Posted by karjala on 2022-05-17 21:34:42 EST

The Force Engine 0.9 - iMuse & Sound  Released

 

After months of effort Lucius has released The Force Engine 0.9. You can download it Here !

 

 

The emphasis is on the full reverse-engineering of the iMuse (Interactive Music Streaming Engine) system.

 

 

Take a look at the playthrough below: all the audio is now generated through The Force Engine. 

 

Remember that the iMuse is the audio system crated by Michael Land for the game Monkey Island 2: Le Chuck's Revenge  It was used in many LucasArts games including Dark Forces. 

 

One of the key features of this system is the ability to switch tracks depending on what is happening in the game. For example, if there is combat or exploration the music transition from one track to another.

Take a look at the video below that gives a nice example of iMuse audio transitions in Monkey Island 2 ! 

 

 

Please read the Blog post that details all the changes and drop by TFE discord Here

 

Patch Details

Features and changes included in the release:

* Reverse-engineering of Dark Forces complete (with the obvious exception of going over bits of code again for bugs, or if I ever want to port TFE to DOS - and no that is not happening anytime soon if ever).
* iMuse system with proper music cues, transitions, and effects. Features like fades and similar effects work the same for both midi and digital audio.
* This is where most of the time was spent. iMuse is big and convoluted.
* Game music with fight/stalk transitions.
* Game and Cutscene sound system that uses iMuse to play digital audio; which includes proper sound priorities and accurate sound falloff and panning.
* Level ambient sounds.
* Sound UI will volume control for Cutscene Music, Sound, and Game music and sound.
* The ability to enable 16-channel digital audio support in iMuse (it was basically already there in the code, I just had to make some tweaks so it could be changed at runtime). 16-channels is the default but if you disable the option, it reverts back to 8-channels like DOS.
* The ability to disable fight music if desired.
* The Mousewheel is now bindable.
* The Mousewheel works on mission briefings and some PDA screens (mission briefing and map).
* Improved support for System UI scaling for 1440p and 4k.
* Many other fixes.

 

Future Plans for 1.0

With version 0.9 finally released, the next major release will be version 1.0 - complete support for Dark Forces in TFE. Unlike the 0.9 release, the plan is to split up the release into several smaller releases. There will be 2 main parts:

• Bug Fixes. I plan on splitting bug fixes by system and do one or more 0.9x release for each system. Examples include AI bugs, weapon bugs, collision issues, INF issues, etc..
• The GPU renderer - the last major feature for version 1.0. The GPU renderer will support both shearing for looking up and down (which emulates the software renderer) and accurate perspective projection to allow the player to look up and down further without distortion like modern 3D games. Initially it will support 8-bit color emulation with optional colormap interpolation to remove banding. Later, after version 1.0 is released, true color rendering, dynamic lights and other features will be added.