OpenDiablo2

https://github.com/OpenDiablo2/OpenDiablo2

by tomcam • 6 years ago

380 163 6 years ago

imtringued• 6 years ago

I actually don't understand the motivation behind these projects. Usually the games for which an open source engine is written for are quite old. Old enough that emulation should be more than sufficient to play these games on something like a Mac with an ARM based SoC. It is also not possible to exactly replicate the game without straight up reverse engineering the game's binary which will open you up for lawsuits. The end result is a very similar game that is merely sharing the same assets but it just isn't the same. If the project was created with the intention of allowing a new experience that is different from the original game then it will be harder than expected because you still need artists, musicians and so on to create more content. Ultimately I think people should focus on making a very good and very faithful clone instead of replicating an old game that still requires you to own the original and proprietary assets.

Of course everything I'm talking about could miss the point of the project and the contributors are just doing this for fun because they like writing code for games but can't create game art on their own.

cobalt• 6 years ago

beyond the obvious 'do it to show that i can' and similar reasons, one less obvious reason may be that often people want to mod these games and its easier than either making a reproduction or using hacks. Having the actual code the game runs (even if decompiled) allows you to both learn how things were done, as well as modify them and improve them.

Many people starting out in games development often want to make games like RPGs to emulate a favorite game they play, but want to experiment with their own rules/mechanics

marvin• 6 years ago

The point is obviously as an exercise to pick apart a piece of older technology, figure out how it was built and interacts with the original assets, and create a machine that works for doing that.

If you've got a passion for software and the game in question, it's a rewarding activity in its own right, in addition to being an excellent avenue for learning new languages and tools.

Not every instance of human effort needs to push the world forward in a way that's immediately economically rewarding.

stefanchrobot• 6 years ago

I started to write the engine for my favourite game in my favourite programming language and the experience was addictive and enjoyable beyond compare. Sadly I just couldn't justify to myself the amount of hours that I would need to spend to complete this project.

pvg• 6 years ago

They can end up producing more convenient, better performing, better integrated, more moddable versions of the game. When it works out it's sort of an 'amateur/community remaster'. Of course that's piles of work so there's many more unfinished than reasonably finished ones.

steerablesafe• 6 years ago

Have you heard about openttd?

waldfee2• 6 years ago

OpenRA states in the about section

This means that OpenRA is not restricted by the technical limitations of the original closed-source games: it includes native support for modern operating systems and screen resolutions...

I think this is the most compelling reason - it opens up features that would be way harder to realize in the original engine.

noteworthy

- OpenXcom https://openxcom.org/about/

- OpenRA https://www.openra.net/about/

- OpenTTD https://www.openttd.org/about.html

crazysim• 6 years ago

- OpenRCT2 https://openrct2.org/

Lariscus• 6 years ago

- OpenMW https://openmw.org/en/

mikorym• 6 years ago

not restricted by technical limitations

Yup, if you play Sacred Gold or Disciples II using open frameworks you get a game that looks much newer. But more importantly, perpetually playable.

Disciples II has an edit that uses OpenGL that makes the game much faster and more playable, and gives widescreen.

Sacred has numerous mods, such as giving 1080p HD (and more).

The next question is going to be: "But why do you play those games?" To this I will ask, honestly, what is Fortnight anyway?

dairylee• 6 years ago

- CorsixTH https://github.com/CorsixTH/CorsixTH

rakoo• 6 years ago

To me it seems the point is to have an open engine to be able to create that kind of games; instead of starting completely from scratch, they wanted to emulate a base that is known to be working and actually fun to use, so the moment they reach feature-parity they'll have a solid foundation. After that anyone can create on top of the existing and make it even better.

This feels like people who are passionate about the base game and would like to see it being open-sourced but they don't own the source code, so they do the equivalent

rasz• 6 years ago

This might be more to your liking

https://github.com/diasurgical/devilution#introduction

it is a faithful reconstruction of original Diablo source code from various debug builds leaked over the years.

madmoose• 6 years ago

ScummVM contains almost 80 game engines (and a lot of sub-engines) supporting hundreds of games. Most of them are made by straight reverse engineering of the original executables.

In the early days we did have a lengthy back-and-forth with a tenacious lawyer from LucasLegal but they backed off when we convinced them that we didn't support piracy.

It is not uncommon for rereleases of older games to use the ScummVM engine instead of the original engine, see for instance the recent rerelease of Westwood's Blade Runner on GOG.com, which wouldn't have happened without ScummVM.

anthk9• 6 years ago

Scummvm compiled with --enable-all-engines supports a fuckload of games, even maybe, Microsoft Encarta. You can even run Ultima games.

Kaze404• 6 years ago

People ported Diablo I to the Nintendo Switch using a similar project.

llarsson• 6 years ago

Cool! I would love to play this natively on Linux.

I would also really like to easily read somewhere, website or github, what the status of the project is. Is Diablo II (with or without LoD) entirely playable?

Do they actually also target other games as well? Their choice of words seem to indicate so: "OpenDiablo2 is an ARPG game engine in the same vein of the 2000's games, and supports playing Diablo 2." If so, which?

ballresin2• 6 years ago

I only joined the project just this week, but I can tell you that the game isn't playable yet. It launches and runs, allowing you to create a character and walk around in town. Most functionality isn't wired up yet. There are a lot of opportunities to contribute.

There are no plans to support any other games, but it sounds like they expect to be able to use it to create new games.

anentropic• 6 years ago

is it cross-platform, since it's built in Go? runs on macOS?

ed25519FUUU• 6 years ago

This is written in Go and you should have no issue running it on Linux. It looks like there’s a small setup script you need to run first.

perceptronas• 6 years ago

Very exciting. Diablo 2 is one of the best games for me. Lore and universe is extremely interesting too

ballresin2• 6 years ago

This is exactly why I got involved and support it on Patreon. I played this a ton as a teenager.

It is also written in my favorite language, Go, which means that on my Mac running Catalina this will likely be the only way to play the game in the future. I couldn't even get the game files without using a High Sierra VM. There's also the impending ARM transition, which this project should also easily support.

simonklitj2• 6 years ago

Excellent point! I remember back when the original Rosetta was discontinued, and I couldn't play WarCraft 3 on my Mac. Haven't played D2 for a couple of years, but very excited by your points that even ARM can't kill this project. If the OS merges between iPad and Mac then maybe even D2 on iPad using OpenDiablo2. Very cool!

vorpalhex• 6 years ago

If you want a modern incarnation, Path of Exile is basically a homage to Diablo 2 with it's own universe and story but same complex and enjoyable mechanics.

fgonzag• 6 years ago

I would hate being a newbie in PoE now a days. The game has gotten so bloated and ridiculously complex that it would take months to sort of grasp all the different league mechanics.

I honestly can't wait for Diablo 4 as a PoE veteran since beta, I just don't agree with most of the recent design decisions. Lack of visual clarity, mechanical clunkiness with movement skills, rng on rng on rng mechanics (just progressing through maps can be incredibly frustrating if you're on a dry spell and can't even get maps to drop).

It's almost as if the devs are intentionally creating frustrating mechanics, in a game...

happy_path3• 6 years ago

Sadly, this kind of engine rewrites need original data files. Alternative art content would be awesome (a la OpenTTD). Could donations help this?

bootloop3• 6 years ago

I don't think this would be of interest for anyone surrounding this project. Requiring you to buy the original game keeps the publisher happy (to a certain level) and also gives you an argument for legality regarding the non-graphical content which might also be copyright protected.

Maledictus• 6 years ago

If you are not using any of their content you are not violating their copyright.

happy_path3• 6 years ago

In what sense are they breaking the copyright? Saying that the project needs some commercial files?

They haven't copied the code but re-implemented (in another programming language that didn't existed when this game was originally released).

Rampoina2• 6 years ago

https://flarerpg.org/

jaynetics• 6 years ago

In an ideal world, Blizzard would get on board and help complete this, then sell an HD asset pack for a few bucks to make a quick million.

pmilot• 6 years ago

Why help complete this? If they would be willing to have an open source D2 out there, they can just release the original source code. It would seem even more "ideal" to me.

mraison• 6 years ago

Fun (or sad) fact: they apparently lost a lot of the source code and assets. Looks like they were able to recover most of the code, but not the assets [1]

[1] https://www.gamespot.com/articles/how-diablo-2-was-almost-lo...

dmos622• 6 years ago

In an ideal world D2 would have been open source from the start.

throw1234651234• 6 years ago

What language is it written in?

How accessible is game code to a modern web dev that understand memory management and such, but never really uses C/C++ outside of coursework?

If I pull in Diablo / Half-Life / Shadows of Chernobyl source, am I going to see pretty clean files in an organized fashion that I can open with a modern IDE or a code dump?

scruple• 6 years ago

They're already working on remastering D2, according to leaks. Supposedly it's going to be announced this next Monday. It follows from the SC:1 and WC:3 remastering that we've seen. In that case, it'd be more than a quick million. It'll be many millions and it'll refresh their IP claims (which is why these things actually happen anyway, right?).

obidan• 6 years ago

Interestingly this is written in Golang. I wonder what the main considerations for choosing it were.

_y5hn• 6 years ago

On top of the hat: Safe, fast compile times, takes care of memory management for you, powerful stdlib, fast and lean execution, straightforward readable code, portability, static compilation, swiss army knife tooling.

Potential downsides: Golang/libs maybe a bit immature for non-system/microservices projects.

jonathanlydall• 6 years ago

Unfortunately Blizzard has a history of shutting down open source projects of implementations of their IP, I would be surprised if they don't go after this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratagus

simonklitj2• 6 years ago

Devilution is still alive, AFAIK: https://github.com/diasurgical/devilution

duskwuff• 6 years ago

And Devilution is more of an infringement, as it represents a direct recreation of Blizzard's source code for Diablo 1. OpenDiablo2, on the other hand, is more of a reimplementation (albeit not a clean-room approach).

logicNSci• 6 years ago

I've thrown in the towel on some of my favorite games, anything from Blizzard, Nintendo (Zelda), and obviously EA.

I think it "Clicked" when someone said 'none of the programmers that made Old_Game even work there anymore'

These companies are selling IP, not a sequel. When you buy modern Zelda, you don't get Majora's Mask, you get a 2015 action game skinned with Link.

Blizzard is a corporation that owns the characters and names. However you can play Diablo clones that are significantly better in 2020. You just need to be okay without Cain.

Nolstagia is a hella drug.

anthk9• 6 years ago

Flare RPG and Nethack are both better than Diablo.

When I discovered libre games thanks to Linux/BSD and some source ports with total conversions, I was sold.

There was 2000 times better quality on a lot IF and now called "indies" than most games since 2002.

cletus• 6 years ago

I think it's fair to say that Blizzard is a shadow of its former self. No argument there.

But there are (IMHO) at least two companies that still put out outstanding games.

1. Nintendo. I can't speak for the Zelda remasters that have come out. I never played the originals so had no nostalgia to draw me in. But Breath of the Wild... that was simply amazing. I bought a Switch just to play it and don't regret it at all; and

2. Rockstar. This one is a little more difficult for me because GTA3 and 4 blew me away at the time. Like they're actually satire. I think they lost that soul with GTA5, which people rave about for some reason. For me, it was a massive disappointment I never went back to after finishing the story missions. Sure it looked pretty but the writing was lazy, the characters were absolutely two-dimensional and off-putting (eg I almost stopped playing entirely when it came to Trevor) and all the humour/satire was just... gone. Plus it became less "slapstick". Like I drove a bus the wrong way down the ring road to see how far I could get before blowing up. I actually did a complete loop. There's no way that'd happen in GTA4. Your car would blow up long before then. In San Andreas you could cause massive car pileups that would chain explosion and I'd sometimes do that for giggles. I'd gotten >20 cars to blow up that way. I really do hope GTA6 finds its way back.

But Red Dead 2... that's both a massive technical achievement and a great game.

I'm also not opposed to reskins of old games. But they have to be right in exactly the way Warcraft III (Refunded) wasn't. It's too easy to lose the magic and the feel by carelessly updating graphics. Oh and Blizzard's IP grab on player maps (aka we're not going to let Dota 2 happen again) is downright disgusting.

But these franchises and companies are (unfortunately) exceptions. Too many games now fall into two buckets: player-generated content (ie PvP) or pay-to-win (ie mobile games). Neither particularly interest me.

strbean3• 6 years ago

You just need to be okay without Cain.

Just play Youtube clips of Bane from The Dark Night Rises. I swear he is voiced by Deckard Cain.

MrFoof• 6 years ago

Unfortunately Blizzard has a history of shutting down open source projects of implementations of their IP, I would be surprised if they don't go after this.

Blizzard's complaint with Stratagus was mostly with the original name, "Freecraft". When they took "Craft" out of the name, they were mostly left alone, and the project continued onwards.

In June 2003, a cease and desist letter was received from Blizzard Entertainment, who thought the name Freecraft could cause confusion with the names StarCraft and Warcraft, and that some of the ideas within the engine were too similar to Warcraft II.[3] The project halted on June 20, 2003

My biggest recommendation to the OpenDiablo and other Diablo clones? Rename it as soon as you can... to OpenDemon or something. It at least gets you away from Blizzard feeling as if they need to defend their trademark, to ensure they can successfully defend their trademark in the future.

anthk9• 6 years ago

OpenDevil. Totally not related to "Diablo"...

mister_hn• 6 years ago

Libreablo

sydd2• 6 years ago

Does anyone know why they switched from C# to Go?

de_watcher3• 6 years ago

Does anyone know why would you try to develop an opensource game in C# in the first place?

Octoth0rpe• 6 years ago

Presumably due to the wealth of C# code/libraries available to game devs. It's an incredibly popular language in that area, certainly more popular than Go.

There are plenty of good reasons not to use C#, but we shouldn't pretend that there aren't plenty of good reasons _to_ use it for specific problem spaces.

numlock86• 6 years ago

Why not? What are you implying?

BTW, there are a lot of opensource games written in C#. More than there are written in Go actually.

pjmlp2• 6 years ago

Don't know, maybe because C# follows up on Assembly, Pascal, C and C++ as the next language being widely adopted by the games industry?

essial2• 6 years ago

Project lead here. I switched from C# to go for multiple reasons. One was that we were having strange platform-specific issues between different operating systems with the runtime. Another reason was due to some design issues causing the code to be very difficult to work in.

I was originally going to re-write it in C, but when I saw go, I immediately fell in love with it. In my mind it sits somewhere between C and C++. Yes it has a GC, but it's not obtrusive. Plus the language is simple and nice to work with.

Regardless of what language I use, someone's going to say it's a "bad" choice and others will say it's a "good" choice. Personally I believe the language is just a tool, and go is working out extremely well for us so far.

steeleduncan• 6 years ago

I love go, but I've never thought of it for game projects due to the GC.

Have you had to do anything to avoid problems with the GC? (e.g. manual runtime.GC() calls, or work to avoid generating garbage)

sydd2• 6 years ago

What frameworks were you using in the C# version? And which ones in Go?

wheybags2• 6 years ago

Hey, just gonna take this opportunity to plug my very similar project for Diablo 1: https://github.com/wheybags/freeablo

k__• 6 years ago

Nice!

Since it's written in C++, does it compile to WebAssembly?

wheybags2• 6 years ago

I guess it could, but I haven't tried yet. It uses SDL and opengl, which I gather are well supported. You'd still need to load the original assets though, so it would maybe be more useful as a demo with some new assets.

TravHatesMe• 6 years ago

I'll take this opportunity to plug my project that I used to build plugins for Diablo 2: https://github.com/blurt/X86.Interop/

You can use this library to interop between C# and x86 assembly under a Windows process.

pixelbath• 6 years ago

Going to use this opportunity to plug someone else's Diablo 2 clone written in C++ that's been around for a few years: https://github.com/eezstreet/OpenD2

pjmlp2• 6 years ago

I wish to get just one pence in whatever currency for every time one writes Golang instead of Go.

tankenmate• 6 years ago

How about a brass razoo? [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_razoo

hombre_fatal2• 6 years ago

I wish everyone wrote it "Golang".

have_faith• 6 years ago

For anyone interested in this sort of thing, OpenMW (Morrowind) comes to mind and is still in active development: https://openmw.org/en/

mentos• 6 years ago

And here is what I consider the best client emulator for Ultima Online https://github.com/andreakarasho/ClassicUO

hombre_fatal2• 6 years ago

This is great.

I wanted to try it on macOS Catalina but was too lazy to copy my GOG game files over from Windows. I noticed the top Morrowind torrent already comes with the "Data Files" folder unpacked from the installation.

Download OpenMW, run the wizard, point it at the Morrowind.esm file (from the torrent or your own installation), and click play. We now have a Morrowind that works on all OS.

Amazing stuff. Even detects mods dragged into the directory and lets you click and drag their load order.

chungus• 6 years ago

Earlier this year I read "Stay a while and listen" by David Craddock and it made me reinstall diablo 2 after not touching it for 15 years. After disabling d3d11 in wine, it has been running with no issues on ubuntu 20.4

87zuhjkas• 6 years ago

For anyone interested in this sort of thing, ReGoth (Gothic 1 & 2) comes to mind and is still in active development: https://github.com/REGoth-project/REGoth-bs

the_af4• 6 years ago

Wow.

Gothic 1 was one of my favorite RPGs of that era. The setting was intriguing (it was devised to limit the world, but it was an interesting way of doing so), the world felt "alive", with night-day cycles and NPCs going their way, working, etc. I still have the box lying somewhere, because I keep the boxes of my favorites games.

(Unfortunately, I don't think I have any way to read the original game discs anymore, so I have the game and at the same time I don't have access to its assets...)

frabert• 6 years ago

The development has come to a (temporary?) halt right now, the bs::framework we were using encountered some issues right after we adopted it... Hopefully we'll be able to resume some time in the future! In the meantime, https://github.com/Try/OpenGothic is more feature-rich.

(Disclaimer: I worked on the project but I am not the maintainer nor am I any kind of leader figure in the dev team)

Vysero3• 6 years ago

I played Diablo2 for almost 19 years. Then the Blitzchung controversy happened. Now Diablo2, and all Blizzard products are dead to me, and imo they should be dead to you all as well.

ouid• 6 years ago

I'm pretty happy to draw a distinction between playing a blizzard north game that I bought in 2002, and continuing to support activision blizzard today.

Vysero3• 6 years ago

Sure, I get that, if the copy of D2 that you're using was purchased from Blizzard North.

jean-• 6 years ago

For those who are wondering what the parent is referring to: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy They banned a player who voiced support for the Hong Kong protests.

marcusverus• 6 years ago

This is serious concern for me regarding the rise of China. Access to their market is already so valuable that they are able to impose their censorship program internationally via implicit threat against corporate proxies abroad. See the similar NBA Hong Kong controversy[0] and the YouTube 'communist bandit' ordeal[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Basketball_Associatio... [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/youtube-china-communisty-par...

manmal• 6 years ago

You are boycotting an open source project that reimplements a 19 year old game from scratch because you hate the current owner of the original game?

killface• 6 years ago

it's not reimplementing it from scratch. it's developing a runtime engine that can read the original diablo 2 files. It says right in the README with big letters. You can't use this unless you have a legal copy of diablo2 and an expansion.

This thing is more like an emulator than a game.

LitFan• 6 years ago

Do you boycott any other companies based in, or products made in China?

schrute• 6 years ago

You are boycotting people playing a 20 year old game that was made by Blizzard North, who closed their doors in 2005, over someone being banned in 2019? Why don't we just cancel every business who has ever done something we disagree with?

benologist• 6 years ago

Excellent work. I think it is long overdue that many of our childhood cherished games, books, cartoons etc are paralleled in open source. Stuff from 20 - 30 years ago was supposed to be public domain once upon a time, Blizzard already made billions then got paid billions again when they sold to Activision and it's never going to reach public domain. Instead of public domain we have each generation paying $100b to continue enjoying pokemon, Harry Potter, Barbie, super heroes, cartoons etc.

kazagistar• 6 years ago

This is going to go poof to lawyers the moment they release their remasters.

BurningCycles• 6 years ago

I don't think so, I believe the worst case scenario is they might have to rename the project to not have 'Diablo' in its title.

Only project that I know Blizzard shut down was a Starcraft server re-implementation, presumably because it would allow you to play without having a legitimate cd-key.

BosunoB• 6 years ago

For anybody interested in this, you should also check out Path of Diablo https://pathofdiablo.com/. It's a popular mod with a lot of QoL improvements and which borrows Path of Exile's robust endgame mapping system for replayability.

OpenDiablo2

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