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Update On The Xoreos Project

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Previously on GamingOnLinux, liamdawe highlighted my pleas for OpenGL developers to help me with my FLOSS project xoreos. 7 months have passed, so what has happened since then?

To recap: xoreos is a project aiming to reimplement BioWare's Aurora engine (and derivatives), covering their games starting with Neverwinter Nights and potentially up to Dragon Age II. As such, it is similar to other reimplementation projects, like ScummVM, GemRB and OpenMW. The goal is to have a portable and free/open/libre codebase capable of playing these games, and possibly, in the future, even enhance them.

On to the meat. What happened? Well, first of all, I did find an OpenGL developer willing to rewrite the graphics code (this community's own mirv, no less <3). There's also been a few other people answering my call for developers, so some other areas are slowly progressing as well.

Me, I mainly did under-the-hood maintenance work: cleaning up utility code, fixing bugs found by the static analyzer Coverity Scan and extending the documentation a bit. Yes, nothing huge and sparkly, but it's progress nonetheless.

If you're interested in the details, please read the "Not-Thanksgiving" news post on the xoreos website. There I expand upon what exactly has been done and thank the people making this possible.

Not everything is sunshine though: I learned this week that the people from the Neverwinter Nights Podcast, who were so gracious to interview me about xoreos back in April and were always happy to provide shout-outs to my little project, stopped recording with their 200th episode. They want to refocus on other things and on their Neverwinter Nights 2 persistent world Realms of Trinity. So with a bit of sadness, I say farewell and thank you to the crew of the Neverwinter Nights Podcast.

That's it for this little update. I hope I provided a few interesting insights, and as always, if you want to help with the development of xoreos, please feel free to contact us using the project mailing list or ping us in #xoreos on Freenode IRC. Or just PM me here, that's fine too. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Misc
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About the author -
Geek. Atheist+. Leftist. Metal-Head. Discordian. Lefty.
ScummVM dev, xoreos lead.
Free software zealot.
See more from me
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6 comments

FutureSuture Dec 2, 2014
Good to hear that progress is being made. Thank you for the update and keep up the good effort! I hope to use xoreos for some of those games in the hopefully not too distant future.
EKRboi Dec 2, 2014
Wow that is really cool. I wish I could be of help, but sadly my programming skills are outdated (VB4/5/6) and I never did learn to do "3d graphic stuffs" mostly just simple gui's. I really should sit down and force myself to learn to do it.
commodore256 Dec 3, 2014
So, Sven, you basically make algorithms that's compatible with the ones that Bioware used for asset containment and scripting.
Notavi Dec 3, 2014
Interesting. I'm currently re-learning OpenGL myself, so I may show up on IRC in a week or two offering to help with some of the more basic stuff (not sure how much free time I can make available, I guess we'll have to see on that).

I should be able to test it on a few different systems for you as well (got an NVidia based desktop, as well as two laptops - one Ivy Bridge and one with an older model Radeon in it).

I assume mirv-sillyfish is your git repo?
DrMcCoy Dec 3, 2014
Quoting: EKRboisadly my programming skills are outdated (VB4/5/6) and I never did learn to do "3d graphic stuffs" mostly just simple gui's.

Well, there's a lot of other things left to do, not just graphics. Figuring out file formats, finding out how the original game did things, stuff like that. But yeah, you will need to have some working programming (and C++) knowledge for that.

Quoting: commodore256So, Sven, you basically make algorithms that's compatible with the ones that Bioware used for asset containment and scripting.

I wouldn't put it that way, but essentially yes. I write code that can load the original data files and reproduce what the original EXE did.
ElectricPrism Dec 5, 2014
Very Cool
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