I've been working religiously for like 2 years on the jedi academy codebase which is c & c++. It's Ravensofts variant of the idtech3 engine and it's insane how fragile the games combat is to precision and timing changes, I can't get away with adding much without destroying the lightsaber combat qualities. There are certain spots where I can't even add an incrementing i++ counter lmao it presents just enough of a slowdown or shifts something around that I haven't been able to track down that bleeds into the rest of the gameplay, but I am also sticking with the ancient compilers from 22 years ago so as to preserve the fpu characteristics of the game. There are some modern attempts at using this codebase with modern tooling but they've kind of bastardized/refactored all of it and it just feels different/unbalanced wrong. idtech3 is such an incredibly foray into c it's really something else and carmack and team really sent it back in the day.
ravensoft open sourced it in 2013 ish and promptly removed it because they accidentally included a bundled lib but i believe it was then re-added. theres quite a few repos that have it cloned. https://github.com/jedis/jediacademy
what am i up to with it? creating hardened vanilla base servers (no mods) and ensuring it gets compiled in a way that doesnt impact lightsaber combat. everyone has failed to do this for 22+ years because there's lots of subfactions in this game who fail to prioritize this as they have other priorities. tons of people who enjoy the prospect of modding the game or making it something different but the tiny remaining competitive player base has only ever needed the base game and what shipped by ravensoft in 2003. generally the guys who are competitive players arent.. coders. the game is ultra sensitive to mathematical FPU differences and virtually all recompiles of the game in the past decades completely failed to guard this, so every game mod and attempt at creating something better hasn't stuck for competitive players _except_ for something called ybeproxy which was an attempt to hook the original game engine binary and add some security/anticheat layer.. this was the best attempt to date but it still negatively impacts the fragile lightsaber mechanics.
That's so cool! I didn't know they open sourced it. Is your work also open? And how do you check that the frames don't change?
I love seeing people try to revive old games and improve them for players. I've made a couple of contributions to VCMI, an open source implementation of heroes of might and magic 3 that I used to play as a kid and it's so rewarding seeing people use those.
