning with Neverwinter Nights, up to and including Dragon Age 2.. The goal is to have a portable program to play those games even on operating systems they were never meant to be played on, such as GNU/Linux and Mac OS X.
While xoreos itself is free software licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 or later (GPLv3+), it requires the original (proprietary) game data of those games and as such, xoreos is akin to projects like ScummVM, ResidualVM and GemRB
Current status
In its current state, xoreos is still far away from its goal. At the moment, we are able to load resource archives and read basic file formats. Video and sound playing works, models are partially supported, and for earlier games, areas are shown and even some very basic gameplay exists.
Specifically, the "most implemented" game in xoreos is the first Neverwinter Nights game. The main menu works partially, and you can select a module or game to play and a character to play it with. Then the module loads, showing its entry area in which you can fly around in a kind of "spectator mode". Clicking on objects or creatures starts their default action, for example starting a conversation with an NPC. Scripts are partially evaluated: the door in the entry area of the NWN OC opens itself after telling the NPC beside it that you don't require a camera tutorial. Of course, with a lot of systems and script functions still left to implement, the game does not progress much further.
Secondly, there's the two Knights of the Old Republic games. Again, the main menu, modules and areas work partially, but the script system is not hooked in yet, and dialogues don't work either.
Recently, I worked on getting the Neverwinter Nights 2 areas in a similar state. I wrote a blog post about it.
Currently, I'm reversing the model format for Jade Empire, and when those are implemented, I plan to extend basic area loading to Jade Empire as well.
Help wanted
With such a massive project, there's of course a lot of demand for additional contributors. We need people who have fun reverse-engineering the games, implementing file format loaders and furthering the game engines in xoreos. There's no real roadmap, but there is a (non-exhaustive) TODO list with some pointers on where to start.
So please, contact us!
Further information
- Website: https://xoreos.org/
- git repository: https://github.com/xoreos/xoreos
- Project wiki: https://wiki.xoreos.org/ - Running xoreos, Developer information
- IRC channel: #xoreos on irc.freenode.net
- Mailing list: xoreos-devel(at)xoreos.org