Overview
An open-source engine reimplementation for Warrior Kings (Battles), a Real-Time Strategy game developed by Black Cactus and released in 2002/2003, now with multiplayer support!
This project is an engine recreation. That means it basically tries to imitate the original engine by loading the exact same asset and script files from the original.
WK uses a set of script files named the game set, which are files that define all the types of units (characters, buildings) as well as the scripting for the game mechanics, commands and orders in the game. What is nice about the game set is that, once extracted from the data.bcp archive file, all the game set files are text-based, which makes reverse engineering and modding a lot easier.
The goal of the new engine is to actually load the definitions and interpret the scripts in the game set, similar to for example ScummVM which interprets scripting languages of several adventure games, but here we have a 3D RTS game instead. this way the new engine already supports nearly all mechanics of the game without having to reimplement them from scratch, saving lots of time in making a "new" WK.
One catch though is that by reusing the game set, the new engine might become close to the original engine. One might think this could bring back design flaws and bugs the original had. However, I do believe that with few improvements to the design and game set, as well as bugfix mods to the game set files, we could fix all of the issues and bring the game up to "modern standards".
