FreeGameDev

Hello,

I would like to propose a new idea for freegamer. What about cooperatively writing articles by community?

I propose topic - open source replacement engines

I'm not sure if it's good - because those games aren't fully open source.

Content:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

Game industry created many great games in it's history. Despite many years that have passed since those games was released, they still have many fans. Among those fans there are computer programmers, who gives those games new lives - by reimplementing game engines. This gives opportunity to launch games on modern computers / different operating systems. Also, those games can be run in higher resolution, with replacement graphics, mods etc.

Important notice - Those games aren't fully FOSS, because they need data from original games.

VCMI http://forum.vcmi.eu/portal.php
VCMI project aims at developing replacement engine for Heroes Of Might And Magic 3 with Wake Of Gods addon. Project is already on playable state, but many features still needs to be implemented. It supports higher resolutions than standard heroes 3 resolution (800x600). After reimplementing all features, team is planning to add support for scripting languages (lua and python are considered) and modding (like adding new towns).

Free Heroes 2 http://sourceforge.net/projects/fheroes2/
Similar to VCMI but aimed at Heroes Of Might And Magic 2. Game is in playable state [needs verification], it's customizable (you can change monster statistics etc) in xml files and also supports Pocket PC.


Enough for now. Feel free to change everything, add new games, enhance descriptions. If you change content, paste it completely (i think it would be best way).

Some more projects, which could be described:
http://www.openttd.org/en/
http://code.google.com/p/corsix-th/
http://www.descent2.de/
http://sf.net/projects/gemrb
(i thought about more projects, but forgot for now :P)

I think it would be great to work a multi-author post. I recommend http://etherpad.com/ for this.

OpenTTD has moved beyond needing the commercial game's data.

http://openmw.sf.net - TES3: Morrowind

http://uhexen2.sourceforge.net/ - Hammer of Thrion / uHexen 2

And if you want to flame a few people, add the Spring TA based mods

http://www.scummvm.org/

The granddaddy.

Browsing sf.net.. found a few things:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/dunelegacy/ "Updated clone of Westood Studios' Dune2 which uses data files from the game. New features include multiple unit selection/control, high resolution support, multiplayer gaming via tcp/ip, improved gui. (PS: This project is no longer dead:)"
https://sourceforge.net/projects/zod/ "Zod Engine is a remake of the 1996 classic game by Bitmap Brothers called Z. Z is a capture the flag style RTS. In this game you command robots and vehicles with the purpose of destroying the enemy's fort. Please visit http://zzone.lewe.com/ for more "

barras FIFE fallout ?
iris ? (when it's done i guess)
also clones/inspired games/remakes like opendungeons, freeciv, simultrans, hedgewars, ufoai, ultimate-smash-friends etc ?
old games/engines gone opensource ? openarena being a famous example, and two minor ones that i've heard about (have the original ones in my shelf) marathon aleph one, exile ? ur-quan-masters(star control) and freespace or so as well ?

As for remakes i propose another post for them.

Exult: http://exult.sourceforge.net/

TheAncientGoat {l Wrote}:And if you want to flame a few people, add the Spring TA based mods

Apropos Spring, I recently stumbled upon an interesting project: Engines of War
They want to make a DotA-like game with mechs.

KeeperFX a reimplementation of the good old Dungeon Keeper , note that even though they are not finished (they are at version 0.37c now) the old Dungeon Keeper is still fully playable because the old exe has been made into a dll which their implementation wraps around. As long as they do this wrapping trick the game is only playable on Windows, but then they hit version 1.00 they have a complete open source replacement for the exe and it will then be cross-platform

Hopefully someone would do something similar for Dungeon Keeper 2, as that is the most troublesome to get running of the two games.

I think Spring is worth mentioning, since it is or used to be, in a way, a replacement for the TA binaries.