OpenDiablo2
github.com
github.com
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Basketball_Associatio... [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/youtube-china-communisty-par...
This thing is more like an emulator than a game.
Assets aren't like software in this regard.
You obviously don't know what an emulator is.
And OFC is reimplementing from scratch. Everything else is not code, but data. Get your facts right.
Or an iso acquired from a random torrent site. I've owned a few copies of D2 in my life and given blizzard years of my time, who knows where the booklets with the CD keys are. At least my copies of lod have it printed on the cover. I feel no qualms whatsoever about not giving blizzard more money for another 'legit' copy.
You can use this library to interop between C# and x86 assembly under a Windows process.
Since it's written in C++, does it compile to WebAssembly?
Blizzard's complaint with Stratagus was mostly with the original name, "Freecraft". When they took "Craft" out of the name, they were mostly left alone, and the project continued onwards.
>In June 2003, a cease and desist letter was received from Blizzard Entertainment, who thought the name Freecraft could cause confusion with the names StarCraft and Warcraft, and that some of the ideas within the engine were too similar to Warcraft II.[3] The project halted on June 20, 2003
My biggest recommendation to the OpenDiablo and other Diablo clones? Rename it as soon as you can... to OpenDemon or something. It at least gets you away from Blizzard feeling as if they need to defend their trademark, to ensure they can successfully defend their trademark in the future.
I think it "Clicked" when someone said 'none of the programmers that made Old_Game even work there anymore'
These companies are selling IP, not a sequel. When you buy modern Zelda, you don't get Majora's Mask, you get a 2015 action game skinned with Link.
Blizzard is a corporation that owns the characters and names. However you can play Diablo clones that are significantly better in 2020. You just need to be okay without Cain.
Nolstagia is a hella drug.
But there are (IMHO) at least two companies that still put out outstanding games.
1. Nintendo. I can't speak for the Zelda remasters that have come out. I never played the originals so had no nostalgia to draw me in. But Breath of the Wild... that was simply amazing. I bought a Switch just to play it and don't regret it at all; and
2. Rockstar. This one is a little more difficult for me because GTA3 and 4 blew me away at the time. Like they're actually satire. I think they lost that soul with GTA5, which people rave about for some reason. For me, it was a massive disappointment I never went back to after finishing the story missions. Sure it looked pretty but the writing was lazy, the characters were absolutely two-dimensional and off-putting (eg I almost stopped playing entirely when it came to Trevor) and all the humour/satire was just... gone. Plus it became less "slapstick". Like I drove a bus the wrong way down the ring road to see how far I could get before blowing up. I actually did a complete loop. There's no way that'd happen in GTA4. Your car would blow up long before then. In San Andreas you could cause massive car pileups that would chain explosion and I'd sometimes do that for giggles. I'd gotten >20 cars to blow up that way. I really do hope GTA6 finds its way back.
But Red Dead 2... that's both a massive technical achievement and a great game.
I'm also not opposed to reskins of old games. But they have to be right in exactly the way Warcraft III (Refunded) wasn't. It's too easy to lose the magic and the feel by carelessly updating graphics. Oh and Blizzard's IP grab on player maps (aka we're not going to let Dota 2 happen again) is downright disgusting.
But these franchises and companies are (unfortunately) exceptions. Too many games now fall into two buckets: player-generated content (ie PvP) or pay-to-win (ie mobile games). Neither particularly interest me.
Perhaps Obsidian is one studio/producer that keeps turning out outstanding experiences for so many years.
When I discovered libre games thanks to Linux/BSD and some source ports with total conversions, I was sold.
There was 2000 times better quality on a lot IF and now called "indies" than most games since 2002.
Nethack is a turn-based roguelike. Diablo is an action-oriented dungeon crawl (the original at least; I never played Diablo 2 or 3). To me they don't "feel" the same enough to compare which one is better.
I'm a fan of roguelikes too, by the way. If you want to try a somewhat different roguelike for Linux, I recommend Teleglitch (commercial, scifi, quirky graphics, real-time, brutal gameplay).
edit: and Duskers! How could I forget Duskers! For a really different scifi roguelike: http://duskers.misfits-attic.com/
I have a good list here. Nethack, DCSS, the old TOME 2.x releases, SCrap...
I avoid CDDA because I hate games with no clear ending or objectives ingame.
Teleglitch is punishingly difficult from the start, and pretty fast paced too, so maybe give that one a pass.
If any, Flare RPG has anything the first Diablo offers with a longish campaign and a good set of skills.
I know the timing changes everything (and Nethack is more like a text adventure lore made into a top-down RPG), but the environment and tasks ingame aren't so that different both in Diablo and Moria.
There are absolutely differences, some significant. But they have a lot in common.
I would be pretty surprised if, of those who played Nethack around the release of Diablo who also made a habit of purchasing Windows games, there wasn't a majority that also played Diablo.
> I still see no point in saying that Nethack is a better game since it appeals to totally different players.
I agree that the two are sufficiently different, and sufficiently well executed examples of their species, that personal preference between the two is likely to be dominated by the differences that cannot be reasonably labeled "quality".
FWIW, I loved both.
Just play Youtube clips of Bane from The Dark Night Rises. I swear he is voiced by Deckard Cain.
I'll never be able to un-hear this. •__•
I would also really like to easily read somewhere, website or github, what the status of the project is. Is Diablo II (with or without LoD) entirely playable?
Do they actually also target other games as well? Their choice of words seem to indicate so: "OpenDiablo2 is an ARPG game engine in the same vein of the 2000's games, and supports playing Diablo 2." If so, which?
There are no plans to support any other games, but it sounds like they expect to be able to use it to create new games.
Gothic 1 was one of my favorite RPGs of that era. The setting was intriguing (it was devised to limit the world, but it was an interesting way of doing so), the world felt "alive", with night-day cycles and NPCs going their way, working, etc. I still have the box lying somewhere, because I keep the boxes of my favorites games.
(Unfortunately, I don't think I have any way to read the original game discs anymore, so I have the game and at the same time I don't have access to its assets...)
(Disclaimer: I worked on the project but I am not the maintainer nor am I any kind of leader figure in the dev team)
[1] https://www.gamespot.com/articles/how-diablo-2-was-almost-lo...
I think the only thing they really lost are the hi-def assets from which the lower-def ingame assets were created.
I can't think of any other way of interpreting it.
I don’t think games are well adapted to open source. For starters, it’d be very hard to build an adjacent business like Red Hat, and there are very significant time and capital requirements even for smallish projects.
These might be the reasons why the model never caught on like it did for generalist software.
Not as end products, but it's pretty insane how much is available these days as far as free engines and tooling. Both in terms of beer (UE4 is free for all but the most successful of projects) and libre (Godot, LÖVE, loads of others).
There are also tons of classic games that have been rebuilt from their assets as modern open source engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engine_recreation...
And, finally, there are also a small number of pure OSS labour-of-love titles, like the incredibly ambitious 0ad: https://play0ad.com/
None of this really disputes the notion that commercial game development is not (and has never really been) well suited to open source development. But it's nonetheless interesting to look at how these things have evolved over time.
In todays world most people only give, if they have to.
Find a way to work with us as we are rather than condemn us for not being as you can imagine.
I doubt so, because I know enough people who act the way, I like people to act.
In other words, I try to find a way to work towards change in culture. History shows that can be done and has been done multiple times. Every succesful open source project is a step towards that. Wikipedia is a step towards it. Blender. Inkscape. LibreOffice. Linux. VLC. And so on. I believe and hope we improve in that direction.
There are some open source games but they tend to be more like engines than proper games, or are very niche. Some rather popular example:
- Nethack: Maybe the most "complete" open source game I can think of, if you like ASCII characters for graphics.
- Freeciv: The engine is original, but the game logic and assets are a complete ripoff.
- Stepmania: a DDR clone, useless without user contributed (and often illegal) songs.
- SCUMMVM: that's an engine, not a game
There are also plenty of smaller games, some of them of playable but they tend to be at "school project" level. Well below the standards for popular indie games.
As for OpenDiablo2, it is yet another engine, not a game.
I think the open source model can make good engines, because everyone can pick it up and contribute the few features they want, allowing for gradual improvement that the original developers can benefit from.
But for a complete game, you usually need a more global approach, and a lot of work making assets, open sourcing will probably benefits your competitors more than you: once your game is complete, there is little need for you to take advantage of the work of others.
- Battle for Wesnoth. HOMM3 quality level. Not so niche.
- XConq. Zillons of campaigns, old and with a good quality.
- Flightgear. Impressive data and models.
- Lincity/Lincity-NG. Lincity is old and amazing.
- Supertuxkart.
- Supertux. With the extra campaigns you have a long, really long game with a solid gameplay.
- FreedroidRPG.
- Foobillard.
- FreeOrion.
- GNUChess + the GUI you like most.
Glest
The Ur-Quan masters
Neverball
Beneath a Steel Sky
Alien Arena
Armagetron Advanced
Wing Commander (not sure about the name, played it a long time ago)
Endgame: Singularity
All of those are really good free software games that I played myself. There are a lot more, but I have not played them so I don’t really know how good or bad they are.
Solution: don't have competitors, make a unique product. You don't even have to find a niche to do this.
We can change all kinds of directions, in all kinds of ways.
But not through condemnation and high minded judgement. If it did anything at all it would’ve worked by now.
Which I don't believe is true. And you apparently neither. So lets call it a misunderstanding.
And yes, I also do not believe, that anyone changes by moral judgment. I certainly did not became a free software activist by reading RMS moral codex. I became it, by listening to inspiring people in my university. By the local linux groups who spend their free time, to help other people. By reading about and using free software. To the point, where I thought, yes, this really makes sense. The world would be such a better place if open source would be the default. Not just for software, but also hardware. Medicine. Knowledge in general.
Utopian? Maybe, but still worth working towards it. And even if the default of the industry will be IP-restricted forever - what has been achieved so far, is very useful already today.
“Every Man Lives By Exchanging” means that everyone is constantly giving and taking in an exchange. That exchange can be free monetarily or not, doesn’t matter.
It’s only when third parties interfere with this natural law that some people take way more than they give.
So if I read correctly you are saying, that nobody ever took more than he gave if not for a third party interfering? And that this is a law of nature?
Because if that actually is your claim I would love to read the evidence on that. Having studied history, I very much doubt that ver being the case. Also archeological evidence as far as I am aware of doesn't corroborate your words.
Upfront crowd funding ala KickStarter.
Monthly subscription ala Patreon for new features, assets etc.
Could very well be a combination of the two, starting out with some KickStarter then going through an "eternal alpha" via Patreon.
Of course lots of potential issues with this, like people rebranding and pretending to be devs, taking donations for themselves etc. But in theory it could possibly work.
Why, they'd offer consulting for a fee, of course! On such things as how to most effectively level your char, or perhaps they'd sell you a neat yet overpriced user manual that they wrote for their free software, or perhaps they'd offer printed maps for a price. :D
Jokes aside, there are loads of ways to earn money off free software, though usually you'd have to accept competition. I agree that it's probably not viable for a game, however, though there are some open source game projects out there, such as UFO:AI.[1]
2. Open source the client and the assets but not the server
3. After a delay, open source everything but still charge for playing on the official server where there is already a thriving community
Although there is not necessarily much of a benefit.
But it's easy to see how that isn't a great option for Blizzard.
How accessible is game code to a modern web dev that understand memory management and such, but never really uses C/C++ outside of coursework?
If I pull in Diablo / Half-Life / Shadows of Chernobyl source, am I going to see pretty clean files in an organized fashion that I can open with a modern IDE or a code dump?
I wanted to try it on macOS Catalina but was too lazy to copy my GOG game files over from Windows. I noticed the top Morrowind torrent already comes with the "Data Files" folder unpacked from the installation.
Download OpenMW, run the wizard, point it at the Morrowind.esm file (from the torrent or your own installation), and click play. We now have a Morrowind that works on all OS.
Amazing stuff. Even detects mods dragged into the directory and lets you click and drag their load order.
I was originally going to re-write it in C, but when I saw go, I immediately fell in love with it. In my mind it sits somewhere between C and C++. Yes it has a GC, but it's not obtrusive. Plus the language is simple and nice to work with.
Regardless of what language I use, someone's going to say it's a "bad" choice and others will say it's a "good" choice. Personally I believe the language is just a tool, and go is working out extremely well for us so far.
Have you had to do anything to avoid problems with the GC? (e.g. manual runtime.GC() calls, or work to avoid generating garbage)
There are plenty of good reasons not to use C#, but we shouldn't pretend that there aren't plenty of good reasons _to_ use it for specific problem spaces.
There are some other frameworks that use C# and are cross-platform. Monogame is the cross-platform replacement for MS's XNA, which targets most of the major game systems out there.
Yes, I understand that Windows is big and there are a lot of C# developers/fans here who immediately scream "What? C# can do anything!!!", but in practice MS doesn't support opensource where it matters and when it matters.
BTW, there are a lot of opensource games written in C#. More than there are written in Go actually.
Names fall under trademark law and even names that they've bothered to apply for (let alone all those rejected for various reasons) aren't difficult to change.
Story is a different question. The core story is incredible thin and derivative. Creating a new story wouldn't be very hard. That said, most players today would probably be much more interested in multiplayer anyway.
They haven't copied the code but re-implemented (in another programming language that didn't existed when this game was originally released).
For example here they take the original text from the game for the labels: https://github.com/OpenDiablo2/OpenDiablo2/blob/37ae98d81b79...
For sure most of the game specific data can be extracted from the game files but it's unlikely that there are no artifacts in the game code itself.
I honestly can't wait for Diablo 4 as a PoE veteran since beta, I just don't agree with most of the recent design decisions. Lack of visual clarity, mechanical clunkiness with movement skills, rng on rng on rng mechanics (just progressing through maps can be incredibly frustrating if you're on a dry spell and can't even get maps to drop).
It's almost as if the devs are intentionally creating frustrating mechanics, in a game...
It is also written in my favorite language, Go, which means that on my Mac running Catalina this will likely be the only way to play the game in the future. I couldn't even get the game files without using a High Sierra VM. There's also the impending ARM transition, which this project should also easily support.
Potential downsides: Golang/libs maybe a bit immature for non-system/microservices projects.
Only project that I know Blizzard shut down was a Starcraft server re-implementation, presumably because it would allow you to play without having a legitimate cd-key.
Of course everything I'm talking about could miss the point of the project and the contributors are just doing this for fun because they like writing code for games but can't create game art on their own.
> This means that OpenRA is not restricted by the technical limitations of the original closed-source games: it includes native support for modern operating systems and screen resolutions...
I think this is the most compelling reason - it opens up features that would be way harder to realize in the original engine.
noteworthy
- OpenXcom https://openxcom.org/about/
- OpenRA https://www.openra.net/about/
- OpenTTD https://www.openttd.org/about.html
Yup, if you play Sacred Gold or Disciples II using open frameworks you get a game that looks much newer. But more importantly, perpetually playable.
Disciples II has an edit that uses OpenGL that makes the game much faster and more playable, and gives widescreen.
Sacred has numerous mods, such as giving 1080p HD (and more).
The next question is going to be: "But why do you play those games?" To this I will ask, honestly, what is Fortnight anyway?
It's been a while, but I sure would go look for my old disks to give it a try in FHD!
1) I used this [1] guide to get it working on Windows 10.
2) This [2] is a more detailed version with a lot of comments.
The bugs don't bother me that much to be honest, unless you want to complete all quests in a city, then you should have a look at them.
The tools one uses for configuration like dgVoodoo generally work, but I guess anyone could slip in malicious code if they really wanted to.
One final tip, the Hero Editor is a great way to edit your characters if you want to turn a fire mage into a wind one or stuff like that. Since multiplayer is not common these days, I reckon it's not cheating as you've lost all the benefits of multiplayer anyway. (I think the tool is just in German, not sure.) [3]
In terms of the open frameworks, it's not my area of specialty, but there is Sacred ReBorn, and there is even a Diablo 2 mod to Sacred. I believe even dgVoodoo does edit some files to use newer (open) frameworks.
[1] https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=84319...
[2] https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=20187...
[3] http://www.sacredvault.org/forum/index.php?action=tpmod;dl=i...
In the early days we did have a lengthy back-and-forth with a tenacious lawyer from LucasLegal but they backed off when we convinced them that we didn't support piracy.
It is not uncommon for rereleases of older games to use the ScummVM engine instead of the original engine, see for instance the recent rerelease of Westwood's Blade Runner on GOG.com, which wouldn't have happened without ScummVM.
This feels like people who are passionate about the base game and would like to see it being open-sourced but they don't own the source code, so they do the equivalent
Many people starting out in games development often want to make games like RPGs to emulate a favorite game they play, but want to experiment with their own rules/mechanics
If you've got a passion for software and the game in question, it's a rewarding activity in its own right, in addition to being an excellent avenue for learning new languages and tools.
Not every instance of human effort needs to push the world forward in a way that's immediately economically rewarding.
https://github.com/diasurgical/devilution#introduction
it is a faithful reconstruction of original Diablo source code from various debug builds leaked over the years.