What about Jedi Knight 1 and Dark Forces?

Rumor is that LucasArts lost the source code to JK1. Not sure about Dark Forces.

Well, better late than never.

No Blender Ghoul2 exporter yet. 😉

What I can at least salvage is the renderer's fixed flares, or maybe I can fix up JK2/JKA for PowerVR 😀

Wow that is cool. I now hope on a Dark Forces 1 and Jedi Knight source code release. 😁
I find those more unique since they're not based on any other engine. Both Jedi Knight 2 and Academy are idtech3 right?

F2bnp wrote:

Wow that is cool. I now hope on a Dark Forces 1 and Jedi Knight source code release. 😁

JK1's source has reportedly been lost.

I find those more unique since they're not based on any other engine.

DF1 was a Doom clone in a lot of ways, but I always thought it had some cool additions like looking up/down, jumping, floors above other floors, some polygon (your ship) and some point-based (holograms) 3D models, etc.

JK1 was a pioneer of hardware-accelerated Windows FPS games that also ran well with software rendering. Like a lot of games from that era, its graphics haven't aged well, but the gameplay still holds up decently. It's going to fall into obscurity soon, though, because it will have a harder and harder time running on new hardware/OSes; hopefully we'll get a good DOSBox-style emulation/VM solution for Win9x games in the next couple of years (in the meantime, running Wine on Linux helps).

Both Jedi Knight 2 and Academy are idtech3 right?

Yeah, they're Quake 3 engine games. There were a ton of FPS games based on the Quake 3 engine.

https://github.com/mrwonko/Blender-2.6-Ghoul-2-addon
Apparently there is a Ghoul2 blender pipeline

So, the first order of things, testing this exporter by porting OA angelyss/dark or Sorceress over to JK2

HunterZ wrote:

JK1's source has reportedly been lost. […]
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JK1's source has reportedly been lost.

I find those more unique since they're not based on any other engine.

DF1 was a Doom clone in a lot of ways, but I always thought it had some cool additions like looking up/down, jumping, floors above other floors, some polygon (your ship) and some point-based (holograms) 3D models, etc.

JK1 was a pioneer of hardware-accelerated Windows FPS games that also ran well with software rendering. Like a lot of games from that era, its graphics haven't aged well, but the gameplay still holds up decently. It's going to fall into obscurity soon, though, because it will have a harder and harder time running on new hardware/OSes; hopefully we'll get a good DOSBox-style emulation/VM solution for Win9x games in the next couple of years (in the meantime, running Wine on Linux helps).

Welp that would definitely suck. Is it just rumoured or did someone actually talk about it somewhere?

DF1's engine is indeed a bit more sophisticated than Doom's. So much so that it would be interesting to have the source, but I'm not really dying for it.

JK1 on the other hand... Honestly, I think its gameplay holds up better than JK2 or Academy nowadays. It's also, understandably, more reminiscent of the original trilogy, where as Raven's games are more reminiscent of the prequel trilogy. I love the game's feeling, it really has grown on me.
Like you said, it's probably one of the first games to really show off Direct3D (Direct 3D 5.0 to be exact) and also have a great software renderer. This game ran great on S3 Virge cards and even the early ATi Rage cards. 320x200 Software mode on a P133 was also doable I think.
AFAIK there are ways to get Win9x on current DOSBox releases, so perhaps in future versions it will become an easier task and perhaps we'll even get 3D Acceleration?

HunterZ wrote:

DF1 (...) floors above other floors

No floors above other floors there.
The first game with such a feature was quake1.

I wonder how the OA3 plan of atlasing and minmal texture switching could apply to a new project on the JO source. JO was always slow on low-end PCs for various reasons

robertmo wrote:

No floors above other floors there.

Yes there is. There's even some of it in the first level (along the lift area)

robertmo wrote:

HunterZ wrote:

DF1 (...) floors above other floors

No floors above other floors there.
The first game with such a feature was quake1.

No, it was Dark Forces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-person_sh … re_acceleration

Dark Forces (looking up/down, floors over floors), Descent (complex 3D environments, polygonal enemies) and Terminator: Future Shock (mouselook) all beat Quake 1 to the punch with a lot of technologies that Quake is frequently mis-credited for.

DF also uses some 3D models. Neat engine.

Yeah I really enjoy JK and DF. Raven's games do have some great aspects but they lost the scale of JK1.

Shadows of the Empire has an interesting in-between DF/JK engine too.

swaaye wrote:

Raven's games do have some great aspects but they lost the scale of JK1.

Yeah, JK1 really caught my interest a lot more than JK2 for some reason. I think there were too many Quake 3 engine games out around that time, so JK2 just didn't feel unique the way JK1 did.

JK1's level design was quite acrophobic. I think the level the better illustrates that is the 4th one, right after you have grabbed your lightsaber from your father's home. There's especially one part of it where you're crossing what I think is a bridge, but you're actually crossing it using the constructional beams, or whatever they're called, that keep the bridge in one place. Of course, if you fall you plummet to your death. And there are those flying beasts, I think they are called Mailocs, that attack you head on.

Man, what a great game.

It was the XBOX source. No project files. Dammit!

Why the F*** would they release the XBOX source instead of the PC source?

i've gotten this far. I could gimp up the renderer to imitate a PowerVR wrapper mode (actually easy to do) then attempt to add shader blend fallbacks to everything to make a wacky pcx2 friendly version 😈

Too bad DF1 was not released...I really miss mouse look over there.
I'd re-play it, but holding pg-up, pg-down all the time is terrible. I remember how I struggled with it when it came out...

It's interesting you can map left-right to the mouse, w s a d to the movement, but not up-down 🙁

gulikoza wrote:

Too bad DF1 was not released...I really miss mouse look over there.
I'd re-play it, but holding pg-up, pg-down all the time is terrible. I remember how I struggled with it when it came out...

It's interesting you can map left-right to the mouse, w s a d to the movement, but not up-down 🙁

Best bet may be to wait for DarkXL (http://xlengine.com/) to get somewhere eventually.