Arx fatalis is GPL’d

[ducon]

For those of you who don’t know this game, it’s a FPS RPG developped by a French team, that was followed by Dark messiah of myth and magic.
So, Arx fatalis’ source code is available since January, 14. It does not compile with gcc in Linux, but with Visual studio in Windows 32.
http://bethblog.com/index.php/2011/01/14/arx-fatalis-source-code-patch-released/

[Gez]

That's awesome. :)


A very interesting thing to note is that this happened after ZeniMax bought Arkane Studio, the makers of Arx Fatalis. So if ZeniMax allowed source release for Arx Fatalis, they should let John Carmack release the Doom 3 source code as well.

[Aliotroph?]

They will let Carmack do what he wants. Carmack has that clout plus the foresight and intelligence to see that he keeps it where he can.

It's awesome they released the code for Arx. It badly needs a big update just for stability and bug fixes.

[Captain Red]

Horray! My favorate bread and pie cooking simulator might soon be getting a modern overhaul!

Maybe this will finally gave some enthusiastic mod makers the tools to make a Ultima Underworld remake...
Well they did it for Ultima V and Ultima VI, and Arx fatalis was going to be Ultima Underworld III for a while. It's not completely impossible.

It's just mostly impossible. :(

[Doom_Dude]

Kewlness. Arx was one of those games I never heard of until I walked into a store, saw it on the shelf and bought it right there and then and was very glad with the purchase.

[Aliotroph?]

I bought it because Doom Dude told me to. Sweet game. Here's hopindg the mods start happening now.

[Quasar]

Checked out the code. Nothing too mind blowing. Very clean, but rather hard coded. No abstraction layer to speak of - Direct3D and DirectSound are used throughout the code. Some parts are a bit jumbled as I've seen graphics, sound, and AI being handled in the same places. The most use you'd probably get out of this aside from creating a port of the game itself is to learn some Direct3D coding from it.

The license is a little bit bothersome as they customized it (two sections are modified at the end with additional language about trademarks, indemnity, etc). That basically will be a problem for anybody looking to combine it with other GPL v3 code.

[Aliotroph?]

This is only tangentially related, but is a nice find: http://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/16508172428648448

[Technician]

Cool.

[The Lag]

i just GOG'd this game a few weeks ago. very cool in a lot of ways (once i figured out what to avoid in order to make it not crash), but also left me with the feeling that it wasn't nearly as good as ultima underworld.
i even went on to watch a let's play of Dark Messiah of MIGHT and Magic afterwards.
i'm hoping that another good 1st person dungeon crawl comes out eventually since i get a lot of enjoyment out of wandering around vast subterra.
also: the crypt was fucking badass.

[Spleen]

Quasar said:

Checked out the code. Nothing too mind blowing. Very clean, but rather hard coded. No abstraction layer to speak of - Direct3D and DirectSound are used throughout the code. Some parts are a bit jumbled as I've seen graphics, sound, and AI being handled in the same places. The most use you'd probably get out of this aside from creating a port of the game itself is to learn some Direct3D coding from it.

So there's not much point in using the Arx Fatalis engine as a 3D engine over, say, Quake 3 engine? Or there enough of a difference in code quality over id software's engines to make it worthwhile, in your opinion?