jsFO

About

Fallout 2 is a 1998 role-playing game developed by Black Isle Studios and published by Interplay Productions, a sequel to Fallout (1997), set roughly 80 years after the atomic war that devastated the first game's world. jsFO is a browser port of Fallout 2 using the HTML5 canvas API, with the original game's .dat asset files converted to a JSON-based format via Python scripts. Development has ceased, and the author describes it as pre-alpha with limited playability, intended more as a technical demo and reference codebase than a complete playable port.

How it differs from the original

The project explicitly does not aim to be a complete playable port of Fallout 2, but a technical demonstration of running the game in a browser; it ships with only a few pre-converted sample maps, and converting additional maps requires the original game's master.dat and critter.dat files.

Getting started

The repository includes pre-packaged data for several sample maps that can be tested by building the project and running a local server, which requires Node.js, npm, Python, and GNU Make. Playing additional maps requires supplying the original Fallout 2 data files for conversion.

History

The project began around 2014 as the author's hobby project for learning game development, started in C/SDL before the author decided to try running Fallout in a browser using the then-new HTML5 canvas API. The author later noted that web technology (Node.js, ES6, WebAssembly) and their own skills had moved on considerably since the project's early design decisions.

Known issues & limitations

• development: Development has ceased; project is inactive as of the documentation date.
• gameplay: Pre-alpha state with limited playability.

Additional notes

Note

The author says the code is left available mainly for others interested in reverse-engineering Fallout 2, and offers to help anyone who wants to continue similar work.