Freeablo – An open-source Diablo engine | Hacker News Reader

Freeablo – An open-source Diablo engine

freeablo.org

247 pointsbane28 comments

For people hoping to just download and play be aware, it doesn't include art files. Need to get those from original Diablo.

> freeablo is a modern cross platform reimplementation of the game engine used in Diablo 1. As it is just an engine, you will need the original data files to play the game.

> #Installation > Copy DIABDAT.MPQ and Diablo.exe from your diablo install into the folder with the freeablo executable. (NOTE: only version 1.09 of diablo is currently supported, so please patch to that version)

For anyone interested in contributing to open-source game engines, there is a nicely curated list (by language and game genre) at http://osgameclones.com/.

I've been thinking of making such a list (with all these filters!), but thankfully someone beat me to it. One thing I'd like to see though would be the extension to include open source game projects that aren't clones or remakes.

There's a lot of open source game projects that are not clones, but also a lot of them are just unfinished, unmaintained, buggy or just crap as well.

Nice. Now we just need the game distributed DRM-free on GOG for the art assets.

https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/diablo_i_diablo_ii_and_di...

The beauty of a project like this, is that you get plenty of experience and fun building an engine, without being up the creek on art assets, game design, etc.

Some of my favourite personal projects are where I wholesale rip off assets from other games, used as placeholders for assets that will never arrive. My creative space is then the underlying engineering and game systems.

Too awesome! Someone should run this through emscripten and have Diablo in the browser.

That would require distributing the art assets without a license.

Or reading a 500 MiB file via file APIs.

https://github.com/doggan/diablogl

The most recent release (0.3) is from 2015-08, but apparently there's been good progress recently.

Good. I found the only way to play Diablo on a modern system is WinXP in virtualbox and with certain compatibility setting enabled. Was painful to get working.

Is there controller support? I know the UI is not made for that but I always wanted to try it.

There was a PSX version of Diablo. I'm sure a ROM is floating around somewhere. It was pretty terrible though :)

The Japanese Playstation 1 release of Diablo 1 did include debug symbols though!

https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/issues/1

Thank you for this, I'll enjoy reading through this and some of the linked material. Diablo 1 is the game that got me into gaming and it holds a special place in my heart.

If only I could find the old Diablo CD-ROM that I had owned. Not sure where I put it, but if I find it I will give this a try.

How it's compared to Flare? (http://flarerpg.org/)

Wow, nice, but gosh- freeablo?

Any bets how long it'll take for a cease-and-desist letter from Blizzard for this one?

It's just an engine - you have to get the content from Blizzard. OpenMW is doing the same with Bethesda.

You don't have to get consent from anyone without reusing, redistributing, or modifying their copyrighted materials.

A cleanroom reverse engineering is perfectly legal, without any "permission", in most countries.

Yes, but distributing the copyrighted art with your clean-room reverse-engineered engine is not legal. Hence, no art is available for this engine, and you have to procure your own copy of the art, presumably from the CD you purchased, in order to use the engine.

That's what FreeCraft folks thought too

That was a dispute over the name; rather than fight it they changed the project name to Stratagus[0] and released Wargus[1].

0: https://launchpad.net/stratagus

1: https://launchpad.net/wargus

As their "Recent News" goes back to 2014, I don't think we need to hold our breath.

Wouldn't libre-ablo be a better name?

Depends on if you want to pronounce it or not.

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