About
Albion is a 1995 role-playing game developed and published by Blue Byte for MS-DOS, originally released in German with an English translation following in 1996; it combines fantasy elements with a science-fiction setting, following a space pilot stranded on a mining colony ship on a resource-rich world that turns out to be teeming with sentient life. UAlbion is a from-scratch remake of the 1995 RPG Albion built on .NET 9, requiring the original game's data files (from the GOG release or its demo) to run. It currently implements 2D/3D rendering, 2D movement and collision, environment interaction, a full GUI (menus, inventory, conversations), sound and music, save/load, video playback, asset export, a day/night cycle, and NPC movement, while the combat system, magic system, 3D lighting model, and 3D event handling/automap remain unimplemented.
How it differs from the original
The remake plans several deliberate changes from the original: streamlined hotkeys to reduce reliance on right-clicking, mouse-movement pathfinding, a take-all button for looting (already implemented), and optional, toggleable fixes for bugs in the original game; modding support and a built-in asset editor are also planned.
Getting started
Getting started requires acquiring the original Albion game files (available cheaply on GOG, in full or demo form) and extracting them via a DOSBox-based process described in the repo (Wine is also needed on Linux). The project is then compiled and run with an included run script, which supports choosing the Vulkan, OpenGL, or Direct3D graphics backend.
History
The project's file-format support draws on documentation from the freealbion wiki community and on code adapted from IllidanS4's AlbLib project (MIT-licensed) for image loading.
Known limitations
- gameplay: Combat system currently unimplemented.
- gameplay: Magic system currently unimplemented.
- graphics: Lighting model for 3D levels not implemented.
- gameplay: Event handling and collision detection in 3D environments not implemented.
- gameplay: Automap for 3D environments not implemented.