Runesword 2 CRPG Gets Open Source Release

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing out that CrossCut Games has released the source code and a fully unlocked playable version of RuneSword 2, a "[Windows based] CRPG designed to appeal to 'pen and paper' role-players. The game comes with two full-length adventures, a number of smaller adventures, and a completely flexible construction set." There's more information over at the CrossCut Games forums for the game, where it's noted that the developers "had to remove the music files", but "all the source code (and the unlocked version of RS2)" are currently available, with "another few hundred meg of 'unused' graphics, sound and many other tid bits" that may be released in the future.

Great to see more open sourced classic games

[Kiriwas]

Games like this filled my time endlessly and its great to see sources being released more often. It's like magicians giving away secrets after 50 years, it usually leads to more quality magic shows. In the same way, as novice programmers and tinkerers get to see techniques used in these games, I feel that the quality of games in general will go up. Either that or we'll just go back to playing the classics! For FREE!

Classic?

[rbright]

Um. Your sentiment is noble and all but this is in no way a classic game.

Runesword 2 is a game construction kit, released on September 4th, 2001. I suppose the original Runesword is slightly more "classic" having been released on February 6th, 2000.

http://www.runesword.com/rs2.html [runesword.com]

Not so magical, really.

Re:Classic?

[Kiriwas]

I most definitely realize that. Classic in this case meant the style of the game. No flashy 3D graphics to wow the eyes, drain the wallets and bore the mind. These types of games are plain fun. I'd say that maybe I'm showing my age, but im barely breaking 2 decades, so I don't think its an age or generational thing so much as the fact that a good game is a good game, and thus... a classic. I don't think a studio like CrossCut, with all 2 of their developers could spend the resources on thousands of 3D models and hundreds of miles of 3D terrain, instead they produce good games. Kudos boys!

Re:Classic?

[JVert]

classic as in vb6 codebase.

Re:CRPG = ??

[Lathan]

Computer, sometimes Console for games like Final Fantasy or Terranigma. The idea was to differentiate it from tabletop roleplaying games, though since those were first, they're not called TRPGs.

Before anybody gets any ideas of a Linux port...

[ClassicG]

I think you should know that the game was written in Visual Basic. Good luck - you'll need it. Also, the game doesn't seem to work in any flavour of wine that I've tried, including winex, so it looks those of us that have left windows behind are out of luck... Not that I'm complaining about these guys releasing the source to their game - that's only ever a good thing! But it still sucks a little that it looks like, open source or not, this is going to remain a Windows-only game.

Re:Before anybody gets any ideas of a Linux port..

[Jerf]

Maybe... maybe not. With the source you might be able to start migrating the game piece by piece onto a more friendly platform. You could take pieces of the game from VB to C++, and perhaps from there wrap it in Python/Perl or something via SWIG.

Unfortunately, VB is just about the worst choice for this scenario. C++ can be wrapped a bajillion different ways (my personal choice would be to migrate it into Python, but there are a wide variety of alternate good solutions too). Maybe, maybe, the game could be wrapped as a (gigantic) COM control and driven from a decent language, slowly migrating out the logic into the alternate language, but I don't have enough experience to know if this is feasible.

Still, it isn't hopeless; bare minimum, the pieces that WINE are choking on could probably be made such that WINE stops choking on them.

Re:Before anybody gets any ideas of a Linux port..

[Karora]

Well one thing it would potentially be good for is as a test suite for enhancing Wine. Whatever these guys have done is likely to have been done by other VB programmers, and making this app work with Wine would likely have a flow on to many other apps.

Having source code for something can really give the Wine coders something to sink their teeth into. I recently saw that they now have the (windows version of) AbiWord running under Wine, and that pointed up a number of fairly minor bugs.

Wine is actually getting surprisingly good nowadays. My wife still runs Photoshop, but with wine I have been able to migrate her over to a Linux desktop. Likewise I used it for a mapping application recently in a linux desktop rollout project. I have one last Windows development environment that I still need to use for a couple of clients (Progress 4GL), but Wine does that job for me too now.

Re:Before anybody gets any ideas of a Linux port..

[mrseigen]

Yeah, this is about the worst possible case for an open source release. With luck, it will even compile on a new version of Visual Basic!

Yet another reason not to use VB for anything you're likely to update in the future.

Dumb Question

[geminidomino]

What's the "C" in "CRPG" stand for?

Re:Dumb Question

[Quill_28]

Computer?

Re:Dumb Question

[PunchMonkey]

Oh! and Miss... what does the "P" stand for?

/obscure?

Re:Dumb Question

[TrickFred]

Normally, CRPG stands for Console RPG - as in PS, SNES, etc. - but as this is obviously a PC program, and not a console game, maybe they meant that the game was made to look in a similar style to its console bretheren. I don't know for sure, as I'm still downloading it.

Re:Dumb Question

[TwistedSquare]

Character I believe.