Show HN: OpenTIE and OpenXWA, Modern Ports of Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance
github.com72 points by elyosh 4 hours ago
72 points by elyosh 4 hours ago
Very nice. Looking forward to irritating the Empire again as a new recruit [1].
On a more serious note, there's also a really great conversion that ports the original TIE Fighter over to the later X-Wing Alliance engine [2].
And of course if you need copies of the originals, they still sell them over on GOG (Good Old Games).
[1] - https://imgpb.com/AoSwyrZ
[2] - https://www.moddb.com/mods/tie-fighter-total-conversion-tftc
I think a lot of the value of a total rewrite in C is that it is a buildable executable that should be runable on virtually any system, given that this game predates the popularity of the modern "3D Card". A lot of the friction in these games is dealing with all the peculiarities of getting a DOS game to somehow install on a 30 year newer Mac. A complete rewrite eliminates all of that awkward installer friction, so long as you have the necessary game files.
Oh yeah, I completely agree even though DOSBox (or DosBox-X) is fantastic, it’s really nice to be able to potentially run a game natively.
I only mentioned GOG because it’s probably the easiest legal way to obtain the original assets necessary to use OpenTIE.
How is it that FS mechanics are dependent on which release you have available? It all seems to key off of TieProfile_UsesTie98Logic(). Why can't you enable that with just the 95 release?
The original Star Wars: TIE Fighter was one of the first computer games I played as a teenager. The funny thing is, I had absolutely no idea what Star Wars was, but somehow I still thought the game was really cool and played it for quite a while.
Wow, I thought this could not be possible. May I ask, where did you grow up? I mean, in the 80s the Star Wars were already a cult thing.
If your parents thought cable TV was too expensive, even a North American kid could have no idea what Star Wars was until they became a teenager , had access to a BBS and saw jpegs of princess Lea.
Would be cool to have a web port of this.
Really excited to give this a go! Being able to merge the two versions together is a killer feature.
I am not a mobile gamer by any means but...
I think I would really like a Tie Fighter mobile port.
That being said I still remember all the keybindings of Tie Fighter...
... and the correct sound card settings for my Pentium.
Why not just run it in an emulator or VM? Is there tangible benefit to reimplementing everything, or is it just an intellectual exercise?
A quick glance through the README would demonstrate the litany of improvements you can expect from a proper decomp/port, compared to emulation.
"high-resolution rendering and substantially more advanced lighting" and several other items are documented as improvements in the link.
Cool! I played the original with a joystick back in the day. I tried the previous port to XWA with Tie Fighter more recently, and it had been so long that I couldnt even complete the tutorial with the joystick! Proper gamepad support would be clutch
Thrustmaster FCS & WCS MK1 for me. And as much as I'd love to play it again, it will never be the same.
Oh, wow. I loved these games when they were new.
May need to find a modern HOTAS setup and immerse myself in these.
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