Amnesia: Games Open Source for its 10th Anniversary
The studio Frictional Games announced, for the game’s 10 year anniversary, Amnesia Dark Descent and Machine For Pigs has been made open source under the GPL3 license. This comes as a big surprise and delight to horror lovers and developers alike.
Open-sourcing this game will allow developers to enhance the engine to include fixes or new features. It will also likely lead to strange mods, brand new horror games, and even new game engines using this engine as reference.
As an educational tool and jumping point, Frictional Games has created a new entry point for horror developers to tinker. While this series has always been welcoming of the modding community, this will take that relationship even further.
Obviously, all these things are decade old and nothing new. But I think they can all be quite interesting for anyone learning gamedev, or that are just curious how Amnesia worked under the hood. — Thomas, Frictional Games
The code is written in C++ and includes the editor code and all assets for the game. You can find the source code on Github here. I haven’t programmed in C++ in some years, but this has sparked my interest in picking up the old compiler again.
Some key features from the announcement:
Shadow mapping with soft edges.
Realtime visibility culling system that also works for dynamic objects.
Automatic render batch system of static objects.
Deferred shading system.
A full editor with lots of interesting feature that such as picking algorithms and view fitting.
Very simple state machine AI that still gives rise to fairly interesting and intelligent agents.
Fairly advanced system for physics sounds.
Physics based interaction system.
Own sound system implemented using OpenAL
Lots of other basic rendering and gameplay tech all implemented in an a coherent engine structure
While this news is exciting and will no doubt lead to great new horror content, I can’t wait for the next Frictional Games release Amnesia: Rebirth coming October 20th.
