Rewriting Diablo II: The Great Project

[Gath]

I've been lurking for a lot of time, probably made a few posts with a forgotten accounts back in the days. Anyway I've been wondering for a while now.
What's stopping us from rewriting Diablo II from scratch?

• Copyright problems? No, otherwise nobody would have been modifying the game files and injecting their own codes into the game. Besides, everything I've seen so far from here is free, so no copyright problems. Also we will be using original files from the original disks so I see no problems.
• Most of the people here knows the game literally inside-out; I've seen huge modifications and lots of hardcoded stuff being modified.
• Time? Well, I think if everyone of us worked together with *a lot* of patience that wouldn't be a huge problem.
• The basic of Diablo II is not complex if you think about it. Brevik and his team finished the game in three years; I'm ready to bet two of these were just for the arts (which we don't have to do); and guess what we already have all the tables as well..
• Using modern tools this would be even easier. Unity, Unreal Engine, Blitzmax2D, etc.
• Replace all the old tools here, or make our own formats to better handle all the stuff that Diablo II needs (maps, animations, graphics, etc.)
• Incredible and numerous amount of bugfixes and improvements we could make, without counting all other thousands of possibilities

So, considering that there's nothing we don't know about the game, how hard is this? is this actually achievable with patience and time? What's the hardest part? Why are we not doing it yet? Where can I donate to start a group and a website for this?
The benefits coming from this vastly beat the time and patience required

Sure it's a colossal task, but it's a human task, and we are already half way there.

I forgot to say that there are some guys (or only one? i don't know) who already created a huge portion of Diablo I

~peace

[jetaman]

Hello. I was thinking about it. I have the required skills to replace literaly all animations in the game (monster, npc and player), I have the opportunity to record quality audio monologues for the game.

[Desocupado]

Would make more sense to release an open source/easy to mod action rpg engine then, no?

[splintter]

Hay long time player first Time on this site.

I'm super keen to help with this project. Tho I am new to the modding side of things of diablo 2. I think there's 2 ways we can do this
1. Use the diablo 2 engine and mod it from the ground up to suit our (bloodsucking) tastes completely using a cobanation of old and new tool's
Eg. Up to level 500 for heroes
10 different heroes
bigger levels
Another act or 2
More elemental majic
Online dueling between players aswell as co-op of course
Rework all animations
A survival mode just for grinding. Done room by room with overwelming amounts of monster's
More rings on hero
Sidearm attached to belt
And obviously a rework of the menus and hud incuding the inv&stash
These are just some of the ideas I've had in the last few days

Or

We colect and make all new tool's for coding animations interface engine etc. and make a spiritual successor to the game witch would take a lot longer and with diablo 4 possibly looming I'm not sure what the outcome would be.

End of the day we would be only limited by our imagination and wallet size

I'm not calming to have all the answers but I do have the time and patience to help

Please get in contact with me my Addy is joshuawoods62@msn.com if you want any tips of help or saport in this matter

[jerk-o]

Using the game engine at http://flarerpg.org/ seems like an "easier" way to do this, since you'd only need to create the game data and not write the entire engine from scratch.

[devurandom]

Here's the repo for Flare engine if any one wants to take a look.
https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-engine