About
Warrior Kings is a 2002 real-time strategy game developed by Black Cactus and published by Microïds, with a Mac OS X port released the following year via Feral Interactive, set in a fantasy medieval world exploring pagan tribalism, renaissance enlightenment, and imperialist theocracy. wkbre2 is an open-source engine reimplementation of Warrior Kings (Battles) that loads the original game's own asset and script files (its 'game set') directly, letting it support nearly all of the original's mechanics without reimplementing them from scratch. It's a from-scratch rewrite of the earlier wkbre project, still in early development and not completely playable, but it already supports online multiplayer via a client-server architecture and runs on Windows and Ubuntu Linux, with Direct3D 9, Direct3D 11, and OpenGL 3.3 rendering backends.
Getting started
After downloading a build, players edit the included JSON configuration file to point at their own installed copy of Warrior Kings (or Warrior Kings: Battles) and set the correct game version number, then launch wkbre2; compiling from source requires a C++17 compiler and dependencies installed via vcpkg.
History
wkbre2 is a ground-up rewrite of the author's earlier wkbre project, begun roughly six years after wkbre when the author was 16; the original codebase had accumulated short variable names, excessive global state, and other issues the author wanted to leave behind. The original Warrior Kings engine itself also suffers from crashes on large games, performance issues, broken pathfinding, and modding limits that wkbre2 aims to eventually fix.
Known limitations
- gameplay: Still in early development and not completely playable.
Additional notes
- External link
- A short gameplay demo video is linked from the readme on YouTube.