The aim of Ordoor is to be a complete reimplementation that allows all four of these games to be played on modern hardware. It should also permit new games of the same style to be built.

For each of the games above, You must have a copy of the original game data to play. Links are provided above if we're aware of an active publisher; otherwise, check your back catalogue, or perhaps a local charity shop.

Trademarks and intellectual property are the property of their respective owners, and the games mentioned above (including the game data) are protected by copyright. As a mere game engine recreation, we're confident that this project operates legally, and that its goal is a noble one. Do get in touch if you believe otherwise!

Ordoor is a portmanteau of Order Door, which is, of course, the opposite of a Chaos Gate. The project began with a Chaos Gate recreation, then more games were discovered, so scope expanded. A rename and/or rewrite may be on the cards as a result.

Current status

Chaos Gate

Some of the original file formats are either partially or fully decoded. Maps, menus, and most visual data can be rendered pixel-perfect. Sound can be played (with a preprocessing step). Some UI tookit work is done. No game mechanics are implemented yet.

I keep a GIF showcasing interesting progress here:

I've just been informed that another game from 1998, Soldiers At War, seems to use the same engine. Maybe at some point Ordoor will be able to play both. Will that need a rename? Hmm. Watch this space.

Soldiers At War

(At least some) objects display. Map support is being worked on in the soldiers-at-war branch, which can more-or-less display them, albeit with many errors.

Squad Leader

Squad Leader is the most recent of the games created with this engine. Nothing has been done with it yet, but a preliminary look at the game data suggests many changes are afoot. The object files are a different format, at the very least.

Wages of War

This is the oldest of the four games. The object file format seems to be mostly the same. the installer only copies some data to the game directory; we may want to work directly from the CDROM instead, if we can.

Maps are uncompressed, around 243K, and no header is present. They look similar in principle to the tile data of Soldiers At War or Chaos Gate maps, otherwise.

The menu system seen in Chaos Gate is not present; instead, there is a BUTTONS directory and a lot of pcx files under PIC that, I suspect, do the job for this game.

Long-term goals

Once full playthrough of the official single-player campaign for all four games has been achieved, thoughts turn to other things we could do. Here are some ideas, mostly at random.

Multi-player support.

Graphics enhancements - 3D models instead of sprites, high-resolution tile sets, 32-bit colour, etc. Hopefully we'd be able to drop these in one at a time.

Vastly improved AI.

Mash-ups? How do mercenaries fare against cultists fare against Nazis? Only one way to find out!

New campaigns with existing assets. Tell new stories, or elaborate on / modify existing ones.

Completely new fantasy game using the same engine.

Building from source

I'm writing code in Go at the moment, so you'll need to have a Go runtime installed on your system:

$ go version
go version go1.14 linux/amd64

In addition, you'll also need the following packages installed, at least in Debian:

# apt install libx11-dev libxcursor-dev mesa-common-dev libxrandr-dev \
  libxinerama-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libxi-dev libasound2-dev mpv ffmpeg

You can then run make all in the source tree to get the binaries that are present at the moment.

Place your WH40K: Chaos Gate installation in ./orig to benefit from automatic path defaults. Otherwise, point to it with -game-path

The view-map binary attempts to render a map, and is the current focus of effort. Once I can render a whole map, including pre-placed characters (cultist scum), things can start to get more interesting.

Current status: almost pixel-perfect map rendering. Static objects (four per map coordinate: floor, centre, left, and right) are rendered fine, and each Z level looks good. There are a few minor artifacts here and there.

Characters and animations aren't touched at all yet. Rendering performance is poor. No gameplay, no campaign logic. Interaction with the play area is minimal and limited to pan, zoom, and click for basic console output.

Still, I'm proud of myself.

To run:

$ make view-map
$ ./view-map -map Chapter01

Looks like this:

Use the arrow keys to scroll around the map, the mouse wheel to zoom, and the 1 - 7 keys to change Z level.

Dependency management uses go mod, so ensure you have at least Go 1.11.

There is the start of the menu / campaign flow in a ordoor binary:

$ cp config.toml.example config.toml
$ make ordoor
$ ./ordoor

This plays the introductory videos so far, and nothing else.

Menus are in the process of being rendered; you can use the view-menu binary to inspect them:

make view-menu
./view-menu -menu ./orig/Menu/Main.mnu

This menu displays OK, including

Sound

Sound is in the very early stages. Chaos Gate uses ADPCM WAV files, which are a pain to play in Go, so for now, a preprocessing step that converts them to .ogg is used instead. To create ./orig/Wav/*.wav.ogg, run:

# apt install ffmpeg
$ ./scripts/convert-wav ./orig/Wav

As with video playback, the ambition is to eventually remove this dependency and operate on the unmodified files instead.