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Clonehunter

Massassi Temple meets its Doom and Dark Forces turns 20

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For anyone who has ever followed Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, it's expansion pack Mysteries of the Sith, or the sequels Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy, perhaps you've stumbled upon the JK editing haven that was the Massassi Temple. Perhaps a smaller scale JK Hub (Though I believe Massassi has been around longer), it for a while served as a place for JK/MotS, and some JO and JA mods, to be submitted and flourish, alongside a plethora of links and tools and tutorials that was all made somewhat redundant by JK Hub's larger database. Or at least, I assume this is the history of of the site.

Anyways, submissions of mods and general mod work for the game, or at least mod work directed at MT, has been stagnant for a long time, minus a release here or there. Although the game is still widely available today, it has suffered from a lack of support on modern systems, fan ports (Although I've recently learned that something called Gorc was being developed, but it's at a bit of a standstill), and/or a fixed and smoother multiplayer platform and community. So without any new comers to keep things interested for newcomers or old timers alike, the Temple has decided to officially close its submission doors, and keep the site as a static archive of past levels and mods.

There seems to be one more community project in development, but it will be the last submission to the site before it closes on December 15th later this year, although the true future of the site is somewhat uncertain. There may be some further discussions, but what I have assumed to have once been a common mod site for an old 90s game is finally being put to sleep, to rest in peace in the backlogs of time. Certainly they had their joys, tears, and all that recklessness that comes with youth when the site and users were young, but life goes on, and the site, and most likely the game, will lack an heir of users to continue the legacy.

RIP Massassi.net, your time seemingly has come

(Disclaimer: This post has been somewhat dramatized for effect, and not all purported facts may be 100% accurate. As far as I know, the game still has a decent community at JK Hub, which still stands, and this doesn't seem to have anything to do with the fate of DF-21, which is the premiere location for modding the original Dark Forces.)

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Personally, the only reason I can claim to be sentimental is that it was the first Internet forum I ever visited, as Jedi Knight and Jedi Outcast were some of the first games I had ever tried to create mods for. I described my very first experience in another thread here that's still going. I've been back every once ina awhile ever since then, either to make nonsensical posts that illustrated my lack of understanding and my 8th (or 7th) Grade ego of retarded proportions, where I flaunted the fact that I used the name "Clonehunter" everywhere and figured I had achieved some kind of notoriety because of that.

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If you click the picture, you'll find that Star Wars: Dark Forces has turned 20 years old. I beat the PlayStation version of this game and played the shit out of the DOS version. It was one of the first FPS games I ever tried, and the third level with no sound and a dark screen was terrifying as all of those Dianogas sprang up everywhere.

Edit: Speaking of the XL Port...

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Wow, I wasn't aware Dark Forces just reached it's 20th anniversary.

It's a good thing Dark Forces already has the XL port but it's a shame they only made it take use of general midi for the music, obviously not the best midi kind available around the games time and the setup.exe for the original Dark Forces I recall had many different midi types. I personally preferred the MT-32 selection.

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XLEngine is abandoned and closed source for now and the game isn't finishable with it :-(

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VGA said:

XLEngine is abandoned and closed source for now and the game isn't finishable with it :-(

Really? That's a shame. I stopped following progress on it a while ago.

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I wouldn't say abandoned, just further put on a hiatus because of life stuff. Of course, will he ever return to it as he wants too? Who knows. But it sounds like it has a better chance than DaggerXL.

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I don't see why they can't find someone else to take over for them while they aren't working on it.

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Avoozl said:

I don't see why they can't find someone else to take over for them while they aren't working on it.

A forum moderator has asked permission to opensource it from the sole developer. Fingers crossed.

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I downloaded a lot of maps and mods from there, perhaps enough to rival my Doom downloads. Glad to see that it's not completely gone, I was worried by the title.

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It honestly kinda pisses me off when people refuse to open the source code of their own reverse engineering efforts. Like that's not hypocritical at all? Yes, you'll reverse engineer some game company's code "for the community" and then refuse to share your uncompiled work with that same community? I don't understand the "but they worked on it and it was hard!" rebuttal: no shit it must've been difficult and I appreciate that the effort was made. So why not allow others to appreciate it by using it in derivative projects, just like how

This rant applies to far more than just the XL engine. I also feel this way about Kega Fusion and various Sonic hacks.

Not directly related since this comes from the actual source itself, but I think it's insane that the Sonic community is expected to get the Xtreme code by reverse-engineering a newly compiled build just because one of the original coders is still sour about the game decades later.

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Sodaholic said:

It honestly kinda pisses me off when people refuse to open the source code of their own reverse engineering efforts. Like that's not hypocritical at all? Yes, you'll reverse engineer some game company's code "for the community" and then refuse to share your uncompiled work with that same community? I don't understand the "but they worked on it and it was hard!" rebuttal: no shit it must've been difficult and I appreciate that the effort was made. So why not allow others to appreciate it by using it in derivative projects, just like how

This rant applies to far more than just the XL engine. I also feel this way about Kega Fusion and various Sonic hacks.

Not directly related since this comes from the actual source itself, but I think it's insane that the Sonic community is expected to get the Xtreme code by reverse-engineering a newly compiled build just because one of the original coders is still sour about the game decades later.

I think the hesitancy to open source it is somewhat understandable. They most likely want to get it "perfect" before letting other people see the code. The prospect of having strangers look at it and criticize every last detail of it is probably scary and *gasp* they might think they're a dummy! Better to wait until it's a flawless monument to your intellect.

Of course anybody sane realizes that no code is perfect and that you have to make some sacrifices sometimes, especially when you're working on stuff as a hobby and your motivation is your most precious resource.

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