It’s kind of weird, but it comes full circle, because you have a modder who did an open-source port of a game, did a remaster of it, was one of the advisors on it, and now he’s putting the extra content from the remaster back into the port!

GamingOnLinux reported about what luciusDXL is doing. He created the Force engine that he ported Star Wars: Dark Forces to, and because of his experience, he helped Nightdive get the remaster on their own engine, KEX. However, luciusDXL has taken his experience here and started to bring the innovations back to the Force Engine. So the HD assets of the remaster (textures, sprites, interface… scenes and mission briefs will come later) have been transferred to the old version. There are three categories (textures, sprites, interface) that you can switch between old and new at any time during the game by selecting the true color, higher resolution graphics mode. The remaster is also an authentic source of game data for the Force Engine version.

That in itself doesn’t mean much, so let’s get to the point: the expansions from the remastered game are back in the Force Engine version, and since luciusDXL’s upcoming level editor may improve the experience, we should get a pretty good result. The Force Engine is essentially what GZDoom is to DOOM: it’s a new open source engine with more flexibility, and in addition to the basic quality of the game, it brought a higher resolution before the Nightdive remaster came along. It does have its positives though.

The remaster has a remix of the music and assets available to players, in addition to the lost demo track and LucasArts archive material. Still, it’s exciting to see how a remaster that can be called official and a fan project can coexist, since that’s mostly what luciusDXL’s vision is.

Source: PCGamer, GamingOnLinux, GitHub