openblack is an open source reimplementation of Black & White (2001) written in modern C++ and modern rendering engines (OpenGL, Vulkan).

You still need to have the original game assets in order to use this, don't ask where to get these.

Clone the code using: git clone --recursive https://github.com/openblack/openblack.git

The simplest way to obtain all the required dependencies is through vcpkg which is included with a manifest file.

If you don't want to use vcpkg; CMake will use system dependencies, or manually specified package directories.

• Install Visual Studio 2019
• Install CMake (3.15+ for Windows)

The easiest way to get started on Windows is to allow CMake and vcpkg to handle all dependencies for you, this is the default on Windows.

You can simply open the openblack folder directly in Visual Studio.

Alternatively you can generate your project files using CMake GUI or with CMake directly:

cd openblack
cmake -S . -B build

Using vcpkg for dependency management you can apply these build instructions to other distros, these are just tested on Ubuntu for simplicity though:

sudo apt install build-essential cmake # Ubuntu / Debian
cd openblack
cmake -S . -B build -DOPENBLACK_USE_VCPKG=true -DVCPKG_TARGET_TRIPLET=x64-linux -DOPENBLACK_USE_BUNDLED_BGFX=true
cmake --build build -j 5

Alternative to vcpkg you can use system dependencies by setting OPENBLACK_USE_VCPKG=false (default: false) CMake will find them as long as they provide a proper config file.

Install openblack-git from the AUR which builds and installs directly for all Arch Linux derived distros such as Manjaro.

Contributions are always welcome, whether it's modifying source code to add new features or bug fixes, documenting new file formats or simply editing some grammar.

You can also join the Discord for development discussion if you are unsure of anything.

openblack is released as open source software under the GPL v3 license, see the license file in the project root for the full license text.