Dark Oberon

A plasticine real-time strategy game made by Charles University students in 2002–2005, which I revived for today’s systems: graphics and sound on SDL2, a new orc race, computer opponents, internet play and a Haiku port.

C++DockerFlaskHaikuOpenGLPythonSDL2

Open website ↗

PURPOSE

Someone else’s classic, a second life

I am not the author of this game. It started as a student project and was released under the GPL; the authors modelled every unit and building in plasticine and photographed it. Over time it fell behind: it depended on libraries nobody maintains any more, and the computer player was just an experiment. I liked it from the very start and came back to it several times over the years, but there was never enough time to really move it forward. Until now. 😉

SOLUTION

What the fork adds

I moved windowing, input and graphics from GLFW to SDL2 with OpenGL, and sound from FMOD to SDL2_mixer. Humans got an opponent: an orc race with 16 units and buildings in the same plasticine style. Any game can have computer players with three difficulty levels and five personalities; they gather an army, retreat from lost fights and remember who attacked them. There is a map editor and seven new maps. The game runs on Linux, Windows and Haiku.

NETWORK PLAY

Oberon Cloud

The original only worked on a local network. Now all you need is an account in the web lobby: create a game, the lobby starts a headless server in Docker and gives you an address to send to your friends. They join without an account, and you can fill free slots with computer players. A game stops by itself after 30 minutes with nobody connected.

THANKS

The original authors

The game was created in 2002–2005 by crazych (Jiří Krejsa), index (Michal Král), jojolaser (Marián Černý), libertik (Valéria Šventová), martinpp (Martin Košalko) and peterpp (Peter Knut) for the Project course at Charles University; the music is by lealoo. This fork stands on their work. Original homepage on SourceForge.