Hi. I’m the developer of the game engine for OpenBW. I’ve been writing a bot/AI for StarCraft: Brood War for a while now, and I started the OpenBW project because working with the original game for purposes of machine learning or running automated games is quite difficult. The existing solutions scale poorly and are not portable. I also really wanted to watch replays in the browser, so I figured I would recreate the game engine.
OpenBW is still in the early stages, and the scope has grown a little, but my main responsibility is the core game engine, and the most important goal is full compatibility with StarCraft: Brood War.
The game engine is almost the entire game. It is how units move, prod and poke each other, how they bug out and struggle with pathfinding, how they live and how they die. It is not things like the user interface, graphics or sound, but don’t worry, we’ll have that too. At some point you’ll be able to play it, there will be networking and whatnot. But not yet.
The first focus of the project is to be able to view replays. Replays are a nice focus since in order to play a replay, the entire game engine is required. From the perspective of the code, viewing a replay is almost the same thing as actually playing the game, the difference is just that the user input comes from a file instead of from a mouse and keyboard.
The required accuracy and faithfulness to the original game can not be overstated. The engine is large, and if anything is off by the slightest margin, the entire game will go out of sync. By out of sync I simply mean that something different would happen if you were to play a game in OpenBW vs the original StarCraft. There is a butterfly effect that happens when something is done incorrectly which creates enormous differences. Therefore, the original behavior needs to be replicated exactly.
The engine will be a library which can be used in other projects. There is no API yet, it is too early to be used for that purpose.
There are no ETAs (at least not from me). Features will be done when they’re done.
We have a demo replay viewer that you can use to view a replay in the browser. In order to draw the graphics it requires some files from StarCraft: Brood War, so you must have that installed locally (with the 1.16.1 patch).
Please read the instructions on how to use the replay viewer here.
The replay viewer itself can be found here.
Hello, my name is James Fitzgerald. I will be graduating from the University of Massachusetts this spring with a degree in Chinese Language and Literature. I have been studying Chinese for 7 years. I can aide in translating any documentation from English to Chinese. I would love to use this as an opportunity to practice my translation skills. Moreover, I have taken intensive Korean for over a year at the college level at this point, so I can also do my best to make Korean translations available. I hope to hear from you soon!
James