Arx Fatalis is actually really rather a cool game. Think Ultima Underworld, fully jazzed up and with a nifty story full of surprising twists. I might produce a review of it at some later stage.
Arx isn’t a new game by any stretch of the imagination, being more than eight years old, and it had persistent performance issues except in the lower resolutions and on some specific hardware. Nevertheless, a patch (1.21) suddenly appeared which fixes all of that – although it actually maybe feels a little fast now.
Apparently it is the final patch for Arx Fatalis, but it is accompanied by the source-code under the GPL 3 (with a couple minor exceptions).
In order to do anything with the source-code, you’ll really need the data that comes with the game, and that means owning it. That’s US$5.99 from gog.com.
The 1.21 patch, and the source-code and licenses can be gotten from this page on the Arkane Studios site.
[thanks Bethesda Blog]
Ah, so this is what you were alluding on twitter- you’re considering giving it a visual upgrade?
Guess again 🙂 This was a pleasant surprise, but entirely incidental!
I’m wondering why they didn’t post the code on a public repository, as opposed to the zip dump.
I don’t suppose you have any stats on which way developers lean when they open-source their old titles (source dump vs. public repository) ?
Source dumps are the most common. Fire and forget.
Are there any old titles of which you’d like to get your hands on their source code?