Tomb Engine
50 comments
·April 14, 2025simonsarris
starkrights
Took me a couple of seconds to realize that “land” was not a video game.
Cyphase
The ultimate sandbox.
InDubioProRubio
You goto patch the Excavator 1.0 engine to be able to alter "land" its kind of finicky
somat
The cube engine also works in this manner. A block engine where you can independently push the corners.
elpocko
The homepage says "The open-source engine" but I can't find a link to the source code anywhere on the site. The link that says "Download" is a link to some Windows binary.
Edit: https://github.com/TombEngine/TombEngine that seems to be the code.
snvzz
MIT license. Open Source indeed.
keyle
This is more interesting: https://github.com/MontyTRC89/Tomb-Editor (the level editor that goes with the engine)
What made the eternal life of Quake has been its open source level editor which means designers can have a field day making new levels.
The editor is as important as the engine, if not more. Exciting stuff!
sho_hn
Another very cool project in this space is TRX, which is based on a decompilation of the original Tomb Raider 1 & 2 source code:
https://github.com/LostArtefacts/TRX
Of the various Tomb Raider fan engine projects, this is basically the "vanilla, but modernized and well-maintained" historical archival option.
I contributed the MacOS port to this one, and last year I dabbled a little in porting an older random git snapshot to the web:
https://eikehein.com/stuff/sabatu/ (using a fan level, as to not post the original game content online)
It's a very rough hack, so it's not upstream at the moment.
The TRX team is a wonderful and passionate bunch of people to hang around.
recursive
From the footer:
> "TombEngine is not be sold."
Ironically, perhaps, this makes me trust it more.
favorited
Seems at odds with their repo's MIT license, which explicitly allows it to be sold.
https://github.com/TombEngine/TombEngine/blob/master/LICENSE
keyle
I guess it's ok to build it and sell it but not to sell the binaries provided? It's odd indeed. Most likely split brain decision.
esperent
Most likely it's from inexperience with licensing. Many people choose MIT because it's the most popular open source license, without really thinking about how permissive it is and whether they want that for their project.
Maybe someone from this thread could open an issue and suggest they clarify this.
I don't personally know enough about licensing to say whether a sentence in the README.md (saying it can't be sold) is enough to override the LICENSE.md (which says it can be sold).
Personally I'd always choose a copyleft license for something like this.
omneity
This is so cool! I hope it starts some kind of new genre or creator community. Maybe a souls-like take on TR as well? Or some unexpected mashup with another game? So many ideas come to mind!
nonethewiser
Scrabble
prawn
One of my fascinations is asking DALL-E for "screens from a game that crosses [two disparate game titles/genres]". Tomb Raider and Scrabble goes about as well as you'd expect (not very).
stavros
I don't know, I don't hate it: https://imgz.org/i4U5kMb5/
wincy
Tomb Raider 2 was one of the first games I got for the PlayStation. I remember spending HOURS with my sisters and friends trying to trap the butler into the freezer of her mansion.
Good memories.
OptionOfT
Santa got me Windows version for Christmas 1997 after I saw it on tv in some video game show.
I was stuck for 3 months in the cave in the very first level.
Eventually someone told me that I could get answers on the internet (what's that?), which meant biking to the library and paying a certain amount (maybe 20BEF?) per 30 minutes to use the internet.
The solution came to me on a website called Game-Revolution!
Oh, and there is a bug in the game that if you save while underwater, your breath bar resets upon loading. Very handy in level 7.
And lastly: while the re-releases aren't remasters, they invoke a nostalgic feeling that I rarely get.
zanellato19
This looks awesome.
On a side note, this looks like it could be used to make a great Armored Core like haha
jbreckmckye
I've dabbled a little in game development projects. But how does someone actually get started on a project like re-implementing a game like TR?
I suppose the PC release helps, you can disassemble that. Perhaps find editors online to determine the asset structure. But it must surely be an enormous project and no end of trial and error to do it that way.
pull_my_finger
Not to be "that person" but in the game space there is already a "t-engine"[1], AKA ToME (Tales of Maj'Eyal) engine, for building rogue-likes in Lua. It seems to go by "t-engine" primarily, but it's begging for confusion.
[1]: https://te4.org/
paulryanrogers
Been following their Discord for a while. It's pretty impressive looking. I was waiting until TR2 had a decent fan port. Now with the official remasters I don't have time to play them.
Still great to see fans taking the games in directions publishers won't, like with MP
jimbob45
https://youtu.be/qpKekNpziAk?si=Umk8nm0pYCYCEfsc
There was a remake in the pipes for a while using the Anniversary/Legend/Underworld engine but it was a one-man effort and seems to have been abandoned. Shame because it looked phenomenal.
philipwhiuk
It's hard to believe the assets they are using are properly licensed.
I give this project a couple of weeks (it would have been months but it's now made it to HN).
null
When I was young I used to make a lot of levels for Tomb Raider (3? 4?) because I found the process of making sacred-but-spooky feeling places very enchanting. I had no one to share them with, so it was more like just making folk art for myself and my brother. This feeling was not surpassed until Minecraft came out (and then that was not surpassed until I bought land).
The levels are fundamentally comprised of square blocks that you push up from the ground, and maybe tilt one of the four sides to make shapes. To make caves and rooms, there is a second set of blocks that you pull down from the ceiling!
To get an idea of what this feels like, see this particular tutorial video of theirs: https://tombengine.com/docs/extended-geometry-update-1-7/