Sith (engine)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (February 2008) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

To comply with Wikipedia's quality standards, this article may need to be rewritten. Please help improve this article. The discussion page may contain suggestions.

The Sith engine is a game engine developed by LucasArts. The game Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II is based on this engine, and its expansion, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith, is based on a slightly updated version. The engine was also used in Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine.

It was also imported to Grim Fandango, as a part of the GrimE engine, and used in Star Wars: Droid Works and Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine.

[edit] How the engine works

The engine is programmed in a very simple manner, but as such it has strict limitations on what can be done. For one, it does not support per-color transparency, and has a Nintendo 64 level of anti-aliasing. However, it renders with ease, though the background environment and the gun in the first-person view tend to be on entirely separate rendering layers. The background would run at 30 FPS, whereas the gun would render at 60 FPS, though this caused no problems in gameplay.

3do files are the 3D models used in the basic Sith engine. Each one contains texture definitions (called MAT files), and text that details mesh names, vertices, faces, how they are shaded, and the like. MAT files are converted 256 color bitmaps. These bitmaps can only be rendered in perfect squares divisible by 8. Since merging all of the textures into one file was very much not feasible (until more recent methods of assigning textures to fan-made 3do models were discovered) each individual body part has a different texture. In some cases textures are reused.

The 3do models' animations come from keyframe (KEY) files. Although they share the same tag as Windows' registry, they are far different. KEY files are animation definitions, as every frame of the player's and enemy's animation sequences, as well as sometimes even spaceship flight paths are defined in these files. Extensive modifications to KEY files can create entirely new motions for characters, though in some cases an enemy's KEY files and the player's KEY files are not interchangeable.