Devlog: We are releasing the engine source code!

After our “LBA returns” announcement beginning September on Twitter, the community response was truly amazing. We anticipated a bunch of cool reactions but not so many and not with so much love and support!!!!

Again, thank you.

So, what have we been up to since our last talk?

Going a little bit deeper into the rabbibunny hole...

The past couple of weeks, I’ve discussed with people close to the original games, being either the programmers working at Adeline Software or the game creators themselves. I also started talking to fans that initiated personal or community projects during the past years.

And I had an epiphany. So dramatic … *insert 🥁 roll here* **even if the title already gave me up but … hey… **

The programming work done by the original teams is not only tremendous but exceptional for the time. It can’t be kept on old CDs in suitcases in the programmers' homes (*wink* Didier 😏).

This codebase can benefit developers as a source of knowledge / education, Little Big Adventure fans or retrogaming communities.

And then, just like that, we decided to OPEN-SOURCE THE CODE OF LITTLE BIG ADVENTURE ENGINES AND TOOLS that have been trusted in our hands, so it can outlive all of us, somehow.

Our objective is to preserve those pieces of technical mastery and true groundbreaking vision. We also want to give back to the LBA community who kept cheering on the games during all those years.

I'd like to invite all fans to keep expressing their passion for the game through different means. We're especially excited about bringing modding capabilities in the future!

Follow the github link to check how you can contribute.

For each game, there is:

• An “historic” repository where only ex-Adeline developers or myself will contribute (if we forgot a file or a mention somewhere),
• A community repository that is open to pull requests

We also invite the community to contribute to the general “engines” documentation.

If you want to discuss our projects in general or the open source specifically, we opened an official Discord server.

By the way, this code was never meant to be seen by anyone outside the Adeline Software team. The source we are releasing is mainly untouched (only the developers names were removed) including bad french, variable names in “frenglish” and some comments that are just too funny not to share. Enjoy 😁

read infostest if object has animno too bad bye

It’s over… What ?!!! already ?!!This compression method is stupid !But it works !

Let’s sound the situation with a little *chbooing*

I’m so grateful for...

I am very thankful for the people helping me recover the source code and working on those files : Seb, DBug and Vincent.
Not forgetting Didier Chanfray for driving 2h30 to my place with the famous “suitcase” full of CDs and Frédérick Raynal for his true passion for technology.
I want to thank both of them for their trust in me with this initiative!
Lastly, cheers to Alexandre, Adrien, the good people from ScummVM and our french friends from the M05 association who were kind enough to answer my questions!

And next ?

In the future, we also plan to release Time Commando engine code. Stay tuned!

Gwen