The GemRB (http://gemrb.sf.net) team is proud to announce a new major release. The berserking development rage still hasn't ended and only a month since the last release a few important milestones have been reached. Combat and various actions are now much improved, many of the projectiles that were hardcoded in the IE now work, time is handled better ... Coupled with a bunch of other bugfixes and new features this means that now a few of the games are roughly playable beyond their starting areas!

Currently only the sources are available. You can get them here (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=10122).

I thought this project was dead. Good to hear, anyway - although it's a shame it's released under a restrictive license. If it wasn't I'd probably try and do something with it.

restrictive license!? Are you kidding me? It's released under GPL, which stands for GNU General Public License, which is the most widespread Free software and open source license.

If you wanted to build a business around it without sharing code (BSD-style), you'd still have a lot of trouble to get permission from WotC, since this uses d&d rules.

A license that requires you to release source code is a restrictive one. I like the freedom to do whatever the hell I like with things that I make, and the GPL doesn't do that. Free software/open source != unrestricted.

Also - while I haven't looked into the engine for a long time and have no idea how they've implemented the D&D rules, I imagine you could simply leave that part out or reimplement it as you like. If you couldn't, that would be pretty horrible design.

I didn't say the GPL is absolutely unrestrictive and your generalisation is even more wrong since that array of licenses include also WTFPL (which I'm sure you'd like :)).

Gemrb is an IE clone (with some boni), so the ability to transplant arbitrary rulesets is not on the roadmap, neither a real priority. Maybe someday, somehow, someway, but the primary goal is to get the games to work as good as possible.

(These post make me sound more like a dick than I'm trying to be - I'm sure you all know what you're doing :p Also, I'm not wrong in thinking that you're on the development team, am I?)

What generalisation? 'GPL' refers to a specific license, not an array of them. (edit: oh wait, I see the problem - I meant != as in 'not necessarily equal' not as in, y'know, 'does not equal')
And, if you admit that it's 'not entirely unrestrictive', that would indicate that it's a 'restrictive license' then, wouldn't it?
(The WTFPL is a lovely license, incidently :p I'd happily settle for LGPL though)

I can't see how tightly coupling the ruleset with the rest of the engine is good software design. Admittedly this is from a position of not having thought very hard about how to make an IE clone, so perhaps it all makes good sense. But if this is the case, the engine doesn't sound like it would be useful to very many people. Making games based on AD&D - as you pointed out - isn't likely to be looked nicely upon by WotC even if they are free.

But then, maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way. I've been thinking that it's more a project like FIFE, where emulating Fallout was more of a stepping stone to getting more tile-based isometric RPGs going rather than an end-goal. From your comments and a bit of lazy browsing around the website, would it be more accurate to call it a (major) extension of IE game modding? If it's not really intended for original games, then I guess the GPL/strongly linked to AD&D thing makes sense.

And in that case - it's a cool project and the best of luck to you - but it just doesn't seem very useful to me (er - specifically to me, not as in it being useless generally).

Still, calling GPL restrictive is pretty silly without any context. It could all have been published as closed source, pay to temporarily get software.

We don't "tightly couple things by design" unless it is necessary or convenient enough for the gain. In the current state this is acceptable, any decoupling can be done later.

You're correct that gemrb has greater ambitions than just running the originals on your next phone or my lawn mower. It is (becoming) a good modding platform since it has fewer hardcoded bits than IE and the obvious development/workings transparency. It allows for cool things like monk/sorcerer kits, up 10 player parties (if someone fixes the scripts; mostly the cutscenes are problematic), iwd2 style combat output, unlimited spell/kit selection when creating characters ... I'll go create a wiki page. ;)

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but couldn't WotC put a hold to your development at any point they liked? IIRC not even d20 is open for software development any more, so basically you need WotC's and Atari's OK to develop anything approaching D&D games? Which would never happen, obviously...

For the ruleset? Probably. Luckily we're a small fish and if something went wrong we could always implement a different, yet similar system. It's all the data that makes the games and since we don't distribute it, I don't think it is a problem (IANAL+I haven't read the eula though).

We got a general "OK" years back from one of the studios. It's a bit of a stretch, but gemrb fits into the modding category. :)

Well, good luck with it, I've been checking in on the project over the years and it's good to see that it's still active.