xoreos README

xoreos is an open source implementation of BioWare's Aurora engine and its derivatives, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 (or later). The goal is to have all games using this engines working in a portable manner, starting from Neverwinter Nights and ending with Dragon Age II.

Games

The following games are valid targets for xoreos:

• Neverwinter Nights
• Neverwinter Nights 2
• Knights of the Old Republic
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
• Jade Empire
• Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood
• The Witcher
• Dragon Age: Origins
• Dragon Age II

Status

Currently, the "foundation" work of managing resources, reading many basic file formats, displaying graphics and playing sounds has been done. All targeted games show partial ingame graphics, such as the area geometry and objects, letting you fly around in a "spectator mode". Some games show partial menus, and something resembling a starting point for a script system is there.

No actual "normal" gameplay is implemented yet, though.

For further information about the status of specific games, please visit our wiki.

Note: We are always looking for people to join our efforts in reimplementing those games. If you'd like to help, feel free to contact us! Please also read over our CONTRIBUTING.md for some guidelines. Thanks.

Getting xoreos

You can get xoreos in multiple ways:

You can download an archive with a binary of the latest release from our downloads page. This includes binaries for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux, as well as packages for various GNU/Linux distributions. All of them are available for both 32- and 64-bit x86 architectures.

Or, if you're running Arch Linux, you can install xoreos directly from the AUR.

Or, if you're running Gentoo Linux, you can install xoreos directly from our overlay.

Lastly, you can compile xoreos yourself; either from a release source package, found on our downloads page, or a fresh repository checkout. For details on how to compile xoreos on various operating system, please read the Compiling xoreos page on our wiki.

Running xoreos

First, you need to fully install and/or copy the game you want to play with xoreos onto your hard disk. How you do this depends on the game, your operating system and where/how you have bought the game.

xoreos does not yet have a launcher GUI or anything like this. You need to start it from the command line. Run xoreos with the command line option "--help" (without the quotes) to get a help text about further command line options.

The quickest way to start a game in path /path/to/game/ would be to call

xoreos -p/path/to/game/

If you're on Windows and the path is, say, D:\Path\To\Game\, call

xoreos -pD:\\Path\\To\\Game\\

For a more in-depth documentation on how to run xoreos, please also read the Running xoreos page on our wiki.

Config file

In general, xoreos can read the configuration which game to run from either the command line, a config file or both. Additionally, when you first specify a new game on the command line, xoreos will add a related entry in the config file (creating it first, if necessary).

To accurately identify a specific instance of an installed game, xoreos uses the concept of a "target". Each target has a separate section in the config file, and each of their options apply only to that target. The special target "xoreos" is a global section applying to all games, although the same option in a game target overrides the global option.

For example:

[xoreos]
width=1024
height=768
fullscreen=false

[nwn]
path=/home/drmccoy/games/nwn/
fullscreen=true
volume_music=0.500000
volume_sfx=0.850000
volume_voice=0.850000

You can then start the game with the target "nwn" with

xoreos nwn

and xoreos will do the rest. This will start the game in the path /home/drmccoy/games/nwn/, running it in fullscreen at 1024x768.

As you can see with the volume options, xoreos also saves settings you made in the game' actual GUI into the target's section of the config file.

The place where xoreos expects the config file depends on your operating system:

• On GNU/Linux, the place is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/xoreos/xoreos.conf. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME defaults to $HOME/.config/
• On Mac OS X, the place is $HOME/Library/Preferences/xoreos/xoreos.conf
• On Windows, xoreos.conf is in the subdirectory xoreos in either $APPDATA or $USERPROFILE, depending on your Windows version

For a more elaborate example with more in-depth explanations, please see xoreos.conf.example in the doc directory, or the Running xoreos page on our wiki.

Links

• xoreos website
• xoreos wiki
• Screenshots
• Main source repository
• All xoreos repositories
• Doxygen documentation

Contact

To contact us, please either write to mailing list, or join our IRC channel #xoreos on Freenode.