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Arx Fatalis Updated, Released Under GPL
Kevin Fishburne writes "According to WtF Dragon at Ultima Aiera, 'The long and short: Arkane Studios have released what is probably going to be the final patch for their Ultima Underworld-inspired game (which, indeed, they tried to license as the third entry in that series), Arx Fatalis. They have also released the source code for the game. That's right, the complete source of Arx Fatalis is available for download.' The readme notes that the original game installation is required in order to play the compiled game, as the data files are certainly still copyrighted. Linux is in need of a good FPS dungeon crawler, though the code will need a hell of a lot of cleanup as it's a VC8/9 project and uses DirectX (ugh...)."
I liked that game - but the really, REALLY disliked the amount of time it took to properly shape out letters with the mouse input. There just seemed to be no consistency with the way it judged the curves of input - I can understand the games with subtle puzzles on learning input mechanisms, but even with practice it came out more as random than a skill to build up.
If anyone can fix the input mechanisms for those spells using the source code, you'd be helping the game immensely.
Oh, and of course, remaking Ulima I & II would be a nice follow up... seems that's always been in the works for FPS modders, but it never seems to get completed. They're beautiful games that deserve the chance to appeal to modern gamers with a modern interface.
Ryan Fenton
http://www.opengl.org/documentation/current_version/
Graphics cards are now sold with OpenGL 4.0 support. It's not stuck at 2.0, like you're suggesting with Direct3D 9.
If you want to play FPS/RPGs, really, get a windows partition or a console. Not trying to flamebait or something, just being rational. The game is 8 years old, with the software engineering maturity of a random sample company that this fact implies. Data files being copyrighted. DX-based being ultra-fun to port. Nope, I can't see serious effort thrown into this. It only gets funnier with feature requests, improvements & bug fixes. The first post here is a request FFS, imagine the port's forums.
For research:
You have source code for Quake3. I bet it's coded far better than arx fatalis, and it's already there.
Yes, why should DX be considered awful? Many game devs choose it because it is a generally well documented API which evolves quickly and with hardware.
If there is one thing Microsoft has been doing well in the last decade is game libraries: between DX >= 7 and XNA it feels like there are alternatives but not opponents...
My book: Friendly F#, fun with game development and XNA; my game: Galaxy Wars by VSTeam; my gamedev language: Casanova.
Sources/DANAE/ARX_Script.cpp is 13719 lines in size, most of which handles script parsing and evaluation simultaneously, in a uselessly convoluted way. It deserves a proper rewrite from scratch.
I do like how they used names from Greek mythology to refer to certain components of the source code: Athena handles audio, Eerie handles some graphics, Mercury handles user input, Hermes is probably there for communication or saving/loading, Minos is only there for pathfinding and Danae gets everything else.
Buy the game, and play it on the open source engine. Just like Doom, Freespace II, Ultima 7, Star Control 2, and many, many other games.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The FPS "modern" interface is, IMHO, overused and the addiction to virtual reality is what is killing the brain cells of the gamers. Profitable, sure, whizz-bang impressive makes profitable, sure, good games, definitely not.
The Ultima series is one of (perhaps only) the few that became better with sequels. That was because they were perfectly timed to progress with the progressing technology. Ultima I had good game play and story line but was primitive on graphics. Ultima II had good game play and good new concepts woven in but was similarly primitive on graphics. Ultima III (Exodus) took the intricate storyline concepts from I and II, meshed them together, and then put that into a fantastic and colorful UI with that completely outside background music.
What I miss is that Ultima ]I[ was not an FPS. I am sick and tired of FPSs. I haven't actually played a video game for more than an hour since the first release of Half-Life. After Half-Life the FPSs were all just whizz-bang. Half-Life was still appealing because it was such an enormous improvement over DOOM (which was great because it really brought the FPS concept to life) because the hardware video card technology was once again on the perfect timeline (3D accelerating algorithms were beginning to stabilize). After Half-Life it was all the same; more whizz-bang, more glitz and glimmer, more anime, prettier girls, more graphica fantastica, more innuendo to keep the teenagers drewling.
What I miss about Ultima ]I[ is that the graphics were good, real good, game play was good, real good, game complexity was good, real good, and story line was complex, real good--it was also top down 2D so your characters _really_ looked the way you wanted them to look, the encounters were top down 2D so the enemies _really_ looked as frightening and gruesome as you wanted them to look, the battles were not movie quality full-motion video so you could imagine your spellcasting and imagine the impacts and imagine the blow by blow the way you wanted to imagine it.
Modern FPS is all about being brain dead and watching what we want you to watch. It is hardly different from advertising.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Well, yeah. If they didn't do that then developers might create/use/improve cross-platform game libraries instead, and that's definitely not in Microsoft's interests. Games are one major area where it's far easier to just use Windows. Microsoft is more than smart enough to realize that this might change if they fail to cater to game developers. To them, furtherance of vendor lock-in is more than worth whatever money and resources they have to invest in development of DirectX.
It's the kind of thing that helps keep Windows from having to compete on its merits on a level playing field where migration to another platform is easy and relatively painless. A world where no one uses Windows unless they really do prefer it over other platforms is something they will struggle mightily to avoid. Easy cross-platform compatibility has never been in their interests.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
So you seem rather surprised and/or disgusted that a game that was written for MS Windows uses DirectX.
I guess if a Russian book written by a Russian author went public domain you would complain that it was written with a Cyrillic alphabet.
%s/\t/ /g
Seriously? White space is annoying?
After Half-Life the FPSs were all just whizz-bang.
Portal.
Oh, does it have to be an actual shooter? Alright, then, how about...
Natural Selection.
Half-Life 2.
etc...
But I chose Portal because your complaint was about the FPS interface. Portal makes good use of that interface to deliver a decidedly non-FPS game. So does Penumbra.
There's more that could be done, but I think leveraging the years of experience people have playing FPSes, and just the overall fluidity of that interface for actually exploring a 3D world, is far, far better than trying to make any sort of 3D game in which you reinvent the controls, badly. If I recall, The Sims was particularly annoying -- completely different controls which ended up being less effective overall.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You can get Arx Fatalis at Good Old Games for the required data files
IANAL; but my understanding is that, when it comes to releasing stuff you possess the copyright to under the GPL, you can release as much or as little, in whatever shape, as you wish. The code doesn't have to work at all, they could chose only to release half of it, it could rely on code from some third party available under a ludicriously restrictive licence or not at all, or whatever. Because their right to use and distribute the code does not originate with the GPL, they are not bound by it. Their right derives from ownership of the copyright, not use under license. Thus, they can do pretty much anything. Anybody else's right, though, derives from use under license, and thus is subject to the terms of the license(GPL or otherwise, whatever the owner dictates).
However, if you are creating a derived work from somebody else's code, to which you have rights to use/distribute only under the GPL, there are restrictions. You still aren't legally obliged to release only perfect, bugless, feature complete software or anything; but if your binary incorporates somebody else's GPLed code; but you are refusing to distribute your modifications, required to build it, to those you are distributing the binary to, you are in legal hot water. Even then, though, that might exclude data files, depending on how things are structured(say, just for an example, I for some stupid reason, want to release a CD of my music that, instead of just acting like a normal CD, has an auto-executed player application with band branding that pops up when the disk is inserted in a PC and plays the music on it. If I used GPLed code to build that application, I would be obliged to release my modifications and additions; but my music would just be input data, merely aggregated on the same medium as the program, and it isn't clear that I would be obliged to license it in any particular way.)
An OS zealot and a homophobe, rolled up into one!
Do any of you people have any idea what an HINSTANCE is, anyway? As someone who has written code on both Win32 and free Unix-type OSes I find this all very odd. Would I criticize you for using some mundane typedef like (picking one at random) pthread_t? Of course not.
It's a Windows game written in C or C++. I expect there to be Windows-specific code. Is that really that evil? How do you expect them to accomplish their goals if they don't use some things that are specific to the platform they're targeting.
From a software engineering perspective the right way would be to isolate that platform-specific code to a clean set of modules. But let's be honest - the cleanest code is not always what gets shipped. How many GTK+ or Qt apps on Linux break the abstraction by calling directly into Xlib? I'm not sure about these days, but when I last developed for the platform the answer was "a lot".
I think a bunch of you guys need to grow up, or take a deep breath or something. Stop being so judgmental. These guys are kind enough to give you the code, and all you can say is it's not written with your favorite set of libraries.
Games like Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D and the like are crediting with innovating and pushing 3D engines. People always seem to forget Ultima Underworld. Ultima Underworld shipped a full year before Doom, ran on lesser hardware, and had a more advanced engine.
It really is a shame these two games aren't very playable on modern systems and have been forgotten in the mists of time.
I'd kill to see the GPL Arx Fatalis engine used to remake Ultima Underworld I and II.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The initial 0.0.1 release of virtually every sourceforge project doesn't work, and there are no legal implications.
Buy the game, and play it on the open source engine. Just like Doom, Freespace II, Ultima 7, Star Control 2, and many, many other games.
While I totally agree with you - the assets for Star Control 2 were actually released alongside the code, that's why you can download them from SourceForge...
np: Autechre - Nine (Amber)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
What I miss is that Ultima ]I[ was not an FPS. I am sick and tired of FPSs. I haven't actually played a video game for more than an hour since the first release of Half-Life. After Half-Life the FPSs were all just whizz-bang. Half-Life was still appealing because it was such an enormous improvement over DOOM (which was great because it really brought the FPS concept to life) because the hardware video card technology was once again on the perfect timeline (3D accelerating algorithms were beginning to stabilize). After Half-Life it was all the same; more whizz-bang, more glitz and glimmer, more anime, prettier girls, more graphica fantastica, more innuendo to keep the teenagers drewling.
I think FPS games are more of a phase... I played lots of them probably starting with Doom (1993) and mostly ending with Unreal Tournament (1999) - my teens to my early 20s. If I had been born a decade later, I'm guessing I'd be playing the FPS games of a decade later but today they have no appeal to me. The fact is, if you take of those rosy glasses you were pretty easy to entertain as a teen. Give you action, give you splatter and you're entertained. In retrospect it's quite amazing how much I liked some rather braindead action flicks too, same thing. Particularly the single-player mode got all the complexity of Rambo, one man against a million of them. In the end I think it was "Capture the Flag" and my clan that kept me on UT, because they brought a bit of strategy and cooperation, pure deathmatch lost the appeal long before I quit.
So to sum it up, I don't think the games changed I think you changed. And there'll always be a generation of teens that want to play these games, just like there's always a generation of children to play children's games. Of course there are FPS games that appeal to a more adult gamer, that resemble real life where you have to sneak and cover and a few shots will kill you and there's real penalties for dying. But the whole "fantasy" FPS games where you dance around each other trying to hit the other guy with the rocket launcher and pocket nukes to get a MU-MU-MU-MULTIKILL and it's all about your mouse twitching skill are things I doubt appeal to many people over 25. Well, less so than other game types anyway as I still play games of Civilization and have done so since the original in 1991. I wouldn't be surprised if I sit these on the nursery home bored and whip up a game of Civilization XVII.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
please,
1G!Gexpand
One hears this argument a lot and it is bullshit. If crap graphics are better because they leave more to your imagination, should it not also follow that a game like Doom is better than one with a complex storyline because it leaves the plot to your imagination? If you can't cope with seeing what the characters look like, how do you ever manage to put up with being told what they say and do?
...so, where are the fully open-source OpenGL library + drivers that has more features than (or even just feature parity with) DirectX 11?
Oh, I see.
Coffee-driven development.
This game was plagued by bugs when I decided to buy it a year or so ago on steam. It was basically unplayable from glitches with the graphics and slowdowns on modern hardware. Hopefully now we can kill 2 birds with one stone, update the graphics bugs and port to other os'es so others won't have to play in wine. It was a good game, and it's pretty cheap on steam (under 10 dollars last I checked) so it could use all the help it can get. Knowing the state it is in now, it will probably be much work, but it will add nicely to the games that went gpl lately, especially since they weren't willing to do any updates. I wish more companies would do the same for games they have no want to update to the latest os'es and just let rott in their IP library.
Lol, you have no clue, do you? A gaming library is a very complicated piece of software where a correct implementation is as important as a fast implementation. This means a lot of stuff that is very specific to the hardware on which the code will run. If it were this simple, a compatible implementation would already be there; the reason why it isn't is that such a library is full of nasty stuff like quaternions (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb281611(VS.85).aspx) and worse. This means that to implement something like DirectX you need developers who are great developers capable of writing very low-level code that directly accesses the underlying hardware (be it CPU instruction sets or GPU operations) and good mathematicians who understand the mathematical nuisances of computer-approximated algebra.
There is exactly one DirectX in the world. If some other entity shows that it is possible to undertake such a powerful development effort without being a company that throws lots of money to the problem, then I will be very glad.
And OpenGL is a graphics rendering system, not a gaming library, so the two are not easily compared without taking into account a fuckload of input, audio, networking and loop/windows management additional libraries.
My book: Friendly F#, fun with game development and XNA; my game: Galaxy Wars by VSTeam; my gamedev language: Casanova.