Today, the folks over at Openc2e would like to announce a new major milestone release of the OpenC2E engine! Designed to recreate and re-implement the engines of Creatures 1 to Creatures 3, it has been long in the works! The new edition features:
- Codebase was updated to build and run on modern computers. That means C++11, Qt5 instead of Qt4, SDL2 instead of SDL, Python instead of Perl, and STL and other community libraries instead of Boost. The OpenAL backend has been removed entirely, and the SDLAudioBackend was vastly improved – Windows native builds: You can simply open the openc2e source folder in Visual Studio with CMake support to get a build (you’ll still need Qt installed, for now)
- On Windows, running openc2e will give you a GUI to find your Creatures installation (thanks Shreddan!)
- The Creatures 1 and Creatures 2 font format was successfully reverse-engineered, and the original font is now used for those games
- Non-English language support was added, and openc2e will use your system default language if possible – Fixed the “My creatures walk through floors and in mid-air” physics bug (now available only through Secret Adventure Mode) – Fixed compound agent parts being displayed on the wrong plane
- Set up automatic tests and builds with GitHub Actions
- Added a praybuilder command-line tool that supports both Pray and CAOS2Pray source
- Added a spritedumper command-line tool that exports SPR, S16, C16, BLK, and PHOTO as PNGs
- Added an mngdumper tool
- Added a cobdumper tool for C1 and C2 COBs
- Included the generated CAOS syntax file, commandinfo.json, in builds for use by other tools – And various other small cleanups, tools, and fixes
The new version can be found on the Github. People interested (such as C++ programmers) in helping the project should contact the lovely people at the Discord for further details!