Black & White (openblack)

Game: Black & White → (Windows, 2001)

openblack: an open-source reimplementation of Black & White, Lionhead Studios’ god game, written in modern C++ and running on the original game’s files. It’s still at an early stage: 0.1.0 (September 4, 2024), its first release, recreates the original’s camera movement, draws the landscape at a higher resolution thanks to an intermediate texture, and has animated models and morphable meshes, audio, a dynamic sky, pathfinding for villagers, physics through Bullet, an early AI state machine, and the LHVM virtual machine for the game’s scripts, reverse engineered; the colors of the sky, the water, and other elements don’t match the original yet, and there’s no launcher or global settings. There are 64-bit Windows, macOS, and Linux builds, downloaded from its continuous integration, and experimental builds for Android, iOS, and the browser. In October 2026 it moved to SDL3 and replaced its bgfx-based renderer with one built on SDL3’s GPU API, with shaders written in Slang.

You needThe Audio, Data, and Scripts folders from your own copy of Black & White, installed from the original CD with official patches 1.10 and 1.2 (the unofficial 1.42 patch is fine too; don’t install 1.3); on Linux and macOS you install it with Wine. The path is passed with the -g parameter. Plus 64-bit Windows, macOS, or Linux.

How it gets to PC

Fan reimplementation

Console

Microsoft Windows

Original studio

Lionhead Studios

Year

2001

Author

openblack

Stars

1.6k

Last activity

2026-10-18 · 13 days ago

Latest version

v0.1.0 · 2024-09-04

License

GPL-3.0

Language

C++

Black & White (bw1-decomp) See all →