The Alternate Timeline Where This is a Star Wars Website

[Darman Macray]

Whenever 1995's Dark Forces comes up, its ground-breaking innovation, such as looking up and down, and multiple floors gets brought up in the same breath, but it seems like Lucasarts' failure to release the source-code and encourage user-generated content left the revolutionary Jedi engine in the dust, to the point where it took us until just this month for get a remaster of any kind. This can't help but make me wonder if, in the event that Dark Forces had been forthright with its technology, if the iterations of the Jedi engine would've been the foundation for so much of the technology others had to developed in lieu of its source-code.

 

Now, I know the title of this thread is highly improbable for a great many reasons--Doom would still be first, and this site has not transformed into "Nukemworld," but mods like Xim's Star Wars Doom make me a little remissed at what could've been, if a Jedi-engine sourceport slow-cooking since 1999 could have produced some really interesting mods within Dark Forces' tonal pallet, and how neat it would be to check in every year for the annual "Probe Droid Awards."

 

These were just some thoughts I had. I don't really know where I was going with all this, but I suppose my imagination was ignited with the thought of composers innovating on the iMuse technology with all of these dynamic original tracks, mappers writing all of these lore-dense mission briefings, and the inevitable Indiana Jones TC, all going strong for 20+ years...

[Stupid Bunny]

It’s always said that a lot of Doom’s endurance as a modding/mapping medium comes from a mix of how easy it is and the early release of the source, and while I think it is mostly those things I also wonder now how much it also benefits from the bareness of the concept and story. Dark Forces could have generated a strong modding scene too, I’m sure, but the fact that everything in it is so identifiably Star Wars, even with how insanely popular that is, may actually constrain it a bit. Doom is a canvas you can put pretty much anything on without having to add a bunch of custom assets, so you can put them in space, in a city, in the jungle, the future, the beach, ancient Egypt, etc and it just sort of works. While you can obviously do whatever you want with Star Wars assets too (I used to play Galactic Battlegrounds a lot and liked creating scenarios with herds of feral Darth Mauls wandering around in the woods), enemies like stormtroopers and Jabba’s guards and stuff have associations attached to them that the Doom monsters don’t. Likewise with Duke I suppose where so many of the assets are designed to look like specific real-world things and so end up less flexible in their usage (plus Duke is much more of a character then Doomguy is).

[QuaketallicA]

On 3/14/2024 at 1:49 PM, Darman Macray said:

Whenever 1995's Dark Forces comes up, its ground-breaking innovation, such as looking up and down, and multiple floors gets brought up in the same breath, but it seems like Lucasarts' failure to release the source-code and encourage user-generated content left the revolutionary Jedi engine in the dust, to the point where it took us until just this month for get a remaster of any kind. This can't help but make me wonder if, in the event that Dark Forces had been forthright with its technology, if the iterations of the Jedi engine would've been the foundation for so much of the technology others had to developed in lieu of its source-code.

 

Now, I know the title of this thread is highly improbable for a great many reasons--Doom would still be first, and this site has not transformed into "Nukemworld," but mods like Xim's Star Wars Doom make me a little remissed at what could've been, if a Jedi-engine sourceport slow-cooking since 1999 could have produced some really interesting mods within Dark Forces' tonal pallet, and how neat it would be to check in every year for the annual "Probe Droid Awards."

 

These were just some thoughts I had. I don't really know where I was going with all this, but I suppose my imagination was ignited with the thought of composers innovating on the iMuse technology with all of these dynamic original tracks, mappers writing all of these lore-dense mission briefings, and the inevitable Indiana Jones TC, all going strong for 20+ years...

 

I'm sorry, but you're just mistaken there. The remaster is far from the only thing that ever got released. (Frankly I think it's stupid, unnecessary, and a lazy cash grab. It even pales in comparison to that unfinished source port from some years back.) Dark Forces has a huge mod library. Obviously nothing like Doom's, but there are a ton of fantastic custom maps made for it over the years, and the most impressive of these is the Dark Tide Saga.

 

www.df-21.net is your buddy here.

 

I actually played Dark Forces first, and it's what introduced me to Doom. So I actually played many of these mods before I even touched E1M1 of Doom.

Edited March 16, 2024 by QuaketallicA

[DNSKILL5]

7 minutes ago, QuaketallicA said:

(Frankly I think it's stupid, unnecessary, and a lazy cash grab. It even pales in comparison to that unfinished source port from some years back.)

Do you mean DarkXL or The Force Engine? DarkXL for sure has been discontinued, but TFE is still being worked on and its current build fully supports Dark Forces and eventually will support Outlaws. Also, you're clearly not the consumer these remasters have in mind. They're geared towards people who don't know what source ports are or want simplicity or to play on console.

Edited March 16, 2024 by DNSKILL5

[QuaketallicA]

9 minutes ago, DNSKILL5 said:

Do you mean DarkXL or The Force Engine? DarkXL for sure has been discontinued, but TFE is still being worked on and its current build fully supports Dark Forces and eventually will support Outlaws. Also, you're clearly not the consumer these remasters have in mind. They're geared towards people who don't know what source ports are or want simplicity or to play on console.

 

Oh trust me, I'm not even a fan of source ports* I'm mostly a vanilla purist. The mods I discussed above are pretty much played in DOSBox. All I was saying though is that the source port that I remember existing, had in addition to widescreen/high resolution also added in things like light bloom. I think DarkXL is the one I have in mind. I haven't heard of the Force Engine. I haven't been into the DF modding scene in some years.

 

*I am however an evangelical of GZDoom with its infinite customizability (and support for more complicated things like Brutal Doom, scripting, etc.) , and Yamagi source port for Quake II, which fixes the music but is otherwise more vanilla than the recent official version.

 

This Dark Forces remaster also happens to coincide with a similarly barebones re-release of one of my all-time favorite and nearest and dearest games, Battlefront II (and I). These are mostly just re-releases on modern consoles with some marketing fanfare, but it still strikes me as a lazy cashgrab to just put old games through a.i. upscalers, delivering essentially the same vanilla experience but at needlessly much larger file size (not to mention full price of $35? For games that usually sell for $2-5 on sale). I generally am rather anathematic to remasters trying to whitewash the past, but in the case of Battlefront (which while I do think the vanilla game is beautiful, I have also played it to death) there literally already exists an amazing remaster by HarrisonFog, which completely redoes everything TC-style and is just teeming with little references and nuggets of easter eggs in every nook and cranny. Everything is more lore-accurate and meticulously crafted with professional quality. It's no surprise that it won mod of the year more than once on ModDB. I would support the new re-release, even if it did nothing to improve the graphics, so long as it included mod support (so console gamers can enjoy the already extant, amazing HarrisonFog remaster, not to mention the thousands of other excellent mods over the years), and online crossplay. But I don't think they will include either, so the already miniscule playerbase on PC is just going to be pointlessly split now between those who wasted money on the re-release and those that didn't.

 

[Edward850]

1 hour ago, QuaketallicA said:

The remaster is far from the only thing that ever got released. (Frankly I think it's stupid, unnecessary, and a lazy cash grab. It even pales in comparison to that unfinished source port from some years back.)

May I ask why you're being openly rude about us on this website?

[Darman Macray]

1 hour ago, QuaketallicA said:

 

www.df-21.net is your buddy here.

 

 

Oh nice! I played Dark Forces on the PS1, and never thought to look for a community for it this whole time. Thank you for the recommendation!

Edited March 16, 2024 by Darman Macray
Grammar.

[june gloom]

Still waiting on Outlaws support from TFE tbh. Though I admit it -- I hate Star Wars but I'd like to see if my vague memories of Dark Forces hold up.

[A339]

As much as I love Dark Forces, it just don't have the monster variety that Doom has, or the weapons that balance it. Doom 2 adding the Super Shotgun and extra monsters just perfected it.

 

I am truly of the belief that one of the reasons Doom 2 has stood the test of time is that there is just no other game like it with the best weapon roster and enemies that go well with said weapons. The combat eventually becomes a puzzle with the harder WADs and learning tricks on how to sue them. It took me over a decade to even learn just how powerful the BFG is. 

 

Dark Forces isn't the only game that had a great engine that did more than Doom. There's plenty of Build Engine games that were impressive too, but they also lack the weapon roster vs perfect enemies that Doom 2 had.

[houston]

1 hour ago, DNSKILL5 said:

Also, you're clearly not the consumer these remasters have in mind. They're geared towards people who don't know what source ports are or want simplicity or to play on console. 

I think you're underselling the project a bit. It's a convenient way to purchase Dark Forces without waiting on a CD delivery, and buying it no doubt benefits Lucius in some way.

 

1 hour ago, Edward850 said:

May I ask why you're being openly rude about us on this website?

What, is doomworld run by NightDive now?

[Edward850]

33 minutes ago, houston said:

What, is doomworld run by NightDive now?

There's nothing wrong with being respectful towards other members here. That should not be exclusive to owners.

[Lila Feuer]

Yeah I don't necessarily agree with every Nightdive release when it comes to certain changes made (and maybe a hot take but I would not call them game preservationists even though I do find the majority of their versions of the respective games to be well worth the money and a playthrough on multiple systems if you own any), but if you're going to be critical at least be constructive about it as opposed to writing the whole thing off as just some "lazy cash grab." That would be Konami when they re-release anything these days.

[QuaketallicA]

2 hours ago, Edward850 said:

May I ask why you're being openly rude about us on this website?

 

I mean no offense to you personally. I just am in general sick or tired of the attitude in mainstream culture today to remaster every possible thing that was ever successful at some point for more money. Part of it is I like dated things to look dated because it is a time capsule, and it lets you experience a different era like it's the present. I don't think it serves future generations or the larger culture to keep overwriting the original with an updated version every decade.

 

I, personally, didn't grow up with Dark Forces or anything like that. In fact, I discovered it in college when I was looking for more Star Wars games on a GOG sale. I was impressed by how realistic the graphics of this 2.5D style was, because even though it was obviously outdated compared to contemporary games, in its own way and own world, it is truly enchanting and impressive. It doesn't need to be perfected. I would much rather see a new sequel in the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight lineage (the incredible Respawn-made Jedi Fallen Order series is a worthy successor), or maybe a new FPS similar to Dark Forces, then just remaking the original game in slightly upscaled graphics. (I get that maybe you're re-doing that from scratch and it's more work than I'm giving credit for, but it's work for a pointless goal.) I don't pretend to be a defining voice here. I'm aware I'm in the minority, otherwise these things wouldn't be so popular. But I'm just tired of them everywhere. They're such low hanging fruit for risk-averse mega-monopolies. Easy money, guaranteed audience. Why actually do something when you can re-sell what already exists and has been around forever with a slightly shinier coat of paint? I don't get it.

 

That said, I'm not entirely opposed to any and every remaster ever. The recent Quake re-releases have been quite impressive, everything from resurrected online play to rare concept art, to new mapsets and even revamped enemy behavior. However, things like that and the aforementioned Harrisonfog remaster of Battlefront II are by and large the exception. Did we really need a re-release of Blood or Shadow Warrior that's little more than a paid source port? Heck, in the case of Shadow Warrior, the original game is legally available for free anyway. The trend really became a joke in my eyes when they started redoing the Crysis series...(and funnily enough the original games still look better).

Edited March 16, 2024 by QuaketallicA

[Edward850]

46 minutes ago, QuaketallicA said:

I mean no offense to you personally.

The problem is you have actually meant offense. You can't say this at the same time as explictly saying our work is a lazy cash grab just now in this thread, and previously with Rise of the Triad which you outright called a downgrade, got called out then for too and never came back to apologize.

You cannot have it both ways. These words and actions are offensive. They mean offense. You cannot say they are not.

 

46 minutes ago, QuaketallicA said:

Why actually do something when you can re-sell what already exists and has been around forever with a slightly shinier coat of paint? I don't get it.

You don't get it because you are rather missing the forest for the trees. You don't understand how well you yourself have it, you have knowledge of how to make dosbox work, you have knowledge of how to make arcane networking function through obscure tunneling behaviors. You have knowledge on how to make old PC games work under weird constrained resolutions. You have knowledge about obscure video card driver behaviors.

 

Other people do not have this knowledge. They don't have the resources to learn this. They may not even have the time to do it. Or certain aspects of the game maybe be lost to a potential wider audience. Our remasters especially for those people, Dark Forces was a time for us to dig through Lucas Arts old archives and present previously unseen content, fix and expand the game up from its DOS limits, make the cutscenes have more than 12 pixels. Rise of the Triad was much the same, as well as giving people a way to play multiplayer without having to learn what the fuck an IPX is. It's good that you can learn this stuff and have patience to do all this yourself, but you are unique. Very unique. You should appreciate this in yourself, rather than giving everyone else a bad time for it.

 

Also just in general, these games we do are now in 64bit, which is a massive benefit to any modder as that means you have far more than 2GB RAM to play around with.

Edited March 16, 2024 by Edward850

[A339]

1 hour ago, Edward850 said:

Other people do not have this knowledge. They don't have the resources to learn this. They may not even have the time to do it. Or certain aspects of the game maybe be lost to a potential wider audience. Our remasters especially for those people, Dark Forces was a time for us to dig through Lucas Arts old archives and present previously unseen content, fix and expand the game up from its DOS limits, make the cutscenes have more than 12 pixels. Rise of the Triad was much the same, as well as giving people a way to play multiplayer without having to learn what the fuck an IPX is. It's good that you can learn this stuff and have patience to do all this yourself, but you are unique. Very unique. You should appreciate this in yourself, rather than giving everyone else a bad time for it.

 

Also just in general, these games we do are now in 64bit, which is a massive benefit to any modder as that means you have far more than 2GB RAM to play around with.

 

The work Nightdive did with Shadow Man remaster was fantastic and makes me forever grateful for their work. While one could argue that the game still ran just fine on PCs with a bit of minor fixes, having mouse control and new updated controls changed everything. That's not even counting the additions of all the missing content from the original game and 3 new levels that were supposed to be in the original.

 

I just wanted to reply and say thank you for the hard work you folks do. The Turok remasters were also incredibly well done and it was the first time someone like me got to actually experience them on PC without having to fight the N64 controller.

[Gifty]

The rereleases of Dark Forces, RoTT, Powerslave and Blood have all been godsends that made made brilliant, overlooked shooters actually accessible and playable by any reasonable standards. I'm sorry that not everyone makes maining DosBox a point of personal integrity, but in an industry that actively disdains its own history and actually embraces digital disposability, remasters are an essential form of preservation that helps the work of previous generations live on and not fade into oblivion as many Amiga and Commodore-era games are currently doing.

 

Is there an exploitative commercial aspect to the wider industry's fixation on remakes and rereleases? Absolutely. What we are seeing is the hangover of an economic system that no longer gives artists the stability or financial latitude to develop any craft, self-discovery or new idea. It is considered more profitable to live in a Ready Player One world of, "hey, remember Frank Frazetta?" Than to facilitate a world capable of ever incubating or supporting another Frank Frazetta. But save your ire for the totally unnecessary "remaster of already-easy-to-play AAA game from 5 years ago" (BioShock), not small-scale, preservation-focused passion projects like Nightdive.

Edited March 17, 2024 by Gifty

[Murdoch]

13 hours ago, QuaketallicA said:

I mean no offense to you personally.

 

You just called his studio's work lazy cash grabs. There is absolutely nothing lazy about taking old code and getting it to work on modern systems. If you think it's so easy, feel free to go ahead and prove me wrong.

 

You claim to be a vanilla purist, then mere moments later show you're absolutely not.

 

You say you hate remasters and source ports, except the ones that you suit your personal needs. So everything you don't like is shit and/or a lazy cash grab?

 

You seem to think everyone has the time to dick around with DOSBox and whatnot, as Edward pointed out. I personally can't play low-resolution FPS titles on my 28-inch monitor without my eyes watering. So I am very grateful for remasters and source ports.

Not every product is for you. No one is being forced to by anything. It's up to consumers to research before they buy and decide if they want to buy something, or not. Yet you are so arrogant that if a remaster doesn't fit your apparently quite arbitrary criteria, it is worthy of scorn and calling the developers lazy pretty much directly to their faces?

 

Do you even know how to spell the word tact?

 

You're allowed to not like something. As I said, not everything is for you. But if you keep making frankly ridiculous posts like this where you baselessly insult people's work and pretty much contradict things you just said, you are 100% going to get called out for it and deservedly so.

Edited March 16, 2024 by Murdoch

[YeOldeFellerNoob]

Personally, even if Dark Forces had it's source code published, I still think it would still stay relatively small. Quake was mind-blowing back in the day, and that had its own source code published, and from what I see, it has a relatively small-medium sized community, including post-Quake 3 (It's what I see, anyways). Besides all that, with how Star Wars is NOW and hell, in the 2000's when the prequel trilogy started with the Phantom Menace, it would probably be declined into either a bunch of deadbeat dads or the stereotypical image of a millennial geek.

[june gloom]

I think it's probably worth stating that Doom is something of an outlier when it comes to community size and longevity. Yeah, there are people still holding on with Quake (mostly Q1), Duke 3D has a bigger fandom than most (but still can't compare to Doom) and even Marathon has a small but dedicated community. But Doom not only came first, not only had a robust modding community longer than anyone else, but the Doom community has had a huge surge in the last ten-fifteen years, and I think that's down to a confluence of Brutal Doom introducing Doom to a new generation (for good or ill,) Doom 2016 reigniting mainstream interest in the franchise, and GZDoom maturing as a modding engine. There's so much that can be done with Doom (and room for so much more as ports continue to evolve) and I think that interests people.

 

(It also probably helps that the bulk of the community is LGBTQ-friendly, thereby allowing a member base that the likes of, say, Duke4.net would never tolerate.)

[Akagi666]

I played Dark Forces for the first time about a month ago. It is not very good and has nothing on doom imo. The enemy variety is much worse.

[Jayextee]

On 3/16/2024 at 9:15 AM, QuaketallicA said:

I just am in general sick or tired of the attitude in mainstream culture today to remaster every possible thing that was ever successful at some point for more money.

With a lot of Nightdive's output though, it's been a case of "want to run this thing on modern hardware at all? LOL YOU'RE SHIT OUTTA LUCK BUD" until they came along. Whether or not DOOM64 or Powerslave Exhumed (to name two of ND's games I bought) were 'lazy' or even 'cash grabs' (and I believe they were neither), the fact is that they allowed me to play games I couldn't before; in any official/legitimate capacity that is.

[Mr Masker]

We'd all be talking about "Stormtrooper Encounter.wad" and there'd be 50+ locked threads about the Disney Sequel Trilogy.

[QuaketallicA]

On 3/17/2024 at 4:21 AM, Jayextee said:

With a lot of Nightdive's output though, it's been a case of "want to run this thing on modern hardware at all? LOL YOU'RE SHIT OUTTA LUCK BUD" until they came along. Whether or not DOOM64 or Powerslave Exhumed (to name two of ND's games I bought) were 'lazy' or even 'cash grabs' (and I believe they were neither), the fact is that they allowed me to play games I couldn't before; in any official/legitimate capacity that is.

 

 

https://www.gog.com/en/games?query=powerslave&order=desc:score

 

The same game was already there. You can see Powerslave sells for $5, with the newer Powerslave Exhumed at $15. Unless you're enough of a hardcore fan of this obscure title to care about the minute differences which existed between different versions, in which case I think the newer one includes the console variation.

 

Doom 64 already existed as a mod on PC, but sure, I guess technically that's not official or whatever, and they sell it for like $1 anyway.

 

Certainly though, what they put out for Blood, Shadow Warrior, and Rise of the Triad? Basically mostly just a source port, with a couple extra goodies like a level editor I think for ROTT.

[Jayextee]

2 minutes ago, QuaketallicA said:

The same game was already there. You can see Powerslave sells for $5, with the newer Powerslave Exhumed at $15. Unless you're enough of a hardcore fan of this obscure title to care about the minute differences which existed between different versions, in which case I think the newer one includes the console variation.

My sweet summer child, they are not the same game.

[QuaketallicA]

On 3/16/2024 at 3:00 AM, Edward850 said:

 

You don't get it because you are rather missing the forest for the trees. You don't understand how well you yourself have it, you have knowledge of how to make dosbox work, you have knowledge of how to make arcane networking function through obscure tunneling behaviors. You have knowledge on how to make old PC games work under weird constrained resolutions. You have knowledge about obscure video card driver behaviors.

 

Also just in general, these games we do are now in 64bit, which is a massive benefit to any modder as that means you have far more than 2GB RAM to play around with.

 

You guys are acting like there's some special arcane knowledge involved. I'm a nobody. I'm not a tech expert, while you, clearly, are. I have no idea what tunneling behavior or driver behavior you're talking about. When I bought these games, they were already made to work by default. Literally that is what Good Old Games (GOG) do is repackage old games and get them working on modern systems, out of the box (so to speak). If you do want to change the settings in DOSBox, which is entirely optional and subjective, btw, it's as easy as opening a notepad file and changing one or two things, which the file itself will tell you what the options you can change them to are. It's really nothing compared to other more modern games, like GTA IV, which was a real pain to get set up on PC, downloading 4 or 5 different mods just for the vanilla experience to work properly. 

 

What a lot of companies are doing nowadays is intentionally lying and making it seem like there is some sort of a huge hassle involved that really isn't the case, because they're trying to invent a reason to get people to re-buy games they already have or can already obtain for less money. If somebody in the Doom community decided to charge money for a source port, that would be looked down upon and get a lot of flak and rightfully so. So why should other similar FPS games of the 90s be treated any differently? 

 

It sincerely was not my intention to offend anybody specifically. I'm not singling out NightDive and its projects here. They're far from the only company to constantly push out remakes, remasters, etc. It's more of a general annoyance with the trend in entertainment overall.

 

That said, I take back and apologize for nothing, and I shouldn't have to. If I had to censor every thought I ever had out of the fear that somebody out in the web might possibly take offense, well then the world would be a sterile place where nobody ever made any statement of significance. Perhaps you should not be so easily offended by something as banal and trivial as a random stranger's opinion?

 

Just because I have a negative opinion of some thing, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm being rude or offensive. And if you disagree with me and really like something I dislike, well guess what, that's okay too. However, if I think a product is a lazy cash grab, then of course I will call it what it is.

Edited March 18, 2024 by QuaketallicA

[QuaketallicA]

On 3/16/2024 at 3:30 PM, Murdoch said:

 

You just called his studio's work lazy cash grabs. There is absolutely nothing lazy about taking old code and getting it to work on modern systems. If you think it's so easy, feel free to go ahead and prove me wrong.

 

You claim to be a vanilla purist, then mere moments later show you're absolutely not.

 

You say you hate remasters and source ports, except the ones that you suit your personal needs. So everything you don't like is shit and/or a lazy cash grab?

 

You seem to think everyone has the time to dick around with DOSBox and whatnot, as Edward pointed out. I personally can't play low-resolution FPS titles on my 28-inch monitor without my eyes watering. So I am very grateful for remasters and source ports.

Not every product is for you. No one is being forced to by anything. It's up to consumers to research before they buy and decide if they want to buy something, or not. Yet you are so arrogant that if a remaster doesn't fit your apparently quite arbitrary criteria, it is worthy of scorn and calling the developers lazy pretty much directly to their faces?

 

Do you even know how to spell the word tact?

 

You're allowed to not like something. As I said, not everything is for you. But if you keep making frankly ridiculous posts like this where you baselessly insult people's work and pretty much contradict things you just said, you are 100% going to get called out for it and deservedly so.

 

 

There is quite a significant difference between a remaster done by fans as a mod, versus re-releasing a game officially for money. Inevitably, the newer version, for better or worse, becomes the new definitive release, and that is how future generations are going to judge the game by. So my concern there is about preserving the original artifact for posterity. In multiplayer games, there is the additional concern of splitting the playerbase or sapping it from owners of the original (e.g. Quake 3 vs Live). Of course, the existence of a newer version doesn't mean the original won't still be there (sometimes it often does mean that) but even if not, most people will default to buying the newest version assuming it is best, and the net result is that the original becomes forgotten.

 

Which is quite insulting, considering if not for its success in the first place, there wouldn't be a remake to begin with. That's the other general objection I have, is that most of the time these things have no reason to exist in the first place, other than the lame excuse that Playstation has poor backwards compatibility. It's such a waste of resources and time to do-over the past rather than do something new. So when I say it is "lazy," I don't mean literally lazy as in there is no work involved, because of course there is a good deal of it. In the case of "Last of Us," for example, they've basically remade the entire game assets from scratch for PS5. Obviously a ton of work. I mean "lazy" in the sense that there's nothing original or interesting about it. It's a very low risk business move that takes no chances. It seeks to profit off of the ideas and innovation of the people in the past. It's practically legal plagiarism that they can get away with because they're the rights owners. 

 

There is also a difference in the quality of a remaster, and if you don't believe me, just look at the current Steam reviews for the Battlefront Classic Collection (Overwhelmingly Negative). Then look at the labor of love that is the HarrisonFog Remaster. It's so damn good that even a purist like myself is in awe of the talent and dedication involved. That's not a contradiction; it's a ringing endorsement.

 

GZDoom is often associated with the most complex and modern wads, but it can also run vanilla compatible wads in software mode @320 x 200 resolution, which is unironically how I've been playing Sigil II, and using the mouse for movement not WASD.

 

I suppose now I must make a disclaimer that it is not the only or necessarily the superior way to play the game for you, lest some other fragile ego gets bent by the mere existence of an opinion.

Edited March 18, 2024 by QuaketallicA

[QuaketallicA]

On 3/16/2024 at 9:57 AM, Gifty said:

 in an industry that actively disdains its own history and actually embraces digital disposability, remasters are an essential form of preservation that helps the work of previous generations live on and not fade into oblivion as many Amiga and Commodore-era games are currently doing.

 

 

I agree with the rest of your post, but what? Remasters are the polar opposite. They're against preservation of the original material. The original gets shafted, forgotten, replaced. The remastered version becomes the  version that seemingly always was. They're not preserving history; they're re-writing it.

 

And the notion that they are saving these games from obscurity is ludicrous, well except in the case of Powerslave. I'll give you that one probably would've been forgotten if not for the re-release. So you're probably right there. But Blood and Shadow Warrior are pretty much always held up as the "holy trinity" of Build engine games, along with Duke 3D. Dark Forces is regarded as one of the best shooters of the 90s, and its ground-breaking sequel spawned the successful and popular Jedi Knight series, which many regard as still being the gold standard when it comes to simulating jedi lightsaber combat. Or the original System Shock titles are famously the father of so many modern greats, e.g. Dead Space, BioShock, etc. These games are by no means obscure. 

 

It is, quite the contrary, the very fact that they are famous and popular that makes them an ideal candidate for a remaster, because there's already built in demand. Businesses rarely will remake or remaster something nobody remembers or ever heard of, for the obvious reason that nobody would care.

Edited March 18, 2024 by QuaketallicA

[Edward850]

1 hour ago, QuaketallicA said:

Just because I have a negative opinion of some thing, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm being rude or offensive. And if you disagree with me and really like something I dislike, well guess what, that's okay too. However, if I think a product is a lazy cash grab, then of course I will call it what it is. 

You're doing it again, you're saying you're not being rude or offensive and then calling our work a lazy cash grab.

This is pissing on me while telling me it's raining.

 

I guess digging source code out of the archives or disassembling code, rebuilding it for modern machines and compilers, sorting out the various bit rot and system differences that evolve over time, porting it over to an entire new bit set, adapting it to use actual modern hardware interfaces and control schemes, fixing art incompatibilities, sometimes writing wholly new netcodebout of nothing, building new tooling, porting various game systems to angelscript to expand modding capabilities, and then topping it of with producing that for on average 7 different SKUs just can't please you and apparently makes us lazy.

 

If that's your attitude to us, then bollocks to you, but you should take heed that respect is a two way street.

 

(You know, it's funny, you complain about Blood and ROTT being unnecessary when they were two of our most complicated titles, while praising Quake 1 & 2 when they were our smoothest. I don't get your angle, but I also cease to care.)

Edited March 18, 2024 by Edward850

[ZeroTheEro]

Honestly how the fuck is it a lazy cash grab when they made the best of two-worlds (three) for Powerslave Exhumed when they combined both the PS1 and Saturn map data and PC sprite assets? Extensive display settings? More graphic assets adapted to widescreen so that you can play it in any monitor sizes? Actual new assets to replace the old ones?
 

[vyruss]

1 hour ago, QuaketallicA said:

 

You guys are acting like there's some special arcane knowledge involved. I'm a nobody. I'm not a tech expert

 

Bolding the important part of your post here that tells us everything we need to know.  Stop acting like you are, or that somehow we all have to share your opinion on this topic.  I can really appreciate that you are able to work in these limited emulation environments to play the game exactly as you remembered it: limited by hardware beyond just clock speed.  You also happen to know how to buy old software that most people couldn't be arsed with to figure out how to set up.  Good on you.

 

I'm going to double down on something Edward pointed out about it, and this is deeply technical and probably going to be way over your head but I'll go a little deeper than that, and I'll make it simpler by adding that it is in an ISO-9660 standard disc image just so you can hope to grasp some of the information I am going to convey to you.  After all, this is only just "lazy" reverse software engineering practice...

 

Let's suppose you want to make this game locked behind dead and decaying hardware.  Where do you start?  What are all of these files in a location, e.g. D:\POMPOUS\POMPOUS.BFF? What is this file? And what about D:\POMPOUS\POMPOUS.MIM or D:\POMPOUS\POMPOUS.VRM?

 

I want to play Pompous in GZDoom, how do I do these conversions? Where do I start?

 

@QuaketallicA I await your response.  Should be easy, because it's just lazy to figure these things out right?