Nightdive Remaster FAQ

As many of you have seen, Nightdive has announced their Dark Forces Remaster. They have partnered with me to help them in a technical advisory role to help with the project, which includes exchanging information and providing some TFE code. So I have written a FAQ to answer likely questions.

• What impact does this announcement have regarding The Force Engine (TFE)? This announcement has no negative impact on TFE, existing development plans - including the level editor and Outlaws support - are continuing as-is.

• What sort of Dark Forces assets (art, etc.) does Night Dive have access to? As seen below, I am not a Night Dive employee and so cannot say.

• Are you a Night Dive employee or getting paid by Night Dive? I am not a Night Dive employee, no money has changed hands, and I have no inside information I can share regarding schedules, other games in development and so forth.

• Does TFE and the Night Dive version share code? While it is true that some TFE code has been shared to help in development, such as iMuse, these projects use different code bases and use different implementations for many components - such as very different GPU renderers. The Night Dive project uses Kex, TFE uses its own framework. I have no access to the Night Dive code base.

• Were contributor assets or code shared with Night Dive? Only code reverse-engineered or written by myself has been shared with Night Dive. I have not shared any code or assets contributed by others with Night Dive.

• When did this partnership begin? While I cannot give exact dates, the reverse-engineering process for TFE and version 1.0 were nearly complete.

• Why agree to this partnership? Did TFE development benefit?

  • There were a number of reasons to agree, and it seemed like a good idea to help TFE be seen in a positive light (and I still think this is true). TFE has also benefited from the exchange of information (such as one of the developers pointing out a bug in iMuse).

  • Night Dive will also be helping me to support the new content they are creating in TFE - though you will be required to purchase the new version of Dark Forces in order to use that content.

  • In other words, this partnership was beneficial for all parties involved.

• Why not mention this before? Mentioning this before the announcement would leak information about the project which I agreed not to do. It’s that simple.