Show HN: OpenTIE and OpenXWA, Modern Ports of Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance

10 comments

• vunderba 3 hours ago
  Very nice. Looking forward to irritating the Empire again as a new recruit [1].

  On a more serious note, there's also a really great conversion that ports the original TIE Fighter over to the later X-Wing Alliance engine [2].

  And of course if you need copies of the originals, they still sell them over on GOG (Good Old Games).

  [1] - https://imgpb.com/AoSwyrZ

  [2] - https://www.moddb.com/mods/tie-fighter-total-conversion-tftc

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  • hadlock 2 hours ago
    I think a lot of the value of a total rewrite in C is that it is a buildable executable that should be runable on virtually any system, given that this game predates the popularity of the modern "3D Card". A lot of the friction in these games is dealing with all the peculiarities of getting a DOS game to somehow install on a 30 year newer Mac. A complete rewrite eliminates all of that awkward installer friction, so long as you have the necessary game files.
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    • vunderba 2 hours ago
      Oh yeah, I completely agree even though DOSBox (or DosBox-X) is fantastic, it’s really nice to be able to potentially run a game natively.

      I only mentioned GOG because it’s probably the easiest legal way to obtain the original assets necessary to use OpenTIE.
• kevin_thibedeau 1 hour ago
  How is it that FS mechanics are dependent on which release you have available? It all seems to key off of TieProfile_UsesTie98Logic(). Why can't you enable that with just the 95 release?
• felixding 2 hours ago
  The original Star Wars: TIE Fighter was one of the first computer games I played as a teenager. The funny thing is, I had absolutely no idea what Star Wars was, but somehow I still thought the game was really cool and played it for quite a while.
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  • kensai 1 hour ago
    Wow, I thought this could not be possible. May I ask, where did you grow up? I mean, in the 80s the Star Wars were already a cult thing.
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    • LeBit 1 hour ago
      If your parents thought cable TV was too expensive, even a North American kid could have no idea what Star Wars was until they became a teenager , had access to a BBS and saw jpegs of princess Lea.
• modeless 1 hour ago
  Would be cool to have a web port of this.
• mysterydip 3 hours ago
  Really excited to give this a go! Being able to merge the two versions together is a killer feature.
• xyzzy_plugh 2 hours ago
  I am not a mobile gamer by any means but...

  I think I would really like a Tie Fighter mobile port.

  That being said I still remember all the keybindings of Tie Fighter...

  ... and the correct sound card settings for my Pentium.
• hackyhacky 2 hours ago
  Why not just run it in an emulator or VM? Is there tangible benefit to reimplementing everything, or is it just an intellectual exercise?
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  • apetresc 2 hours ago
    A quick glance through the README would demonstrate the litany of improvements you can expect from a proper decomp/port, compared to emulation.
  • ceejayoz 2 hours ago
    "high-resolution rendering and substantially more advanced lighting" and several other items are documented as improvements in the link.
• pdntspa 3 hours ago
  Cool! I played the original with a joystick back in the day. I tried the previous port to XWA with Tie Fighter more recently, and it had been so long that I couldnt even complete the tutorial with the joystick! Proper gamepad support would be clutch
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  • Singletail 2 hours ago
    Thrustmaster FCS & WCS MK1 for me. And as much as I'd love to play it again, it will never be the same.
• electric_mayhem 4 hours ago
  Oh, wow. I loved these games when they were new.

  May need to find a modern HOTAS setup and immerse myself in these.
• herri 2 hours ago
  [dead]