Bringing Old Games Back to Life
Re-Animator is a development framework written in C++ using SDL and various other Open Source libraries. It allows you to write high-performance 2D sprite-based graphical applications (like games!) using just XML and JavaScript on your desktop. Yes, that's right, if you can write a web-page, you can write a game using Re-Animator. Whilst it was originally conceived for the creation of
remakes of old games (hence the site's tag-line) it can be used to create pretty much any type of 2D game, or even simple 3D ones, providing you do some of the maths yourself.
The framework is still quite young but, after two-and-a-half years worth of development, we hope to shortly make an initial release! The Downloads section will soon contain development kits for Windows and Linux, check out the News for the latest on what's happening, the Gallery for screen-shots of on-going development, and the Documentation for what scant information there currently is along with personal TODO lists and other stuff.
Oh, did I mention, it's free? The code is available via the
Bazaar version control system and (although the code doesn't actually say so yet) it is free Open Source software available under the LGPL license. So you can release your own games without having to also release your source code. If you don't want to. See the Documentation section for download and compilation details, although the dependency packages aren't yet available.
Re-Animator is Powered by
OpenGL, and uses the following Open Source libraries and tools;
Code::Blocks,
SDL,
SpiderMonkey,
jsgen,
Natural Docs,
FTGL,
PhysicsFS,
TinyXml,
Chipmunk,
Nvwa,
Cairo.