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

vunderba•about 2 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

hadlock•40 minutes 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.

vunderba•27 minutes 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.

felixding•about 1 hour 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.

xyzzy_plugh•4 minutes 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•44 minutes 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?

apetresc•40 minutes 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•41 minutes ago

"high-resolution rendering and substantially more advanced lighting" and several other items are documented as improvements in the link.

mysterydip•about 2 hours ago

Really excited to give this a go! Being able to merge the two versions together is a killer feature.

pdntspa•about 1 hour 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

Singletail•24 minutes 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•about 2 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.

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

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion (12 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews