Openage: Making Age of Empires II Open-Source

[DanL]

I'm not sure what the point of this project is... isn't this kind of like legitimizing the closed-sourcedness of the thing its trying to clone?

The project is still in its infancy. One of the prospective ideas is to eventually replace the artwork, but if the people working on it right now are not artistic, it's better just to use the games assets while developing the engine.

[Delgarde]

I'm not sure what the point of this project is... isn't this kind of like legitimizing the closed-sourcedness of the thing its trying to clone? If you're going to the effort of cloning part of a game, why not just make a whole brand new game that is totally open? Saves the whole problem of reverse engineering even.

Well, it's simple. People have a much-loved old game they want to play, the original doesn't work anymore, so they set out to create a version that *does* work. It's usually nothing to do with "open source" as such... it's just that if you can get a community around it, open source is an effective way of keeping those old games playable into the future.

A perfect example of this would be OpenTTD. The old Transport Tycoon games were much loved by players, but like most DOS games, eventually became a struggle to run on new hardware. And there was already a bit of a community around binary-patching the game to make minor changes, so in the end, it was only natural that some of them try re-implementing the game in a form which would allow them to make bigger changes. And the result was initially an almost perfect replica of the original game, but one which could run on both Window and Linux, and which could cope with higher resolution screens instead of being limited to 640x480. And then over the years, they've improved on the original - better algorithms for path finding, support for longer trains and more complex station layouts, etc.

In short, it's not about creating a new game, and it's not about open vs closed source. It's simply about allowing people to keep playing a favourite old game, long after the original developer has abandoned it.

[Delgarde]

A perfect example of this would be OpenTTD.

Oh, and just a few further comments on this - some examples of how OpenTTD has changed from the original:

• bigger maps (up to 64 times in size)
• IPv6 and IPv4 support for all communication of the client and server
• new pathfinding algorithms that makes vehicles go where you want them to
• advanced/conditional orders, share and copy orders
• significant internationalisation support. OpenTTD has already been translated into over 50 languages
• freely distributable graphics, sounds and music

...you get the idea. Essentially, they've kept the gameplay of the original, added features of a modern game, fixed some of the original's deficiencies around AI, and made improvements to the UI.


I assume this is essentially the goal of this OpenAge project too... to first create a clone of AoE2, then to improve it.

[halo9en]

Random observation: there is a handy catalogue of other game clones at http://osgameclones.com/.

Wow, there's an interpreter for Another World? Thanks for the link!