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Tomb Engine

tombengine.com

212 pointsibobev49 comments

When I was young I used to make a lot of levels for Tomb Raider (3? 4?) because I found the process of making sacred-but-spooky feeling places very enchanting. I had no one to share them with, so it was more like just making folk art for myself and my brother. This feeling was not surpassed until Minecraft came out (and then that was not surpassed until I bought land).

The levels are fundamentally comprised of square blocks that you push up from the ground, and maybe tilt one of the four sides to make shapes. To make caves and rooms, there is a second set of blocks that you pull down from the ceiling!

To get an idea of what this feels like, see this particular tutorial video of theirs: https://tombengine.com/docs/extended-geometry-update-1-7/

Took me a couple of seconds to realize that “land” was not a video game.

The ultimate sandbox.

You goto patch the Excavator 1.0 engine to be able to alter "land" its kind of finicky

The cube engine also works in this manner. A block engine where you can independently push the corners.

http://cubeengine.com/index.php

The homepage says "The open-source engine" but I can't find a link to the source code anywhere on the site. The link that says "Download" is a link to some Windows binary.

Edit: https://github.com/TombEngine/TombEngine that seems to be the code.

MIT license. Open Source indeed.

This is more interesting: https://github.com/MontyTRC89/Tomb-Editor (the level editor that goes with the engine)

What made the eternal life of Quake has been its open source level editor which means designers can have a field day making new levels.

The editor is as important as the engine, if not more. Exciting stuff!

Another very cool project in this space is TRX, which is based on a decompilation of the original Tomb Raider 1 & 2 source code:

https://github.com/LostArtefacts/TRX

Of the various Tomb Raider fan engine projects, this is basically the "vanilla, but modernized and well-maintained" historical archival option.

I contributed the MacOS port to this one, and last year I dabbled a little in porting an older random git snapshot to the web:

https://eikehein.com/stuff/sabatu/ (using a fan level, as to not post the original game content online)

It's a very rough hack, so it's not upstream at the moment.

The TRX team is a wonderful and passionate bunch of people to hang around.

From the footer:

> "TombEngine is not be sold."

Ironically, perhaps, this makes me trust it more.

Seems at odds with their repo's MIT license, which explicitly allows it to be sold.

https://github.com/TombEngine/TombEngine/blob/master/LICENSE

I guess it's ok to build it and sell it but not to sell the binaries provided? It's odd indeed. Most likely split brain decision.

Most likely it's from inexperience with licensing. Many people choose MIT because it's the most popular open source license, without really thinking about how permissive it is and whether they want that for their project.

Maybe someone from this thread could open an issue and suggest they clarify this.

I don't personally know enough about licensing to say whether a sentence in the README.md (saying it can't be sold) is enough to override the LICENSE.md (which says it can be sold).

Personally I'd always choose a copyleft license for something like this.

> Personally I'd always choose a copyleft license for something like this.

How would a copyleft license prevent it from being sold?

It doesn't, but whoever sells it needs to contribute back whatever they did with it is almost as good.

It's not quite as good because some games still get griefers who sell versions on some market places without otherwise giving back to the community who maintains them.

But it's better than MIT for sure.

It doesn't, I was expressing my personal opinion on what kind of license I'd choose.

However, that was a bit of a non sequitur to end the comment on, my apologies.

It doesn't, but makes it economically unviable. There's hot much point selling something your customers can duplicate for free and give to your other customers for free. grsecurity barely manages it and only because they don't have many customers and make it hard to become a customer.

> How would a copyleft license prevent it from being sold?

It doesn't but, it prevents the code from being sold, without the source code attached.

I can pull the code, add some levels, polish this more, call CaveRider, and sell it as a binary. With GPL, you can't do that. You need to add the source to the archive, or make it accessible without any walls.

People do get confused by licensing in general, and even more so about the consequences. Developers are not lawyers.

There are plenty of guides, but most are written by people arguing for a particular license so do not come across as impartial.

IMO people need to ask questions such as whether they want to allow proprietary forks, whether they want anti-tivoisation, whether people using an install over a network need access to the code, etc. and then decide on a license. If you know what you want then it should not be hard to narrow down the choice.

> I don't personally know enough about licensing to say whether a sentence in the README.md (saying it can't be sold) is enough to override the LICENSE.md (which says it can be sold).

It is very likely to depend on jurisdiction, and may well need a court case to clarify.

> People do get confused by licensing in general, and even more so about the consequences

> It is very likely to depend on jurisdiction, and may well need a court case to clarify.

Is it any wonder that people are confused when this is the only valid response to most of their licensing questions?

> It is very likely to depend on jurisdiction, and may well need a court case to clarify.

Is it any wonder that developors don't understand licensing very well when this is the response to majority of their licensing questions?

How could you be anything except confused and uncertain?

The solution is to stick to well known and well understood licences and not tinker with them.

They could just use the MIT license, or GPL of whatever they like. Using MIT and then modifying it in the README is the problem.

This is only the response to the majority of (or even very many) questions if you decide to use a DIY license.

This is so cool! I hope it starts some kind of new genre or creator community. Maybe a souls-like take on TR as well? Or some unexpected mashup with another game? So many ideas come to mind!

Scrabble

One of my fascinations is asking DALL-E for "screens from a game that crosses [two disparate game titles/genres]". Tomb Raider and Scrabble goes about as well as you'd expect (not very).

I don't know, I don't hate it: https://imgz.org/i4U5kMb5/

Oh damn that’s awesome. That triple word score!

The prompt was "Make an image of a Tomb Raider/Scrabble crossover, with huge caverns of Scrabble blocks, and traps of double/triple score tiles".

Good idea

OK, with a decent prompt, that's a solid option!

Tomb Raider 2 was one of the first games I got for the PlayStation. I remember spending HOURS with my sisters and friends trying to trap the butler into the freezer of her mansion.

Good memories.

Santa got me Windows version for Christmas 1997 after I saw it on tv in some video game show.

I was stuck for 3 months in the cave in the very first level.

Eventually someone told me that I could get answers on the internet (what's that?), which meant biking to the library and paying a certain amount (maybe 20BEF?) per 30 minutes to use the internet.

The solution came to me on a website called Game-Revolution!

Oh, and there is a bug in the game that if you save while underwater, your breath bar resets upon loading. Very handy in level 7.

And lastly: while the re-releases aren't remasters, they invoke a nostalgic feeling that I rarely get.

BEF?

Belgian Francs, presumably.

20 BEF would be around 0.5 EUR around the time when the change happened. Nowadays it would probably be around 5 EUR or something.

This looks awesome.

On a side note, this looks like it could be used to make a great Armored Core like haha

Been following their Discord for a while. It's pretty impressive looking. I was waiting until TR2 had a decent fan port. Now with the official remasters I don't have time to play them.

Still great to see fans taking the games in directions publishers won't, like with MP

https://youtu.be/qpKekNpziAk?si=Umk8nm0pYCYCEfsc

There was a remake in the pipes for a while using the Anniversary/Legend/Underworld engine but it was a one-man effort and seems to have been abandoned. Shame because it looked phenomenal.

I've dabbled a little in game development projects. But how does someone actually get started on a project like re-implementing a game like TR?

I suppose the PC release helps, you can disassemble that. Perhaps find editors online to determine the asset structure. But it must surely be an enormous project and no end of trial and error to do it that way.

Not to be "that person" but in the game space there is already a "t-engine"[1], AKA ToME (Tales of Maj'Eyal) engine, for building rogue-likes in Lua. It seems to go by "t-engine" primarily, but it's begging for confusion.

[1]: https://te4.org/

It's hard to believe the assets they are using are properly licensed.

I give this project a couple of weeks (it would have been months but it's now made it to HN).

I don't see a single screenshot of gameplay on the website. Is that to mask that it's infringing on IP? Looks cool.

I expect the video in homepage to showcase the engine but it just play BGM for 2 minutes....

https://tombengine.com/docs/tomb-engine-beginners-tutorial/

The website doesn't really explain what this is, or why it would be used.

Tomb Engine is supposed to be a new Tomb Raider Level Editor engine.

It’s on repo’s readme.

How are they avoiding the intellectual property issues?

The code wouldn't contain any IP. You would need the original media files to play the actual games. As long as there's no code taken from the original code, there's unlikely to be serious IP issues.

EDIT: No! After browsing the website a bit, the developers actually explicitly mention that you should use their media and not a rip of the original assets. Bizarre.

I'm guessing it still infringes on copyright simply because that's clearly Laura Croft and probably other characters that are similar, but not legally distinct, from the original game?

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