Nostalgia hit me recently, so I started a small private project related to the old Project Entropia era.
I’m experimenting with reconstructing parts of classic Calypso locally — terrain, buildings, textures, and hopefully later also creatures and animations.
The screenshots below show one of the first old outpost buildings successfully loaded with its geometry, materials and textures. It is still an early work in progress, but seeing it appear again after all these years was a pretty special moment.
Somewhere in the comments under an old Project Entropia soundtrack video on YouTube, I may have mentioned a little more about what I’m working on… maybe you’ll find it.
Aaand… would anyone here be interested in seeing more progress? old locations, terrain, creatures or other forgotten Calypso assets?
You have no idea how far the reconstruction has already come…
The complete heightmap is ready. The terrain textures are ready, including the original system of blending several texture layers across individual terrain blocks. The environmental models have also been recovered and are waiting to be placed back into the world.
The biggest remaining challenge is restoring the colonists, creatures and their animations.
But Calypso itself is already there.
The land exists again. The sky is above it. The old locations are slowly returning.
And somewhere out there is one Billy from Billy’s Spaceship Afterworld…
These pics are pretty cool to see thanks. I think the last picture here of the nymphtown dock might be only 1 still left in the game right? Or maybe I’m remembering it wrong but coulda sworn it looked like this when I tried fishing there lol
I rebuilt an almost exact copy of the original heightmap and converted it to a clean 16-bit format for my Three.js/WebGL version. I also converted the terrain textures — the game builds the ground from many small chunks with layered materials like grass, dirt, sand and rock.
Most static models and textures are already extracted too. Trees, water and a few other things are still work in progress.
I also managed to reverse-engineer the character skeletons and animations like walking, running, jumping, attacks, deaths, waving, etc.
Sounds and music still need to be properly sorted, so I don’t have a clean pack ready yet.
Later I’ll probably put the PE Asset Viewer on GitHub. It won’t include the original files, but you’ll be able to point it at an old PE game folder and convert/preview the models directly in a browser.
Try searching the Web Archive for “Project Entropia game”. The people who uploaded those old files preserved a part of the game’s history that could easily have disappeared completely.
That is exactly what places like the Archive are for leaving a trace for people digging through the archaeology of the old internet, not necessarily looking for profit or harm someone, but for a small glimpse of their youth and some nostalgia…
