[exogen]

I've been thinking about this topic and am glad to see it come up: AI is going to be a huge boon for digital preservation & restoration projects like this. I realized this while building this project (a map explorer for Tribes 2): https://exogen.github.io/t2-mapper/

Old games like this have a small (and shrinking) audience of people who care about them. With Tribes 2, for example, there are only ~50 people who actively play on a regular basis. A subset of those people are programmers, and a subset of those have the time & energy to put into a project like t2-mapper, assuming they're even interested. I got a basic version working, but then Claude Code helped decode and convert obsolete Dynamix/Torque3D file formats (improving existing Blender addons that were incomplete), got TorqueScript running in the browser, wrote shaders, and generally helped figure out what the original C++ code was doing.

In the past, you'd need the stars to perfectly align for stuff like this to happen: a passionate super-fan with the time, resources, knowledge, and persistence to see it through. Now, you mostly just need the persistence (and maybe a couple hundred bucks for tokens). I foresee people with niche interests (but not necessarily a programmer's skillset) being able to extend the lifetime (and maybe audience) of their obscure or obsolete software.

[Pilottwave]

Wow, this whole thread has been a blast from the past. But this tribes mapper is beaming me back to my childhood. Seeing the actual siege base layouts, wow. I can still see myself as a little kid, not fully understanding or being good at the shooting part of tribes. I just stayed in base, repairing the generators. Sometimes enemies would run in, i would hide, and shoot from a distance and call for help. Them some heavyweight, powerarmoered up, armed to the teeth teammate would come down from the skies with his jetpack, carrying crazy armaments like heavy spinfusors, plasma cannons, artillery. The queiet generator complex would soon erupt in a burst of violence, this iron hulk would clear out the intruders, thank me for the heads up and leave. Then i would get back to the repairs! Now my friends, that kind of emergent gameplay, is hard to come by!

[bee_rider]

Nowadays you’d get whined at, “repairing the base isn’t meta, you are throwing, this is going to screw up my matchmaking rank.”

[aktau]

This is great. I'd love to do something similar for Ground Control (2000, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_Control_(video_game)).

Do you have a writeup of how you did it? Both (regular) tooling (radare2? rizin? IDA? ...) and how the LLM did (or did not) use it?

In the little spare time I have, I've been able to reverse engineer the "compressed" file format (ended up being basically a XOR'ed zlib-compressed TAR-like archive), but not much else. I have not used LLMs to help me.

[jamesu]

Bumped into your project a while back - pretty impressive. I was a little disappointed it seemed to just convert the resources rather than use the original runtime formats (since there are a features that don't directly translate to gltf), but for a viewer it's perfectly reasonable. Are you planning on supporting tribes 1 maps at all? Theres still quite a surprising interest in reverse engineering and extending the life of torque games. I'm hoping on publicly releasing a refresh of the original torque codebase this year which improves support for modern platforms including wasm. It's amazingly easy these days to reverse engineer stuff and revive old codebases!

[exogen]

It would be possible to have it decode the .dts and .dif formats on demand - that was my original plan - just much less efficient for users, as the .glb files are about 1/5 of the file size on average. (I also assume glTF loading/rendering has had a lot more optimization work put into it than what I'd be able to accomplish.) For these reasons it seemed more productive to have it work on the Blender addons as a starting point rather than JavaScript/TypeScript parsers for the original formats. I still ship the original assets alongside the .glb files (meaning they have URLs just aren't loaded) in case I want to switch it someday.

Some of the custom features you may be referring to I implemented as custom properties in the glTF output - like surface flags. "Outside Visible" is one example, it's a flag baked into each .dif surface that determines whether rays can reach it from the outside, so the engine knows whether to apply the map's directional sunlight, or just ambient and light map lighting. So, even though it technically could try to render with modern PBR, dynamic lighting/shadows and all that, it instead renders as close to the original as possible using the same (or similar) techniques. Comparing screenshots with actual Tribes 2 renders is often indistinguishable unless you really know what to look for!