{"id":11896,"date":"2022-12-19T22:58:02","date_gmt":"2022-12-19T22:58:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.bwgamespot.com\/index.php\/2022\/12\/19\/after-3-years-of-work-modders-have-remastered-the-first-star-wars-fps\/"},"modified":"2022-12-19T22:58:02","modified_gmt":"2022-12-19T22:58:02","slug":"after-3-years-of-work-modders-have-remastered-the-first-star-wars-fps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.bwgamespot.com\/index.php\/2022\/12\/19\/after-3-years-of-work-modders-have-remastered-the-first-star-wars-fps\/","title":{"rendered":"After 3 years of work, modders have remastered the first Star Wars FPS"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Star Wars: Dark Forces, the first Star Wars FPS and predecessor to the Jedi Knight series, has finally gotten the ZDoom<\/a> treatment. Developers luciusDXL, winterheart, and gilorem560 have released the 1.0 build of the Force Engine<\/a>, an open source reverse engineering of Dark Forces (and soon, its lesser known cousin, Outlaws) that lets you play it with modern conveniences and at high resolution.<\/p>\n

Released in 1995, Dark Forces is firmly of the “Doom Clone” era of first-person shooters. It has that slippery, speedy boomer shooter movement, a great weapon selection, and sprawling, mazelike levels, but it really innovates in its presentation. Dark Forces nails the music, sound effects, and look of Star Wars while also telling a pretty in-depth story about Han Solo-alike Kyle Katarn doing battle with the Imperial Remnant.<\/p>\n

These days, Dark Forces is somewhat overshadowed by its sequels in the Jedi Knight series, which see Kyle become a Jedi and engage in what is still the best-feeling lightsaber combat anyone’s ever done in a game. Outlaws<\/a>, meanwhile, is a western-themed Lucasarts FPS that reuses Dark Forces’ original Jedi Engine. This shared DNA will let the less-fondly remembered Outlaws ride Dark Forces’ coattails into the 21st century with only a bit of extra effort from the Force Engine team.<\/p>\n

In its 1.0 release, the Force Engine lets you play Dark Forces to completion with a highly customizable selection of quality-of-life features like mouse look and high resolution support. The Force Engine also now supports GPU rendering as opposed to the original’s archaic software renderer, and features a mod loader for past and future user-made creations. The Force Engine team has indicated that full Outlaws support will come at a later date in the project’s 2.0 update.<\/p>\n

Installation of both the Force Engine itself and mods is a snap. You’ll still need a copy of Dark Forces to start\u2060\u2014it’s not freely available and included with the source port like Bungie’s Marathon is with Aleph One\u2060\u2014and you can find it on Steam<\/a> or GOG<\/a> for $6 usually (at the time of writing it’s on sale for $2 on GOG!) After downloading the mod, running the Force Engine executable will automatically detect your installation path for the game.<\/p>\n

You can just drop any user-made maps or tweaks in the “Mods” directory of the Force Engine, and select which ones to load from an option on the Force Engine’s startup screen. I grabbed the fan mission Among the Shadows: Fortress Quadrigon from the DF-21<\/a> repository of Dark Forces mods and had it up and running in seconds. Like with GZDoom<\/a> or Aleph One<\/a>, the Force Engine opens up a whole world of free FPS levels in addition to letting you more comfortably and conveniently play an old classic.<\/p>\n

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(Image credit: Disney, The Force Engine Team)<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Image 2 of 4<\/span>\n
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(Image credit: Disney, The Force Engine Team)<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Image 3 of 4<\/span>\n
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(Image credit: Disney, The Force Engine Team)<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Image 4 of 4<\/span>\n
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(Image credit: Disney, The Force Engine Team)<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[#item_image]After 3 years of work, modders have remastered the first Star Wars FPS<\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Star Wars: Dark Forces, the first Star Wars FPS and predecessor to the Jedi Knight series, has finally gotten the ZDoom<\/a> treatment. Developers luciusDXL, winterheart, and gilorem560 have released the 1.0 build of the Force Engine<\/a>, an open source reverse engineering of Dark Forces (and soon, its lesser known cousin, Outlaws) that lets you play it with modern conveniences and at high resolution.<\/p>\n

Released in 1995, Dark Forces is firmly of the “Doom Clone” era of first-person shooters. It has that slippery, speedy boomer shooter movement, a great weapon selection, and sprawling, mazelike levels, but it really innovates in its presentation. Dark Forces nails the music, sound effects, and look of Star Wars while also telling a pretty in-depth story about Han Solo-alike Kyle Katarn doing battle with the Imperial Remnant.<\/p>\n

These days, Dark Forces is somewhat overshadowed by its sequels in the Jedi Knight series, which see Kyle become a Jedi and engage in what is still the best-feeling lightsaber combat anyone’s ever done in a game. Outlaws<\/a>, meanwhile, is a western-themed Lucasarts FPS that reuses Dark Forces’ original Jedi Engine. This shared DNA will let the less-fondly remembered Outlaws ride Dark Forces’ coattails into the 21st century with only a bit of extra effort from the Force Engine team.<\/p>\n

In its 1.0 release, the Force Engine lets you play Dark Forces to completion with a highly customizable selection of quality-of-life features like mouse look and high resolution support. The Force Engine also now supports GPU rendering as opposed to the original’s archaic software renderer, and features a mod loader for past and future user-made creations. The Force Engine team has indicated that full Outlaws support will come at a later date in the project’s 2.0 update.<\/p>\n

Installation of both the Force Engine itself and mods is a snap. You’ll still need a copy of Dark Forces to start\u2060\u2014it’s not freely available and included with the source port like Bungie’s Marathon is with Aleph One\u2060\u2014and you can find it on Steam<\/a> or GOG<\/a> for $6 usually (at the time of writing it’s on sale for $2 on GOG!) After downloading the mod, running the Force Engine executable will automatically detect your installation path for the game.<\/p>\n

You can just drop any user-made maps or tweaks in the “Mods” directory of the Force Engine, and select which ones to load from an option on the Force Engine’s startup screen. I grabbed the fan mission Among the Shadows: Fortress Quadrigon from the DF-21<\/a> repository of Dark Forces mods and had it up and running in seconds. Like with GZDoom<\/a> or Aleph One<\/a>, the Force Engine opens up a whole world of free FPS levels in addition to letting you more comfortably and conveniently play an old classic.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
Image 1 of 4<\/span><\/p>\n
\n
\n

\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

(Image credit: Disney, The Force Engine Team)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Image 2 of 4<\/span><\/p>\n
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(Image credit: Disney, The Force Engine Team)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Image 3 of 4<\/span><\/p>\n
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(Image credit: Disney, The Force Engine Team)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Image 4 of 4<\/span><\/p>\n
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(Image credit: Disney, The Force Engine Team)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":11897,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bwgamespot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11896"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bwgamespot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bwgamespot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bwgamespot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bwgamespot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bwgamespot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bwgamespot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bwgamespot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bwgamespot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}