Nightdive discusses the challenges of porting Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster
I know what I have to do...
Back in August, Nightdive Studios and Lucasfilm Games announced that Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster — a faithful remaster of the classic first-person shooter (FPS) originally released in 1995 — will be released on Switch February 28, 2024. In a new interview from PC Gamer, we find out just how challenging this port has been.
Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster is being fully remastered through its proprietary KEX engine, allowing the game to run on modern gaming devices at up to 120FPS. New and returning players will enjoy Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster’s upgraded gameplay, high-resolution textures, enhanced lighting and rendering and more.
According to Nightdive’s Max Waine, the team had access to the original source code for Dark Forces right from the start, which was absolutely invaluable. That said, when the team dove into that code to tinker, they found that getting the title up-and-running on modern platforms wasn’t going to be as easy as they first thought.
“Dark Forces has been difficult to change, from the technical end of things, because it is very heavily over-designed. There were a lot of small details in how LucasArts did things at the time that made stuff particularly difficult. They managed to do multi-threading effectively, using a task system in the mid-1990s. We had to use sophisticated modern techniques to be able to get it to work nicely, while keeping the same basic idea.”
That’s not the only challenge that Nightdive has faced, as even the game’s menus needed a serious overhaul.
“The other thing that’s been difficult to appropriately modernise is the user interface that they had, in terms of menus and such, because the menus are all mouse driven in the original. Finding an appropriate balance that feels faithful to how the original menus are, while being able to work while you’re on a controller, was quite difficult.”
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