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Case study

OpenAWE: an open reimplementation of Remedy’s Alan Wake engine

Reimplements Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake engine, later known as Northlight, in C++ and OpenGL, aiming to run Alan Wake and Alan Wake’s American Nightmare portably from the user’s game data, with Quantum Break and possibly Control as later goals. README documents only a free camera for moving through loaded game data, and the American Nightmare script table implements 16 of its 278 native functions. The repository also includes command-line tools for the games’ archive, texture, Havok and sound formats.

Requirements & limits

  • Reviewed at the master commit of 2026-10-11; there are no releases or tags, and CMake declares version 0.0.1. README states the goals but gives no gameplay status beyond a keyboard-and-mouse free camera, and the game selector rejects Quantum Break and Alan Wake Remastered as not yet supported. In the reviewed American Nightmare native-function table, 16 of 278 script functions are implemented and the rest are placeholders. The reviewed sources do not describe how the engine’s formats and behaviour were analysed.
  • OpenAWE runs from the data directory of the user’s own Alan Wake or Alan Wake’s American Nightmare installation, passed with -p, together with the shaders compiled during the build, passed with -s. The repository contains no game data: the archive tests use small synthetic byte arrays, and data/ holds a single XML file that carries the project’s GPL header.
  • Builds use CMake 3.21+ and C++20 with development packages for zlib, GLFW 3.4+, GLM, TinyXML2, OpenAL, Bullet, fmt 9+, Ogg, Theora, Vorbis and spdlog, GTest for the optional tests, the EnTT and CLI11 submodules or system copies, and the glslc shader compiler. CI builds with GCC and Clang on Linux, MSVC on Windows and Clang on Intel macOS.
  • Each CI job runs ctest with GoogleTest unit tests for the archive readers, streams, compression, XML and TOML parsing and geometry utilities, then packages the build with cpack. No test reads the games’ data or compares behaviour with the original executables; the README screenshot shows an American Nightmare scene. This collection did not build or run OpenAWE.
  • README places the code under GPL-3.0-or-later except the libraries in 3rdparty, which keep their own licenses. Alan Wake and its data keep their owners’ rights. The reviewed sources establish no REA or AI use.

About this entry

Type
Case study
Category
Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship
Independent reconstruction project
Targets
Game

Sources reviewed

The description was reviewed against primary sources. This does not establish runtime testing, security auditing or verified compatibility.

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Primary sources

  1. README.md GitHub · OpenAWE-Project/OpenAWE · Revision cce15d3
  2. LICENSE GitHub · OpenAWE-Project/OpenAWE · Revision cce15d3
  3. CMakeLists.txt GitHub · OpenAWE-Project/OpenAWE · Revision cce15d3
  4. .gitmodules GitHub · OpenAWE-Project/OpenAWE · Revision cce15d3
  5. .github/workflows/main.yml GitHub · OpenAWE-Project/OpenAWE · Revision cce15d3
  6. src/game.cpp GitHub · OpenAWE-Project/OpenAWE · Revision cce15d3
  7. src/engines/awan/functions_table.cpp GitHub · OpenAWE-Project/OpenAWE · Revision cce15d3
  8. test GitHub · OpenAWE-Project/OpenAWE · Revision cce15d3
  9. tools GitHub · OpenAWE-Project/OpenAWE · Revision cce15d3
  10. data/male_player_class.xml GitHub · OpenAWE-Project/OpenAWE · Revision cce15d3

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