Posted by karjala on 2021-09-17 07:27:17 EST

WDFUSE 2.6 Announcement  (BETA)

 

Greetings Everyone!

 

It's been a long time coming, but today, we are excited to finally announce the upcoming release of WDFUSE 2.6 , the updated Dark Forces mission editor. You can get the 3D Preview component Here !

This is something that we've been working on this summer and hoping it would spur folks to make some new maps! =)

Background

Dark Forces Utilities and Editor (DFUSE) is a mission editor created by Yves Borckmans , a programmer from Belgium in 1995. Here is the story of how he created the Windows version of DFUSE in 1996.

"Around 1995, when the Dark Forces DEMO came out, I started working on DFUSE (the DOS version, in C). I didn't release it then because it would have been a bit unethical (you could have made levels for the demo, never buying the game). When the full game came out, I did a few quick changes that were necessary (some formats changed slightly), then released DFUSE 1.0 on ftp.cdrom.com This included the first DF specs if I remember correctly. I made a couple of updates if I remember correctly, but nothing much. Later in that year, I also sent a copy of my C code to Brad Oliver, to help him start on the Mac editor (Dark Forge IIRC). Around 1996, I had to learn Delphi for work, so I decided the best way to learn was to use it to make a Windows version of DFUSE, and in a couple of weekends that became WDFUSE 1.0 I released a couple versions, then started preparing to move from Europe to the US to work at LucasArts. I enrolled the help of David Lovejoy, Alexei Novikov and Jereth Kok to help as I was working 2 jobs (my job + LucasArts) + preparing a transatlantic move lol We called ourselves The Code Alliance and they pretty much took over WDFUSE... many other people helped too! "

 

The editor was very popular in the editing community, even making it to various magazines such as this blurb from PC Zone magazine from August 1995 (page 118).

 

 

After Yves left to work for Lucasarts in mid 1996 to work on Jedi Knight, the Dark Alliance continued making updates to WDFUSE until they switched over to editors for Outlaws and Jedi Knight in 1997. And for almost 25 years the code was sitting on their hard drives. When DF-21.net staff started looking for WDFUSE source code earlier this year, the first person we reached out was Yves and unfortunately he lost it in a hard drive crash. The same story was for everyone else we reached out to until eventually, we got a hold of Alexei Novikov who kindly provided us with the source code which can now be found on our GitHub . 

 

The Code

The code itself, is written in Delphi, an Object Pascal for Application Development. It consists of about 100 .PAS Pascal (Source Code) files and the corresponding .DFM Form ( GUI ) files. 

 

The code, unfortunately, was in an unfinished state as development moved to Outlaws and Jedi knight. Worse, it was no longer compatible with modern systems. After a quarter of a century, basic object definitions have changed (Ex: A CHAR in modern Delphi is 2 bytes while it was 1 byte in the 90s). Throughout this summer we got the code to compile successfully on modern systems and patched every issues we discovered. 

 

Not content with doing the bare minimum we've modernized the editor and added many new features. So what does the editor look like now?

 

Preview

With that out of the way, here is what the new version looks like !

 

 

New Features

There are many bug fixes and new features that we've made to WDFUSE. Chief among them is 3D Preview provided for us by The MAZZTer , here is how it works in action!

 

 

Additionally, we've modernized the Editor to allow you to pan the map with the mouse and even zoom with the mousewheel.

 

 

We've added full support for modern storefronts and DosBox. You can now launch the game instantly with your Steam or GOG install!

 

 

We've also made it possible to copy and paste level elements between different instances of WDFUSE.

This means that your friend can COPY their sectors, send you the text representation of them, and you can then PASTE them into your own map! 

 

 

We've updated the container management system for LFDs and GOBs to easily drag and drop items of various types. 

 

 

We now allow you to easily see Palette previews for textures and updated the size limits to 1000% of normal texture sizes. 

 

Download

The WDFUSE 2.6 editor can be downloaded here --> Download

The 3D Preview component can be downloaded here --> Download

Remember, this is a BETA and is bound to have bugs. Please report any issues on our Discord in the #level-editor channel .

 

When reporting issues please do the following..

1. Describe the issue in as much detail as possible. 
2. If you can take a screenshot of a video of the problem
3. Send us your logs (F5) - they should be in the log folder where WDFUSE is installed.

 

Changelist

 

Projects

• Creating a New project will no longer automatically wipe your current working project.
• Opening an existing project will no longer automatically wipe your current working project.
• Added an option to automatically load your previously worked on project when WDFUSE starts.
• Added an option to Save Project As another name.
• Added an option to automatically test your Dark Forces project through DosBox
• Fixed a crash when loading Projects from drives not present on the current computer.
• Ensured that corrupted projects do not cause infinite load loops.
• Increased project path lengths to 255 bytes
• WDFUSE will no longer create dummy projects if you cancel out during the creation screen.

Editor

• Added an ability to pan the map with your Mouse
• Added an ability to zoom with your middle mouse button
• Added Steam Dark Forces support including installations across multiple drives
• Added GOG Dark Forces support.
• WDFUSE will no longer crash when choosing high-precision grid rendering.
• Added an ability to dynamically generate Grid sizes as you zoom.
• Added hotkey hints to most of the commands in the editor menus
• Added an ability to Copy and Paste content between instances of WDFUSE
• Added an ability to Undo and Redo commands.
• Expanded the Edit Menus to include common commands such as Adjoin, Extrude and Clear MultiSelections
• Expanded the Right Click abilities to include more common commands
• Added a new Sector Fill mode to differentiate sectors from Null Space.
• Panning while in Sector Fill modes will no longer re-render the fill values until you are done panning to speed up processing.
• Added easy-to-access Tools and Options buttons to the Main window
• Adjust window sizes to support modern width and heights.
• Added MouseWheel controls to easily switch between Grid while holding the Ctrl key.
• Added MouseWheel controls to easily switch between Layers while holding the Shift key.
• If available, the default layer will now always be 0 instead of the minimum one.
• Added a throttle for Mouse Zooming to prevent multi-grid redrawing.
• Windows now preserve multi-monitor positioning.
• Added X button to close the current window to all popups.
• Fixed level objects not drawing when moving very fast with a mouse.

GOB/LFD Container Managers

• Show the full path of the GOB/LFD during construction
• Allow for full drag and drop of files regardless of chosen folder
• Added an option to exit menus using escape
• Fixed numerous issues with GOB/LFD asset parsing
• Updated filters to include correct assets for each container type (Ex: BMs PLTTs, etc . . .)
• Reworked LFD display to correctly show the asset types and sorted them

Sector/Wall/Vertex/Objects

• Double Clicking will now open the highlighted level component.
• Added a checkbox to many pop-up windows to allow the windows to stay-on-top of the main map editor
• Added a button to the INF editor directly from the sector and wall editors
• Fixed the form not updating properly when highlighting a cell

Assets

• Fixed 3DO profile parsing issues
• Added additional zoom settings for BMs and FMEs and saved the default to the INI file
• Store the Brightness levels in the INI file
• Added Drop-In PAL selection with immediate update of texture assets in the resource picker
• All asset paths have size increased to 255 bytes

Misc

• Fixed and added back the link to the latest Dark Forces Specs File
• Added link to WDFUSE Support Discord
• Added links to DF-21.net
• Added an ability to wipe Editor UNDO cache.
• Added compatibility to Pre 2.5 WDFUSE INI files.
• Added X close window to all windows.
• Added automatic UNDO cache cleanup and added a undo limits to the INI file.
• Added shortcut hints to main menu fields
• Updated memory statistics to handle 64 bit systems
• Changed font to FixedSys to ensure Keys are aligned on all systems
• Muted the Scroll Window Out of Range popups but preserved the limit popups
• INF Font choice will now be preserved between sessions

Logging

• Added WDFUSE Logging to the log folder
• Added detailed INF parsing error logs

Known Issues

• If your map has many INFs it may take a second to UNDO / REDO commands as it recompiles the INF code
• Sector Fill drawing mode is not always accurate at certain scales and may flood the map with the color

 

This was a long project in the making but it means that we now have more time to work on other items for the Dark Forces Community! Expect more posts soon! 

 

- Karjala

Posted by karjala on 2021-05-04 16:26:16 EST

Happy Star Wars Day Everyone!

 

We wish you a wonderful happy May the Fourth! What a year, DF-21 is back from obscurity, we've published a brand new Custom Mission and even Dark Troopers have their field day in the canon universe! 

 

We have a few tidbits to share with you today! 

 

First of all, here are some amazing unboxing photos from our very own Princessruri of the Dark Forces Limited Edition 

 

 

You can take a look at a video of the Unboxing process here

 

Additionally we have launched our own YouTube channel, we'll start putting more videos there soon -->DF-21 Youtube 

 

Finally, we would like to announce that we are working on a Fan-made patch. There are many bugs we'd like to fix and features to enhance such as ... 

   1. Making the Force Fields visible in the Detention Center
   2. Fix the Fuel Station switch so it always shows the correct location of the bridge
   3. Add visual/audio cue when Kell Dragons step on pressure-plate disabling the elevator to obtain the Blue key. 
   4. Add visual updates to the Imperial City vault puzzle map (where the doors are opened).

and many more! If you know Dark Forces editing and would like to contribute please join our Discord  to discuss the details.

Thank you All - we'll make Dark Forces even better in the 2020s with your help!

 

Posted by karjala on 2021-04-14 07:38:11 EST

Fish's Among the Shadows II: The Lava Planet is released! 

Today is a monumental day, after thirteen years we are once again adding new custom Dark Forces mission to DF-21.net!

You can download from our new missions site here --> Download Link

 

Here are some screenshots from the mission, don't fall in the lava! 

       

 

Check out this amazing door! 

 

How to play: To start the mission simply extract the contents to your Dark Forces folder and tell DosBox to run start.bat

Mission Rating: We have a polling bot for this map. Please follow this link in our Discord --> Rating Poll

Bugs: Please post in our Discord's Support channel for any bugs you may encounter. Please write a good description and take a screenshot of the issue. 

What are you waiting for? Go play the mission and discuss it in our Discord !

Posted by karjala on 2021-04-11 22:06:31 EST

Happy April Everyone!

Update: Following the stream, Fish has revealed he is releasing a NEW Dark Forces map Among The Shadows II - The Lava Planet this Wednesday April 14th. We'll have the download link for as soon as it is available. This is incredibly exciting as this is the first new map uploaded to DF-21.net since 2008! 

 

 

Here are some teaser screenshots!

 

Original News Story: 

DF-21.net is expanding with two new sites! We now have out own Twitch channel where we will be streaming custom maps and tutorials.

Additionally, we will be hosting Dark Forces videos on our new YouTube channel. Expect to have a good database of walkthroughs!

 

A few days ago, Fish, the author of Among The Shadows - Fortress Quadrigon, has sat down with DF-21 community and recorded a commentary on his map. It was a blast to hear him talk about the planning that went into making that masterpiece! You can check the video below and download the original map Here .

I hope you enjoy the commentary! It was fun. We will be doing more of them with various authors. 

 

Posted by karjala on 2021-03-22 21:15:58 EST

Greetings everyone, 

 

Lucius from The Force Engine has another update for us. 

The Good news is that The Jedi Renderer and INF System have been completely reverse-engineered  !

The Bad (not really!) news is that the INF system doesn't play nice with the Floating-Point renderer.


First of all, the Floating-Point render allows us to play in higher resolutions (4k) than the Fixed-Point that is limited to the game's default size 320x200.

Here is how the game looks in when using modern resolutions. Lets look at Talay!

And here is a resolution with a ludicrous ratio of 35:9 from Secret Base. (Yes you may need to scroll to see the whole thing!). 

 
The INF scripting system, unfortunately, was written with the old Fixed-Point renderer in mind and thus misbehaves at higher resolutions
made available by the Floating-Point renderer. So the solution is to split off any level geometry that is Fixed-Point into its own system...
which will take more time to complete.

But don't worry, the new Release Target is set for April 2021, and time seems to move quickly nowadays and we'll be there before you blink!

Here is the full progress update in terms of completed systems. 

• Reverse-engineering the original Renderer: 100%
• Reverse-engineering the INF system: 100%
• Reverse-engineering the collision system: 80%
• Reverse-engineering the player controller / player physics: 50%
• Integrating Jedi Renderer: 100%
• Integrating INF System into TFE: 90%
• Integrating player controller / player physics: not started. 0%
• Refactoring: 10%

Please read all about it here --> TFE Blog