Star Wars: Dark Forces and Outlaws are two classic first-person shooters that have trouble running on modern-day hardware. However, PC gamers will soon be able to re-experience them as a team is currently working on a source port of the Jedi Engine, called The Force Engine.
The Force Engine is basically something similar to GZDoom. 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. Furthermore, it will support mods from the get-go.
As the team noted:
“Playing Dark Forces or Outlaws using the Force Engine adds ease of use. It also adds 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. Some of them are slopes, stacked sectors, per-sector color maps and more.”
As with GZDoom, PC gamers will need the original game data in order to play Dark Forces or Outlaws.
The dev team aims to release The Force Engine once Dark Forces support is complete (full INF, iMuse, all cutscenes, full AI, etc.) and Outlaws support is at “tech demo” status.
At launch, The Force Engine will come with three feature templates to make it easier to tune the experience. These three templates are: Classic, Retro and Modern.
Classic is a recreation of the original software renderer, controls and gameplay. This mode will provide the original experience as close as possible while still properly supporting modern systems. On the other hand, Retro is close to the original experience while being enhanced with modern controls and high resolution rendering. Both the “Classic” and Perspective renderers support pure software rendering and gpu based rendering. Lastly, Modern will feature some modern enhancements. Players can expect proper perspective rendering, enhanced texture filtering, mipmapping, widescreen and more.
Here are also the first screenshots for Dark Forces running on The Force Engine.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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