I know this is "old news", and I don't think this belongs in the editing forum since I'm not really talking about editing here. Anyways, I've been trying to find out more (that is, everything I can) about the Sith engine, the game engine that is the basis for Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (as some of you may know), and was also adapted for the GrimE engine used for the games Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island. Well, the Wikipedia article wasn't all too informative, and since the relevant Wikipedia article is the most useful result that a Google search yields, I am basically left with very little information or resources at my disposal. Since Massassi is historically a Jedi Knight editing community, I'm guessing that this may be a good place to ask.

What I want to know is everything that is known about the Sith engine. I want to know who designed and programmed it, when and where did they do it, as well as all the details about its particular idiosyncrasies.

Jedi Knight is inspiring. No game but Jedi Knight have I played that has had such an immersive atmosphere simply by the virtues of its game engine. I'm not talking about the Star Wars theme and doing a pretty darn good job of making it feel like Star Wars. I mean, like, what it feels like playing the game. The vastness and loneliness, the way the character is a part of the game environment, and not just (as has been observed) floating along. It felt so real, dare I say, visceral. Sure, Kyle Katarn moved too fast, jumped too high...but it felt right. It felt like running, it felt like jumping. I dunno what it was. Like the level Valley of the Jedi Tower, someone brought cogs and teleported my character to the bottom of the level. There was nothing there, just an endless blackness, and yet it was a pleasure to be there, to explore the nothingness. It was a powerful sensation. Maybe Jedi Knight is primitive by what we've seen since, but it had something that no game has been able to capture since, and that was the beauty of the engine.

Another thing was, it felt so clean, if that makes any sense. I remember playing it on the wonky Windows 98 with my PII 350Mhz, 64MB RAM, 8GB hard drive, 4MB integrated video memory computer, and it ran perfectly. It ran at the highest resolution my 15" CRT monitor could support, consistently above 60 frames per second. I could Alt+Tab out of the game all I wanted, and it would work, it would never break, and it would respond quickly. It was incredible. I played Half-Life which I would not say is such a huge improvement over Jedi Knight, and that game had the godawful loading screens every few minutes, it felt slow, I couldn't Alt+Tab out. It felt, again, like it was going to break, at any moment.

Please help me out. Tell me everything you know or link me to any place you know that might be useful. Above all, let's reminisce about the Sith engine...did it not strike you as some powerful voodoo like it did me?

I agree with the atmosphere. Some of those maps scream awesome vastness and mystery, loneliness or trepidation.

It had big diverse architecture. It allowed a lot of creativity on the level author's part with out having to worry about performance and a bunch of stuff we have now. All SW space game since then have bottomless pits that fade into black after about 50 feet. It's all much, much smaller. Lot's of complex small rooms on one area. In JK you didn't have to be afraid of building a huge area that the player would only see for s few seconds. In QIII games even a medium sized area would be the climax of a level.

I'd love to see Nar Shadda in the Crysis engine. That would be amazing.

negative space editing ftw.

The levels being made for JK now by experienced editors are far more aesthetically appealing than those made for HL. HL has extremely blocky levels.

Have you taken a look at Jon's stuff over at sourceforge?

SITH2 is open source, and could give you a lot of insight.

Yeah, I completely agree. No game feels like JK. Those levels were so damn impressive, and they still are. It's the scale that does it. JK has 'bigger' levels than any other game... JO and JA's levels are so incredibly cramped compared to JK's.

For example, in the first level, Double-Cross on Nar Shaddaa, there is this moment where you emerge from a building, and there is this MASSIVE cargo freighter in the shadows on your right. Some of the views in Nar Shaddaa are just spectacular.

In comparison, they did a horrible job in JO. I loved the 'graphic' aspect of the atmosphere of the Nar Shaddaa Streets level, but the level itself was just so incredibly simplistic. It's basically a T and you walk all the way round. I mean it's fun to see the environment from all those different angles, and reach all those places you can see, BUT....

I really missed those moments, where in JK you would round a corner, and suddenly you would be confronted with this totally unexpected massive jawdropping view. That just doesn't happen in JO.

Would that be a limitation of JO's engine? I'm not too knowledgeable about these things. Is it true that negative space editing is better for that sort of thing? ('big views') I only edit JK, so I don't know anything about those other engines.

The warehouse part, where you need to jump over all the crates came closest. The atmosphere was good, but in JK the place would have been lots BIGGER.

JK's levels were also much better thought up. (Yeah, this doesn't concern the engine, I know) Navigating the warehouse part with all the moving cargo is one example. There's plenty more of those moments in MotS too, by the way.

And yeah, JK's gamespeed is unmatched. It's the main reason I still play it!

Negative space editing is extremely fast for making levels that aren't that graphically detailed (like JK), that's why such a massive sense of scale - it's very easy to think big. I think an era where limited scale levels where the norm was inevitable after people demanded better and better graphics - the algorithms for making big environments possible just can't keep up with people's demands.

It's only now that i'm starting to see things that make me think twice before deciding it's JK and most of that is done with trickery rather than it actually being a feature of the engine. I suspect there are people who are still trying to push other engines like massassi editors try to push JK, so the editing results we've seen recently are a testament to skill rather than the power of the engine.

I wouldn't say JK has a good engine (even for the time), but somehow LEC managed to use it in a way that was simple yet also convincing. Levels with massive scale aren't impossible or even a real challenge in engines like Quake 3, but it takes a greater knowledge of how the engine works in order to do it well.

Sith engine was poorly-designed. The more you learn about it the more depressed you'll get.

that'd be great except theres almost no information on Sith2's sourceforge site.

Speaking of the Sith engine, is this thing ever going to be finished? (I have a build that was released some time ago, but I could never make it work)

In JK, they traded detail for size. In JO/JA and all the more recent games, they traded size for detail.

(feel free to correct me on any of this) It isn't really a limitation, per se, but Q3 engine was really not designed for huge open areas everywhere that lack detail, which JK has so many of. I believe that lighting, VIS, and other info calculations increase dramatically with a level's size, even if they arent necessarily that detailed. Sector size has no real effect on JK's rendering due to vertex lighting and the adjoin system. The quake 2 and 3 engines are damn solid in the end (I think so anyway), but still suffer heavily from every level feeling like a deathmatch arena, not like a new world to explore. Even the old CS and Doom 3 feel this way too.

The DF/JK series is the only real FPS for Star Wars out there and open-endedness is mandatory. Who doesn't like to explore the SW universe in first person? Quake 3 engine has its place in deathmatch and quick action, but not in Star Wars, IMO, and thats why I beat JO single player and hardly ever played it again.

Sith engine just does it right for the Star Wars universe. It doesn't deliver the graphics (though it did at its time), but it delivers the atmosphere so well, even today.

I agree 100% about JK thinking "big" as the reason it was so great. The Star Wars universe is all about superstructures and mammoth spaceships and JO and JA just didn't reflect that the way JK (and even DF) did.

The Sith engine is the one used by the original JK. You're thinking of the Sith2 engine. As far as I know, that project is on indefinite hiatus pending a fortuitous but altogether improbable turn of events, the exact nature of which may never be known.

The build you have is the last and only. I was able to get it to work, but it involved shutting off the reflections and making sure my computer didn't reboot while my graphics card crashed once or twice. Then when it came back up it would render the level quite nicely. It wasn't playable, but you could fly around it.

I'm thinking that alot of people are making assumptions of engines through just gaming experiences. And fond memories.

I bet that you can get the same level of "depth" if you remade JK in the Q3 engine.

You could, very easily. The problem is the compilation process. The Quake 3 engine would have absolutely no difficulty rendering a Jedi Knight level, and if you only do very basic compilation passes it would compile quickly too - but this kind of defeats the purpose of using a more advanced engine.

The idea is that newer engines are more efficient (along with adding proper support for things that were previously only possible through trickery), but this (often) requires pre-runtime algorithms to do some of this optimisation. As the levels get bigger, this optimisation time exponentially increases. So at the end of the day, it's very easy to MAKE a level of massive scale in the Quake 3 engine, but you're going to be waiting days for it to compile. The final compile for my Kashyyyk Tree Canopy map for JO took almost 2 days to compile at almost dedicated CPU usage. The level itself ran flawlessly with no framerate issues whatsoever, but because there was a large sense of scale, the compile time was badly effected.

You also got to factor in that Jedi Knight uses vertex lighting so the ultra low polygons in the levels was sufficent for calculating the lighting. However, Quake 3 uses light maps and for the lighting to look superb, the surfaces had to be sliced up depending on the scale of the texture on it (larger resolution, more polygons), therefore making the lighting compile phase pretty long.

Also, the editors that make levels for the Quake 3 engine construct levels with brushes but the final compile of the level is NOT what you see in the editor. All those boxes you are stacking aren't going into the final compile - only the faces that can been in the inside of the level (anything not touching the void and not covered by another face) are actually including in the compiling of the level's geometry and they are later connected together to form "leaflets" (I think that's what they are called) that are essentially sectors. So really, as far as geometry is concerned, the end result is the same as a Jedi Knight level but only after all the compiling is done.

Personally, I prefer a hybrid of "Sector" and "Brush". Sector are handy for making large environments and brushes are good for detail. I've notice in the recent years that building levels entirely out of level geometry is a dead art. Now of days, its all done with prefabs that are usually made out of models. Kinda makes it rough for people out there that don't own a 3d package like 3dsmax or Maya to persue level design.

Yeah, I meant Sith2.

Too bad about the hiatus, I had such hopes for it.

Heh, remember that guy who met that LEC guy with his laptop where JK's source code was and... yeah. It was there. Maybe.

I did like JK's big-ness, I saw a friend playing MDK once, and that looked obscenely big as well, should probably try and get a hold of that game sometime...

Was it Mystic0? I do remember someone joking about grabbing the laptop and running for the hills.

All I know is that the following were made with variations of SITH:

Jedi Knight
Mysteries of the Sith
Droid Works
Indiana Jones & The Infernal Machine
Grim Fandango
Monkey Island