BaK GL - Betrayal at Krondor remake using OpenGL

This project is my attempt to remake Betrayal at Krondor using OpenGL.

It started out as a fun project to learn about graphics programming, but I've spent the vast majority of the time reverse engineering and reimplementing the game mechanics instead!

The game is mostly playable (with many rough edges), excluding combat. Improving the graphics will probably land at the end of the roadmap at this point as matching as close as possible the original game behaviour is much more addictive.

Here's a very quick look at some gameplay.

Features

Camping
Chapter progression
Cutscenes/Book excerpts
Music and sound
Quests and story
Shops and inventory
Spell casting
Temples
Towns
World exploration
World map

To do

Combat
Movement clipping
Lots of polishing!

Acknowledgements

This project would not have been possible without Guido de Jong's original work on xbak (http://xbak.sourceforge.net/).

I have used the late Eysteinn Björnsson's wonderful BaK Help Web extensively as a reference. This website is currently hosted at https://dimwood.net/krondor.html by vga256. I've also archived the contents on github.

Requirements

You will need a copy of Betrayal at Krondor for the game data files. These can be found on the web pretty easily.

Requires CMake, SDL2, SDL_MixerX, OpenGL, GLFW, and glm. Most of these dependencies will be downloaded and built automatically.

I use some features of C++23, so a more recent gcc or clang will be required to compile the code. You can check the CI to see what versions I am currently using.

Build

Linux

This project uses cmake. It can be built easily with

mkdir build; cd build;
cmake ..
make

The relevant binaries will be placed in your build directory.

Windows

You can build on Windows by opening the project in Visual Studio.

You may need to manually download some of the dependencies (freeglut, glew, and SDL2) and modify the CMakeLists.txt to point to them.

Mac

Due to Apple's deprecation of OpenGL Mac is not currently supported. It may compile and run if the required dependencies are installed and with some massaging of the CMake files.

Setup

BaKGL file main directory

BaKGL needs to find a number of different files in order to run with the game's original data. These are searched for in the bak main directory.

On UNIX systems this will be $HOME/bak, under Windows it will be %APPDATA%\bak. I will hereafter refer to this directory as $BAK_MAIN_DIR for both platforms.

Locate the original data files

In order to play around with the project you will need the original game data files.

You will specifically need the following files from your game:

krondor.001
krondor.rmf
frp.sx
startup.gam

BaKGL will look in either the current directory from which you ran the executable, or $BAK_MAIN_DIR/data for the game data files, so please copy them to the appropriate folder.

Make sure you check the case of the filenames in the folder where you installed BaK, if they are capitalised you will need to rename or copy them to lowercase.

Save files will be searched for in the $BAK_MAIN_DIR/GAMES directory, you can copy your old saves directory to this location. Alternatively, if you have no saves, the game will create this folder when you save your first game.