OpenArcanum Project - This year!

Goods news everyone! I'm happy to announce that OpenArcanum project has vastly progressed in development and will be after all released soon. This new game engine will bring Arcanum back to it's glory, allowing both single-player and multiplayer game, including coop-mode.

The story behind:
The OpenArcanum was originally developed in Qt framework and written in C++, however the framework did not fit the engine's requirements and I was forced to rewrite the whole engine and write everything from scratch.... However, that was a bad idea back in 2010, because the following 2 years, I was basically only reimplementing the wheel and the project grew to 200 000 SLOC of custom code.

I stopped developing OpenArcanum after that due personal and health reasons. Last year, in July, I decided to continue working on OpenArcanum. After fixing completely broken code (took over 1 month) and modernizing it to use latest versions of third-party libraries, I had to switch my desktop OS from Windows to Linux and so I had to port the engine to Linux. After another month or so, I started writing a converter app for Arcanum's game assets.

While that, I have decided to drop the idea of Lua language for game scripting. In those 5 years, Lua did not made much progress in "development" and it's ecosystem is very small and outdated.

After a deep thinking, I decided to use JavaScript for game scripting.

So I started integrating the V8 scripting engine to the OpenArcanum. However, because I also wanted to use HTML5 for game user interface, I started to integrate the CEF3 engine instead. After that, I started integrating and rewriting Node.js for CEF3 implementation.

After realizing that there is a so much work to be done, i.e. binding the whole engine to JavaScript, rewriting the core for new file formats, porting to other platforms, bugfixing etc, I did hard, but necessary dedision...

I have decided to rewrite the whole engine to JavaScript. The reason is that I wouldn't have to rewrite the Lua bindings, I would not to have to bind the engine at all. Also, it's much easier and faster to write the game in JS than in C++, as JS is a way dynamic and permissible.

Another reason is, that back in 2009, when I started developing OpenArcanum, there was no HTML5, CSS3 and WebGL and something like web sockets, Node.js, Electron and similar stuff did not exists or was in early developments.

Nowadays, it's possible to develop a AA 3D game for web browsers.

So there it is, OpenArcanum2 in it' early development. The JavaScript reimplementation of OpenArcanum.



Update:



Here's a short video of current progress. Notice the movable and draggable widgets and windows and UI effects

If you are considering making a small donation to make the project finished sooner, here are links to OpenArcanum's project pages:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-open...r-arcanum-rpg#/
https://www.patreon.com/libor_max

Please follow my Patreon page for latest updates:
https://www.patreon.com/libor_max

Or ArcanumAlive's facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ArcanumAlive/

 

I'm glad to see OpenArcanum is still being developped, welcome back Crypton

Are you actually loading original Arcanum Files or did you redesign the word in the new engine?

 

Congrats for this, surely it was a hell of a job.

 

Thanks! I have converted all game assets to custom and easy-to-edit formats.

 

That must be a tremendous amount of work like Felipe said...

Maybe I can give some insight on baseline/z-ordering or A* pathfinding, I still have some code from the engine I used to work on if you'd like (c++).

Anyways I hope you'll be able to release this baby

 

Thank you for the offer. I have a topological z sorting for the entities already implemented, however, because I'm calling it now separately on both static and mobile objects, some of those objects have bad z-index, as it can be seen in the screenshot. I'll fix it asap, after I finish implementing the UI. Stay tuned :}

 

So the new WorldEditor can only create modules for the new engine?

 

Great to see OpenArcanum is back in development!