OpenBlack Aims To Resurrect Lionhead's Lost God Game 'Black & White' In A New Engine

If you're a fan of Lionhead's classic 2001 god game Black & White, you'll no doubt understand the struggle of getting the game to run on modern computers. But it seems like help is on the way, as reported by GamingOnLinux and RockPaperShotgun.

This is because OpenBlack — a new open-source reimplementation of Black & White — has just released its first public version (version 0.1.0) online, signalling an attempt to provide better support for the original game across Mac, PC, Linux, and other devices — provided you have your original discs handy.

According to the announcement post on the project's GitHub, OpenBlack has been in development for 6 years, with initial work on the project starting back in August 2018. Since then, its contributors have managed to implement a large number of features required to bring the game back to life, including audio support, new systems for model rendering and animation, a new camera setup that closely matches the original, higher resolution landscapes, physics, and an early AI state machine, among other things.

As of now, it also currently runs on modern Windows MacOS, and Linux, with additional experimental builds adding Android, iOS, and web assembly to its list of supported operating systems.

Before you go getting too excited, though, the developers have suggested there's still a lot of work to be done in the future before this project can be considered feature-complete, with the engine currently experiencing some colour issues related to the sky, water, and various other meshes, and lacking a dedicated launcher or global configuration options.

Nevertheless, you can download it now as a pre-built binary for your platform of choice. Just bear in mind, that there is command line-based fiddling in order to get it to work.