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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Despite being called OpenRW they never tell you where the name comes from, only that it’s an attempt to write the engine from scratch with clean code.

But why RW? Did the GTA games run on RenderWare?

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Yes, the early 3D Grand Theft Auto games (III, Vice City, and San Andreas) ran on RenderWare. [0]

[0] https://gtamods.com/wiki/RenderWare

I think the GTA 3 family of GTA games did, yes. They were PlayStation 2 games first, and RenderWare was relatively common for PS2 games.

Source: worked in game dev using RenderWare on PS2 back then

Since you were in the industry, was RW the first big 3rd party engine?

I know it’s common now, and seems to have really taken off in the Wii/PS3/360 era. My understanding is it wasn’t in the PSX generation (at least early?).

> RW the first big 3rd party engine

RW is RenderWare, it's not a game engine.

> really taken off in the Wii/PS3/360 era

No? RW have/had the immense success as an engine used in more than a dozen commercial games (compared to idTech1/2/3), but it's usage explodes in 2001, with 18 titles, compared with 4 in 2000.

> PSX generation

Too early.

https://en.everybodywiki.com/List_of_RenderWare_games

It was everywhere in the 90s that I remember when I was a game dev. I don't know if you would call it a game engine? We just called it a 3D engine back then. Back then at least I only remember it doing the graphics, no physics, animation, sound, etc?

It must have started off as a purely software renderer as I can remember trying to compete with their published stats on tris/sec.

This is one gem from the project, a partial reimplementation of RenderWare: https://github.com/aap/librw

I would love to see the first few Burnout games given the modern re-implementation treatment, but EA would probably behave the same way as Take2.

I'd love to see the Burnout games somehow remade and/or open sourced.

Looking into it, I found one instance of a reimplementation attempt[0], but it isn't clear to me how far along it is. There's some discussion of it here [1].

[0]: https://github.com/reburndev/reburn3

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/REGames/comments/15ymbtq/an_open_so...

This is from re3, not OpenRW.

librw started long before re3.

GTA3/VC/SA, Manhunt and Bully ran on RenderWare. They made their own engine for GTA4 (and also for their pingpong game and RDR1 iirc) and I "presume" the games since.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockstar_Advanced_Game_Engine

They also made their own engine for the other games you mentioned. RW is more of a rendering layer than anything else, it has no gameplay logic, scripting, audio logic associated with it.

> Bully

Just a heads up that a Bully sequel (trilogy?) is in the works:

https://www.xfire.com/ex-rockstar-games-employee-leaks-bully...

It's "Open ReWrite". That's what the description of the Github repository says.

Yeah but that’s clearly a backronym.

Back when the name OpenRW was coined, there was a much more widespread belief that RenderWare was the engine GTA3 runs on. At some point people realised that's nonsense, GTA3 doesn't have an engine (all code was written specifically for GTA3), and so they had to come up with something that's not RenderWare related.

rewrite

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