First of all, install OpenJDK 21. Anything below JDK 21 will almost certainly fail. JDK 24 seems to work as well, but JDK 25 does not. After installing OpenJDK, you should be able to run the game by running
./gradlew run
Unfortunately, this has only been tested on a limited set of computers, so you never know whether it will work on another... if not, contact the developers.
Installing an IDE is the next step (but optional). I would strongly recommend to choose IntelliJ as IDE, both community edition and ultimate edition should work fine.
When you open this folder for the first time in IntelliJ, it will take some time to import all kinds of Gradle stuff and pull dependencies, which probably takes less than a minute.
You should now be able to run the game by going to MardekGame.kt
and clicking the green triangle on the left of the main method
(hint: press shift twice to search for files).
Some development functionality requires you to install the
Vulkan SDK.
After installing the Vulkan SDK, you should see the
Vulkan Validation Layer when you run vulkaninfo --summary in a terminal:
VK_LAYER_KHRONOS_validation Khronos Validation Layer
(Although a computer restart may be required on Windows.) When this layer is present, you should be able to run all the unit tests:
./gradlew test
Furthermore, you should now be able to run the game with the validation layer enabled:
./gradlew runBasicValidation
or
./gradlew runGpuValidation
(The latter will enable GPU-assisted validation, and also use VK 1.2
instead of VK 1.0.) Alternative, you can run MardekGame.kt with a
basic-validation or gpu-validation program argument.
Some content is automatically imported from the Flash game. However, since this rewrite is far from finished, we often need to change the import code to import more content, after which we need to re-import the flash content.
Before the import script will work, you need to copy MARDEK.swf
from Steam to flash/MARDEK.swf. You should be able to find it
at steamapps/common/MARDEK/MARDEK.swf
(wherever your steamapps directory may be).
After this is done, you should be able to import the content:
./gradlew exportContent
If the above command failed with on Linux:
Bc7 compression failed: ./bc7enc-linux: error while loading shared libraries: libomp.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
You should install libomp-dev, for instance by running
sudo apt install libomp-dev
This project consists of several modules:
- audio contains the audio player code (OpenAL) and the music.
- content contains the classes to model all the game content (e.g. items, areas, monsters).
- game contains the code that launches the game and glues all other modules.
- importer contains the code to parse the Flash MARDEK and convert it to a 'nicer' format used by the rest of this engine/project.
- input models the keyboard/mouse events, which will
be read by
stateand supplied bygame. - renderer ensures that the state of the game is shown on your screen. It uses the Vulkan graphics API for rendering.
- state models and tracks the state of the game (both in the title screen and when actually in-game)
- vk2d is a 2d rendering library that I wrote for
MARDEK, and is used by
renderer. I intend to eventually move it to its own GitHub repository once it matures.
To create releases that can be given to players/testers (without them needing to install OpenJDK or the Vulkan SDK), you should simply push your code to GitHub. This repository has a GitHub Actions workflow that will generate:
- an exe file for Windows x64
- an executable for Linux x64
- a (totally untested) executable for Linux arm64
- a (totally untested) executable for macOS x64
- a (totally untested) executable for macOS arm64
- a jar file for any OS/architecture supported by LWJGL, but requires OpenJDK 21+ to run
Since this repository contains many assets made by Tobias Cornwall (the creator of MARDEK), I am reluctant to provide a license for this repository, since I don't own these assets. He has given permission to finish/rewrite the game, but I don't know the details about this.