retiring

[revelator]

Heh when it comes to making websites i fondly remember an old friend of mine, he had a photographic memory and wrote all his sites in notepad... different people different skills, mine was an intimate understanding of all things electric and mechanical. I could break apart anything and rebuild it to working condition afterwards. Im no savant however, in fact i truely suck at things like woodwork plumbing and a lot of other menial labors. Also it has newer secured me a job, go figure.

And even though i actually have an exam as a radio technician, i only have about 1 years merit working as that.
Rest of my life i have been working manual labour, and some pretty heavy stuff at that.

[revelator]

Heh quake might be hard to get running sometimes on newer compilers doom3 as well, but i just spent some days porting the old lithtech engine to msvc2010 and let me tell you ya aint seen nothing yet sheesh...
even though the jupiter engine is directx9 the build tools used are msvc 6 and 7. So far i the latest one i been able to get some parts of it running with is 2010, and im not even sure its possible to get it running on any later versions because of changes to MFC and AFX
which this engine relies heavily on. I can build allmost the entire engine except the server which fails to find the correct exports in
butemgr (another MFC quirk with the later versions, some structs are now private so cannot be exported).
The client builds but does not work go figure...

Rune has much the same problem, the old unreal engine relies on stuff that is simply not availiable in later versions.

Some guy made an effort to get it running with cmake, and even tried to hook up the new d3d9 client to some of the older games like blood 2. Unfortunatly no further work has been done since 2008 and only NOLF2 builds. Sadly while it builds it does not work.

[revelator]

oh lord, finally got everything ported, and it turns out the lithtech source code released with nolf2 is actually jupiter ex not jupiter (someone made a hack and slash job combining it or trying to combine it with nolf2) sadly while it builds and the samples work
the engine itself crashes when used with nolf2 because of missing assets. While i suspect that it might be possible to get this running, it will take someone VERY skilled in modding. The dead giveaway was doing a depends on the exe and lo and behold it uses d3d9 and not d3d8 like the lithtech.exe from nolf2.

So just for fun i tried it as a client for f.e.a.r and it runs so this is definatly jupiter ex.
Im starting to get a bad feeling that this is in no way a legid source
another giveaway was the lack of stlport which was pretty much needed with the nolf2 sdk, because msvc6 lacked some stl templates.

[toneddu2000]

wow you're making incredible things with source engines!

[revelator]

mostly based on my intent to use it for blood 2 if at all possible , i suspect i would need to create shaders for just about everything as well as material flags. It might newer get that far since i have no idea how to work in shader based engines...
But the port would atleast make it possible for someone who does have an idea .

Still a huge job ahead of me because of some functions referencing builtins in later msvc versions, leading to assertions because they do not allways have the same function ->StrToInt comes to mind, lithtech has its own version and also macros like _countof.

I started debugging the thing to get an idea where things go bad, and atm its mostly bad pointers allthough there are also the above to keep in mind.

[revelator]

Ok samples are working now
game tools need the older msvc .net 2003 compiler, porting those will be allmost impossible since they rely on deprecated
functions not found anymore in newer compilers.
Tbh it might be prudent to just accept that this engine needs msvc .net 2003 and just fix the buggers that are there
(quite a few actually like functions with no type, extra commas where there should be none, non standard enumerators etc).

[revelator]

https://github.com/MWisBest/lithtech

heh i was right it seems, the release uses a much newer version of lithtech which is incompatible with nolf2 assets.
The guy above had been trying to make a multi OS port but i guess it newer got much farther than getting the engine + nolf2 building since it was abandoned back in 2015.
The engine is somewhere between jupiter ex and jupiter, where jupiter used d3d8 and this one uses d3d9 with enhanced shaders.

MH might like a look at the source i guess .

Well this sucks NOLF2 cannot be used with this engine with the current assets, and it does not seem like there are anyone who knows what changes are required for it to run with it.

At most it could be used by someone who wants to make a game from the ground up, by studying the samples.

[revelator]

Ok some progress.

I finally got it running NOLF2 but... The launcher breaks the newer lithtech engine, you can only start the game directly via command or batch file.

Also the engine only accepts multiplayer or mod testing (guess its an evaluation model for devs looking to license it).

This might be changeable via preprocessor settings in the build settings, will need a further look.

msvc 2010 porting still needs work, many tools need workarounds for the newer STL containers.
MFC and AFX needs some heavy refactoring, and some functions where lacking unique types like main not having int type (in fact it had no type at all lol).

[revelator]

well bummer, it seems msvc 2010 is the last version of microsofts compilers that would be able to build this game because of extensive use of std::hash functions. These where allready deprecated in msvc 2005 and they are gone in versions later than 2010. So unless someone comes up with functions to replace these and other likely candidates, its curtains.

Things like this engine is why i allways had a gripe with directx (NO or PISS POOR BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY!!!), OpenGL atleast allows us to play games 2 decades old on our modern OS without having to resort to wrappers, allthough later models might change that.
Atleast i gotten a bit more insight into D3D , for instance did you know that pre directx8 runtimes used ddraw for D3D calls ? (coincidentally this is also the thing that prevents older directx games from playing on modern OS).
Guess microsoft also discovered what a nasty hack job this was since they changed the model in directx8, to bad that this change broke most of the older directx games hehe.

[revelator]

So i was wrong its not jupiter ex .

But it is a later version somewhere between jupiter and jupiter ex.

Unfortunatly its only a render demo... it lacks the release assets for the full game (nolf2) and can only be used for demos or net play.

Buried on my harddrive for curiosities for now...

[revelator]

Had to do some extensive research because theres not much info on the lithtech enterprise package.

So here is to do away with all the fud -> yes it was released by touchdown entertainment way back in 2003 before the site became defunct (so no it is not a leak, and is perfectly fine to use).
The development version of NOLF2 that came with the source code is only a demo (1st level of the game), but allmost all the assets are in the game directory so you can use it for making mods for NOLF2. The lithtech engine version 69b that can be built with the source code does not work with current full NOLF2 game, it is a neutered (but strangely more modern) version of jupiter not jupiter ex as some believe, It lacks bink's sdk for instance (so we need to grab ffmpeg again it seems...).

While i was able to load the game menu with the full game it crashes when loading a new game (yes i did replace the game dll's ), so i tried debugging it and ran into something odd.
It seems the Lithtech Engine has a hardcoded break which only allows the demo header from the demo game directory, im still trying to hunt down where in the source this happens.

Besides this the SDK is allmost a full game studio for jupiter engines, with a lot of tools to setup your own maps or mods, and samples that are worth a look if just to see how touchdown entertainment did things .

The source needs visual studio .NET 2003 sp1, you might have luck building it with visual studio 2005 or 2008 as well,
but anything newer than that and you will need to rewrite a LOT of the source code (yes i tried and succeded to some extent) it builds but is a lot more crash prone than the 2003 build .
Also some of the Tools need very outdated compilers like borland cbuilder 5 (crud.exe) i managed to build it with borland cbuilder 6, but any version beyond that nessesitates a rewrite of the source code, fortunatly it works fine in win10 (the tool not the compiler, i had to install that one in a virtual machine with XP sigh...).

SO if anyone wants to have a go at it i can upload the SDK to my site, and you can start hacking away .