First Post
05 May 2020This is my first “real” post on this blog. Several years ago there was a project called the “XL Engine” which evolved from DarkXL with lofty ambitions. I personally hit some difficult times but never properly canceled the project, even if I couldn’t get back to it for a long time and didn’t really want to for a long time after that. Fast forward to today, things are much better now with more free time but time moves on and the XL Engine isn’t really necessary anymore - both Daggerfall and Blood have great projects that fill the niche the XL Engine wanted to fill (or close enough).
But the Jedi Engine never had a proper source release or reverse engineering effort. While many considered DarkXL to be a promising effort, it was incomplete and inaccurate in many ways. Ultimately the methods used to reproduce the game could never be 100% faithful in the ways that matter. And so The Force Engine was concieved as a complete re-write, rebuilt from the ground up with the following tenets:
- Support all Jedi based games - Dark Forces and Outlaws.
- Source-level accuracy by reverse engineering the original executables.
- Focus on making sure the core games are completely supported before adding effects on top like dynamic lighting, this means starting with the software renderer just like the originals.
- Open sourcing the project the moment it goes public.
- Cross platform support (though admittadly this last area still needs a lot of work before the first release).
While the GitHub repository has been made public, The Force Engine has not been officially announced and no release has been made. It will be some time before that happens (see the Roadmap).