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•about 1 hour 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•32 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•9 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•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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•29 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

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