Sarien open source multi-player game engine released

Space Quest 1 on Sarien.net
Source: sarien.net Martin Kool, a developer from Web applications specialist Q42, has released his open source multi-player game engine. Sarien.net is a "portal for reliving the classic Sierra On-Line adventure games" and is completely browser based. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome are all supported.

Sarien allows users to play classic Sierra online games such as Space Quest 1: The Sarien Encounter, Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel and Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. Games can be played using either a mouse or keyboard and Sarien also supports multi-player. While multi-player was not supported in the original games, users are now able to talk to and replay scenes with other users. The game areas are all accessible using the address bar and can be bookmarked, allowing users to go directly back to certain scenes. When playing through the games, non-player characters (NPCs) encountered by a user are added to their list of avatars and can be used during multi-player. The games can be run on the Apple iPhone and Nintendo Wii game console, although additional work is required to make them "more user friendly and playable." According to the site, more games will be added in "upcoming weeks."

The Sarien.net interpreter is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and the Q42 multi-player engine is available under the MIT License. The source for Sarien.net and the Q42 multiplayer engine are available to download from Google Code.

(crve)