The Force Engine

About

"STAR WARS™: Dark Forces" and "Outlaws" are games built on LucasArts' "Jedi Engine"; both remain active commercial products, with their IP now owned by Disney. The Force Engine (TFE) is a reverse-engineered, from-scratch rebuild of the Jedi Engine for modern systems. It currently offers full support for playing Dark Forces, including its community mods, with quality-of-life additions such as higher resolutions and widescreen, a GPU renderer, full control rebinding with mouselook, a new save system alongside the original checkpoint/lives system, and Sound Font/OPL3 audio emulation; Outlaws support is planned for a future 2.0 release. It runs on Windows, Linux (including via Flathub), and macOS, and requires a legitimately purchased copy of the original game since no game assets are included.

How it differs from the original

As a source port rather than a remaster, it extends the original engine's limits to remove Hall-of-Mirrors glitches in advanced mods, adds a drag-and-drop mod loader and controller support, and lets players toggle its modern features off to restore the original 320x200 DOS-era experience.

Getting started

A legitimately purchased copy of Dark Forces is required, since TFE doesn't include the base game's assets. On Linux it's recommended to install via Flathub rather than building from source, and on Steam Deck it runs best in desktop mode; Windows users get a ready-to-run release package.

History

The project shares a legacy with the earlier DarkXL project but is described as a complete rewrite with a much greater focus on accuracy, and is narrower in scope than the related XL Engine, focusing solely on being a Jedi Engine replacement/port.

Known limitations

• platform: Menus currently require a pointing input device like a mouse or touchscreen.
• gameplay: Outlaws support is not yet playable; planned for version 2.0.

Media

Additional notes

Technical note

The GPU renderer requires OpenGL 3.3, which may exclude some older Intel integrated graphics chips.