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Post by lucius on May 5, 2020 7:24:00 GMT
Welcome to the new forums for The Force Engine. The Force Engine is a project to reverse engineer and rebuild the Jedi Engine for modern systems and the games that used that engine - Dark Forces and Outlaws. The project includes modern, built-in tools, such as a level editor and makes it easy to play Dark Forces and Outlaws on modern systems as well as the many community mods designed to work with the original games. Playing Dark Forces or Outlaws using the Force Engine adds ease of use and modern features such as higher resolutions and modern control schemes such as mouse-look. Using the built-in tools allows for easier modding with more modern UI, greater flexibility, and the ability to use enhancements made to the Jedi Engine for Outlaws in custom Dark Forces levels - such as slopes, stacked sectors, per-sector color maps and more. The project is in a pre-release state but the forums and website have been set up so early builds can be tested and so people can keep track of the progress of the engine, and of course, give feedback.  |
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Post by epithumia on May 5, 2020 18:41:13 GMT
I don't know what possessed me to look up the XLEngine after all these years, but I did and some clicking led me through the github repository and eventually here. It's really astounding timing.
In any case, good luck with this project.
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Post by lucius on May 5, 2020 21:41:34 GMT
I don't know what possessed me to look up the XLEngine after all these years, but I did and some clicking led me through the github repository and eventually here. It's really astounding timing. In any case, good luck with this project. I have NOT made a public announcement about the project yet, just getting things ready as I work towards the first proper release. I don't want to make announcements and such until I have sound first release to show. So I expect these forums to be pretty lonely until then. |
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taton
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Post by taton on May 9, 2020 14:54:49 GMT
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Post by lucius on May 10, 2020 7:11:31 GMT
Thanks, taton, I will let you know. |
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manhs
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Post by manhs on May 18, 2020 13:18:02 GMT
Glad to see you again, we all tought the port project was stopped.... but it's back, amazing! This game deserve to have a port Also the stuff for mutiplayer/level editor and other is really cool! Nice, i will check it when it will be released! edit: Will custom maps work on the Force Engine port? |
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Post by lucius on May 18, 2020 16:29:34 GMT
Glad to see you again, we all tought the port project was stopped.... but it's back, amazing! This game deserve to have a port Also the stuff for mutiplayer/level editor and other is really cool! Nice, i will check it when it will be released! edit: Will custom maps work on the Force Engine port? Custom maps can already be loaded, though you have to use the Asset Editor at the moment. Like it says in the description, there will be full support for existing mods. And of course new mods too. |
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Post by Adam (SECBASE Unlimited) on May 20, 2020 5:06:19 GMT
Oh, excellent. Will be excited to see how this develops. Very keen to see how the Force engine handles double adjoins, since a few of my DF projects are wholly reliant on them.
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taton
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Post by taton on May 20, 2020 12:28:05 GMT
Level 13 uses Double Adjoins for the freighter window looking into the docking bay. I think you should be fine once the engine is fully implemented.
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Post by lucius on May 20, 2020 16:56:08 GMT
Oh, excellent. Will be excited to see how this develops. Very keen to see how the Force engine handles double adjoins, since a few of my DF projects are wholly reliant on them. I think we are using different terminology - by double adjoins I mean two adjoins on the same line at the same time, i.e. room-over-room like in Outlaws. Dark Forces does not support this. That feature will be implemented in the Force Engine before the first proper release in order to support Outlaws and make the enhanced (Outlaws) Jedi Engine features available for Dark Forces mods. If you mean INF changing adjoins dynamically or adjoins where the mirror wall points to a different sector - those things work fine now. You can actually play the Executor level in the current build and the freighter area that taton was talking about does work correctly. All of the vanilla Dark Forces levels are "playable" now and completable, even though the AI just stands around waiting to be shot at. If you pick the "James" profile, you can select any level to play. Just remember, mines don't do anything yet so you need to use a Thermal Detonator to open the door at the beginning of the Executor level. Oh, and I can't be sure it will work correctly since the engine is still incomplete, but you can try one of your levels now. To do so select "Editor" from the menu. And from there select your GOB file using the asset editor (Open Archive -> navigate to your GOB -> Open). Once you do that you should see the level list to the right. Just click on a level and it should start. This is not the way mods will be played in the future of course (no LFD, no cutscenes, etc.) - but it allows some testing now. And welcome to the forums Adam (SECBASE Unlimited). |
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Post by azazeln28 on May 24, 2020 14:14:53 GMT
Hello everyone! I've just found this project and I think it's great, I'm a huge fan of Dark Forces and I've been working for months on my own on a web-based browser reimplementation of the Dark Forces engine using WebGL. You can find a running demo on azazeln28.neocities.org/games/darkforces/ or if you prefer to take a glimpse to the code (a little messy right now): github.com/AzazelN28/darkforces. I'll be glad to give a hand in anything I could. I've been reverse engineering the game using a freeware version of IDA for DOS and found some interesting things like: how to use the Advanced Controller Interface (ACI). You can find the repo at github.com/AzazelN28/darkforces-aci (sorry, it's everything in spanish and it's still a WIP). And just to finish this lengthy presentation: I'm not a very experienced C++ developer but I think I could help porting this engine to Linux and Mac OS. |
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Post by lucius on May 24, 2020 19:12:52 GMT
Hello everyone! I've just found this project and I think it's great, I'm a huge fan of Dark Forces and I've been working for months on my own on a web-based browser reimplementation of the Dark Forces engine using WebGL. You can find a running demo on azazeln28.neocities.org/games/darkforces/ or if you prefer to take a glimpse to the code (a little messy right now): github.com/AzazelN28/darkforces. I'll be glad to give a hand in anything I could. I've been reverse engineering the game using a freeware version of IDA for DOS and found some interesting things like: how to use the Advanced Controller Interface (ACI). You can find the repo at github.com/AzazelN28/darkforces-aci (sorry, it's everything in spanish and it's still a WIP). And just to finish this lengthy presentation: I'm not a very experienced C++ developer but I think I could help porting this engine to Linux and Mac OS. Hello azazeln28, welcome to the forums. I looked at your project and it looks pretty interesting. I don't think I will need too much help getting the engine to work on Linux but will be glad to get help setting up Linux packages for different distributions (I don't have much experience doing that) and getting things working on OS X down the road. With the deprecation of OpenGL though, a proper OS X port will require a proper Metal rendering backend so that should probably wait until the core backend is more complete. Eventually, I will want a Vulkan backend even for Linux/Windows but that will have to wait until after the first proper release. |
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Post by azazeln28 on May 24, 2020 21:50:39 GMT
I don't think I will need too much help getting the engine to work on Linux but will be glad to get help setting up Linux packages for different distributions (I don't have much experience doing that) and getting things working on OS X down the road. With the deprecation of OpenGL though, a proper OS X port will require a proper Metal rendering backend so that should probably wait until the core backend is more complete. Eventually, I will want a Vulkan backend even for Linux/Windows but that will have to wait until after the first proper release. Sure! |
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