DarkXL Build 9.0 Released

[lucius]

I posted here about DarkXL before, see this description for more information.

After a long wait, DarkXL Build 9.0 is finally released!

You can read more about the build here and about the future of DarkXL - beyond build 9 - here.

For good measure I'll put up links for the DarkXL blog and DarkXL forums.

And finally, to make the post more interesting, a couple of screenshots:

[Nomad]

I literally just shit my pants and need to go change them now.

Back in December when Steam was having the big ass sales, I bought the Jedi Knight pack and was excited to play Dark Forces again, and when I went to look for DarkXL, it hadn't been updated in like a year and I thought it was abandoned. I'm super stoked to find all is not lost!

Is DarkXL stable enough to play through the game as-is yet, or do I have to wait much longer to be able to do so? I don't care about the bells and whistles so much, I just want to be able to play a hardware accelerated version of the game!

[Gez]

Some people have had no problems so far. However, in Talay (second level), I can play more than three minutes without getting stuck in an adjoin or some other piece of level geometry... So it depends.

[Enjay]

It still crashes for me on my Vista64 system.

It starts, I get as far as the screen that tells me about a mission (where I can pick Easy, Medium and Hard etc) but when I click Begin - crash! :(

I suspect this isn't much use to you but this is what Windows says:

Problem signature:
  Problem Event Name:	APPCRASH
  Application Name:	DarkXL.exe
  Application Version:	0.0.0.0
  Application Timestamp:	4b695872
  Fault Module Name:	DarkXL.exe
  Fault Module Version:	0.0.0.0
  Fault Module Timestamp:	4b695872
  Exception Code:	c0000005
  Exception Offset:	000a1659
  OS Version:	6.0.6002.2.2.0.768.3
  Locale ID:	2057
  Additional Information 1:	6280
  Additional Information 2:	e63c743b55e8b490226e19f804ba2ed3
  Additional Information 3:	9e12
  Additional Information 4:	c23a7112a8b935e7d2858f571e13f3a5

[Shaikoten]

Well now I know what I'm going to be doing after class rather than homework.

[lucius]

Nomad said:

Is DarkXL stable enough to play through the game as-is yet, or do I have to wait much longer to be able to do so? I don't care about the bells and whistles so much, I just want to be able to play a hardware accelerated version of the game!

Not yet but as I said on the blog, the project will now be on the "fast track" toward beta. The game should be fully playable in the near future.

Enjay said:

It still crashes for me on my Vista64 system.

It starts, I get as far as the screen that tells me about a mission (where I can pick Easy, Medium and Hard etc) but when I click Begin - crash! :(

That's unfortunate. Try turning off bloom, dynamic lighting and turning down the texture filtering. Is there a log file? If so you can send me the log file, maybe something useful is in there.

[Enjay]

OK, well I turned all the stuff off/down that you suggested and it still crashed. I copied my install across to my old XP machine (which used to run DarkXL) and it too crashed. So, perhaps it is something to do with my install of Dark Forces. I don't have time right now but I'll try a completely new installation at the weekend and see what happens. I'll report back.

I don't see a log file anywhere. Presumably it would be named somethingorother.log?

[lucius]

Enjay said:

OK, well I turned all the stuff off/down that you suggested and it still crashed. I copied my install across to my old XP machine (which used to run DarkXL) and it too crashed. So, perhaps it is something to do with my install of Dark Forces. I don't have time right now but I'll try a completely new installation at the weekend and see what happens. I'll report back.

I don't see a log file anywhere. Presumably it would be named somethingorother.log?

Yes. I forget the name off the top of my head but it's definitely "*.log". Make sure to update OpenAL on your XP machine - the OpenAL drivers seem to be really picky... Also make sure that your Dark Forces directory is pointing to the correct place on your XP machine (if you haven't already). If all else fails I'll be releasing a build with a launcher soon that should help diagnose some of these problems (testing drivers and systems before launch and reporting errors).

[lucius]

I just wanted to mention that I talked a little about my plans regarding Outlaws in the latest blog post. (For those of you who may be interested in Outlaws).

[Nomad]

lucius said:

I just wanted to mention that I talked a little about my plans regarding Outlaws in the latest blog post. (For those of you who may be interested in Outlaws).

I love you. Deeply and truly.

[ArmouredBlood]

OUTLAWS! Awesome, loved that game as a kid, haven't tried putting it on my laptop though. Would be great to see it get the same treatment as dark forces is getting.

[Shaikoten]

This is very cool. Ran through the first couple of levels. The two problems I've run into:

While walking I get caught in between sectors sometimes. With some jiggling and jumping I can get out of this.

Whenever I bump my finger into the R key the renderer becomes laggy and inoperable, but I can still go through menus. I don't know why I hit R, probably just compulsively attempting to reload from playing modern FPSes.

A suggestion? It might be in this but I didn't see it. Autorun would be lovely.

[Mechadon]

Wow, those screenshots look pretty slick. I know this is probably going to sound just awful, but I never played Dark Forces. Actually, I never even heard of the game before I started being active within the Doom community. It looks really interesting though, and the engine just makes it look even moreso. The addition of a "pure renderer" (software I guess?) sounds very cool as well. I do enjoy fancy effects and whatnot from a hardware rendered game, but if I'm playing the game for the first time, I like it to look and feel as close to the original as possible (I assume that's what the pure renderer will attempt to accomplish). So that's definitely a plus for me. I'll have to see if I can find a copy of this game somewhere :)

[Shaikoten]

Should be $5 or less on Steam. Honestly I never found the game itself to be amazing, but if you like the cutscenes and story of TIE Fighter (talkie) then it's brilliant for the storyline side. It's nice and oldschool though.

[lucius]

'R' is a debug key that tests performance for massive amounts of raycasts (64k or so per frame) against the scene - it used to display the raycasts on screen but doesn't anymore (a bug) which is why the 3D renderer freezes. I'll remove the key for the next build.

The collision issue is known and a fix is forthcoming.

[Shaikoten]

Thanks, very nice work on this. Now someone just needs to build an awesome TIE Fighter port in this vein and my nerd fantasies will be complete. Was this port all entirely from the ground up? I know someone's attempting a ground up port of System Shock 1, which could be amazing.

[lucius]

Shaikoten said:

Thanks, very nice work on this. Now someone just needs to build an awesome TIE Fighter port in this vein and my nerd fantasies will be complete. Was this port all entirely from the ground up? I know someone's attempting a ground up port of System Shock 1, which could be amazing.

Yes this port has been built from scratch. The built in level editing tool (not available yet, but look on the blog for screenshots and movies of it in action) is also built from scratch and runs in the engine.

[lucius]

Build 9.01 has been released. If you are having trouble running DarkXL, try the following command line options:

-safe : runs DarkXL with the minimum settings, 800x600 resolution and windowed. If something like bloom or some other feature is causing problems, use this to get back to a working state.

-nosound : if you think sound may be an issue, run without sound support.

And don't forget, from before:

-x : to unlock all the levels, though many still have functionality issues.

Get it here.

[eargosedown]

Lucius - I want you to know how much your work on the project (as well as others) means to me. I grew up with Dark Forces just as much as Doom (actually, I played DF first, and then Doom. And in all honesty, I liked DF when I was younger more, because it didn't scare the shit out of me - Also I'm a Star Wars dork.)
Dark Forces to me was the best Star Wars themed game ever created, and it saddened me deeply when it started becoming almost impossible to play because the sourcecode wasn't released, and it wasn't allowed to evolve as Doom has.
DarkXL has made it possible again for me to play one of my favorite FPS games from my child hood, and let me relive the times before Star Wars went to crap (Read as: 1999-present).
It's much appreciated =)

[lucius]

eargosedown said:

Lucius - I want you to know how much your work on the project (as well as others) means to me. I grew up with Dark Forces just as much as Doom (actually, I played DF first, and then Doom. And in all honesty, I liked DF when I was younger more, because it didn't scare the shit out of me - Also I'm a Star Wars dork.)
Dark Forces to me was the best Star Wars themed game ever created, and it saddened me deeply when it started becoming almost impossible to play because the sourcecode wasn't released, and it wasn't allowed to evolve as Doom has.
DarkXL has made it possible again for me to play one of my favorite FPS games from my child hood, and let me relive the times before Star Wars went to crap (Read as: 1999-present).
It's much appreciated =)

Thanks.

My favorite part of your post is this: "...let me relive the times before Star Wars went to crap (Read as: 1999-present)" - it's funny because it's so true...

Seriously thanks for the comments, I glad you like DarkXL.

[Shaikoten]

lucius said:

My favorite part of your post is this: "...let me relive the times before Star Wars went to crap (Read as: 1999-present)" - it's funny because it's so true...

This is truth. I grew up with X-Wing, TIE Fighter, the West End Games Star Wars RPG, and the Decipher Star Wars trading card game. All amazing products with a little bit of soul to them; mostly because the setting wasn't fat George Lucas' sterile fantasy world of the prequel trilogy, and didn't amount to one part retarded kiddie movie, one part poorly written political borefest.

[Gez]

Shaikoten said:

and didn't amount to one part retarded kiddie movie, one part poorly written political borefest.

You forgot "one part blatant promotion for console game tie-ins" such as the pod race...

[Nomad]

Gez said:

You forgot "one part blatant promotion for console game tie-ins" such as the pod race...

For the record, the pod racing game was excellent, and I still play it.

[Shaikoten]

Yeah, surprisingly the Pod Racing game was the only prequel trilogy BS game I played that I actually enjoyed. Mind you the entire pod racing thing could have been completely left out of Phantom Menace and I would have been much happier, but the game itself was well done.

[david_a]

Shaikoten said:

I know someone's attempting a ground up port of System Shock 1, which could be amazing.

Who? All I know of is the one that was abandoned long ago.

[Shaikoten]

david_a said:

Who? All I know of is the one that was abandoned long ago.

I just tried searching for it and it appears to no longer be on the internet :| There's always System Shock Portable, which works pretty good, but--eh.

[Nomad]

Just tried it out, and it works pretty decently! Some weird problems getting stuck between sectors as has been mentioned. Also another thing I encountered and I have no idea what it was, but every now and then a blaster shot would come out of nowhere and occasionally hit me. It didn't appear to have a source, and there weren't any enemies nearby.

If I may put in a feature request, I would really like to be able to save mid-level. I don't always have the time to play through a whole level and it would be nice to be able to quit and come back to where I left off rather than having to slog through stuff I've already done...

[eargosedown]

Did a playthrough of secret base... my god it's looking beautiful so far!

I hope you don't mind; I did a Let's Play video on it =P

So for anyone interested in seeing what the dark forces port looks like so far, here's a quick teaser:

[DuckReconMajor]

QUIT USING THE SSG ALL THE TIME!!

Thanks for posting this. I can't try this myself since I don't have Dark Forces. :(

When Outlaws is supported, though, I'm gonna be all over this. :)

[lucius]

eargosedown said:

Did a playthrough of secret base... my god it's looking beautiful so far!

I hope you don't mind; I did a Let's Play video on it =P

Thanks. I don't mind the video, it's cool to see a video of someone else playing the build. You missed several secrets though. :)