Show HN: OpenTIE and OpenXWA, Modern Ports of Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance(github.com)
119 pointsby elyosh7 hours ago11 comments
  • chucksmash2 hours ago
    Loved these games. Grew up playing them with a yoke + throttle controller my dad bought for MS Flight Simulator. Didn't have the specs for Tie Fighter to run well but X-Wing worked great. I'd angle a clock radio next to the yoke for a little more of a cockpit vibe plus to change up the soundtrack.

    So much joy being at that age and in that era of computing/gaming. Hope people are able to pass that same feeling along to the current gen in some way, shape or form.

    • dmos622 hours ago
      I wonder if immersion in fiction (interactive or otherwise) is lower nowadays, given the rise of dopamine-saturating short-form content like scrolling. I definitely enjoyed more long-form content (like the mentioned games) 10-20 years ago. I guess I do experience less genuine immersion. I wonder what the effect of that is on my wellbeing.
      • wafflemaker15 minutes ago
        Might be also that kids generally still can dream, adults lose that ability if untrained. I believe that most of subjects that are touched on in "The Little Prince" are factual.

        The other day my wife got into a playground toy car for kids, 3 kids got into, and each was picking a destination while she was driving them. Wooden toy car and pretend motor sounds + an adult pretending to drive them were enough for them to get immersed.

  • vunderba6 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

    • hadlock5 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.
      • vunderba5 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.

  • felixding5 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.
    • InsideOutSanta2 hours ago
      At that age, all I knew about most movies was from Mad parodies, which resulted in some highly confusing revelations later in life.
    • kensai4 hours 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.
      • asciimov2 hours ago
        Star Wars went dormant in the late 80s through the mid-late 90s where there was no merch or toys in stores, no cartoons or shows on tv, and no comic books. Cable and home video wasn’t yet ubiquitous, for a cohort of kids born in the 80s and early 90s it’s quite possible to have missed out on it until you were older.

        I was 7 or 8 in the early 90s in Texas before I heard about Star Wars. I was playing play sword fighting with my dad, when he mentioned my broom handle looked like a lightsaber, I was like “what’s that?” My dad then proceeded to delight me with the story. It would be about 6 months later when an aunt lent us a VHS player that I would get to see it.

      • felixding2 hours ago
        I grew up in China, where the first Star Wars movie wasn't released in theaters until 1999. It had probably been shown on TV in some cities before then, but Star Wars definitely wasn't a well-known pop culture phenomenon there.
      • LeBit4 hours 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.
  • hackyhacky5 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?
    • ceejayoz5 hours ago
      "high-resolution rendering and substantially more advanced lighting" and several other items are documented as improvements in the link.
    • qingcharlesan hour ago
      Yes, a lot of these are much improved by reverse-engineering them and adding a few tweaks to modernize them. Many of them have added support for different display aspects, since most retro games are tied to 4:3. I downloaded the new RE of Sega Rally the other day and it was nice to have full proper widescreen.
    • apetresc5 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.
  • kevin_thibedeau3 hours 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?
  • xyzzy_plugh4 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.

  • mysterydip6 hours ago
    Really excited to give this a go! Being able to merge the two versions together is a killer feature.
  • modeless4 hours ago
    Would be cool to have a web port of this.
    • qingcharlesan hour ago
      +1 -- that would be an excellent idea. A lot of these would work great ported to web and the download is small enough that you'd barely notice it. Tie Fighter probably ran off floppy originally?
  • pdntspa5 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
    • Singletail5 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_mayhem6 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.

  • herri5 hours ago
    [dead]