Introduction

OpenBallance is a reimplementation of Ballance (Cyparade / Atari, 2004), the marble game in which you roll a ball of wood, stone or paper along tracks floating in the sky.

Ballance was built with Virtools: almost all of its game logic lives in behaviour graphs stored in the game's .cmo and .nmo files, not in native code. So OpenBallance does not rewrite the game. It runs the original graphs on a new runtime:

• a Virtools (CK2) runtime that loads the original files and executes their behaviour graphs, parameter operations and messages the way CK2.dll does;
• the Building Blocks the graphs call (about 180 of them), ported from the original DLLs with their quirks;
• a renderer for the gasm graphics API, matching the original Direct3D 7 fixed-function look;
• a port of the Ipion physics engine from physics_RT.dll, which gives the ball its feel.

It needs your own copy of Ballance: OpenBallance contains no game code or assets.

• Status and compatibility: what works and what doesn't yet.
• Installing and Game data: getting set up.
• Running on gasm or Playing in the browser.
• Controls and Launch parameters.