About
This project targets several early-2000s Monolith Productions shooters built on the LithTech engine: The Operative: No One Lives Forever (2000) and its sequel No One Lives Forever 2 (2002), the mech-combat game Shogo: Mobile Armor Division (1998), and the psychological horror shooter F.E.A.R. (2005). lithtech is an in-progress effort to build a modern, cross-platform, CMake-based source port around the GPL-released 'Jupiter Ex' build of the LithTech engine, which originally shipped with No One Lives Forever 2 and Tron 2.0's game code. Currently only the engine and NOLF2 game code build, running on Windows and Linux. The author is also attempting to port other LithTech-era game code (F.E.A.R., Shogo, the original No One Lives Forever) onto this GPL engine base, and is working to replace Windows-only dependencies like MFC and DirectInput with cross-platform alternatives (wxWidgets, SDL).
How it differs from the original
Only the NOLF2 game code currently builds and runs, and the 'GPL' release's NOLF2 assets differ from the retail assets and cover only the first level, so the full retail campaign doesn't yet work with this engine build. The F.E.A.R., Shogo, and original No One Lives Forever ports are still unfinished or barely started.
Getting started
There are no pre-built playable releases; building it requires CMake and a C++ toolchain (Visual Studio 2017 on Windows, gcc/clang on Linux) plus SDL2 and, on Linux, the dxvk-native Direct3D 9 implementation, and you must separately supply the applicable game's original data files.
History
The project began after the author found the little-used GPL release of the Jupiter Ex engine and decided to see whether it could be turned into a modern, multi-platform source port.
Known limitations
- compatibility: Debug builds of NOLF2 trigger exceptions in the standard library, likely due to Microsoft's secure CRT differences.
- compatibility: NOLF2 retail data files differ from those supplied with the GPL release; not all retail data formats are supported.
- audio: Linux builds require DXVK-native to enable audio rendering.
Media
Additional notes
- Trivia
- The GPL release also bundled Tron 2.0's game code, though the author does not currently list Tron 2.0 among the games being actively ported.