“The Force Engine is a project with the goal to reverse engineer and rebuild the Jedi Engine for modern systems and the games that used that engine - Dark Forces and Outlaws. The project will include modern, built-in tools, such as a level editor and will make it easy to play Dark Forces and Outlaws on modern systems as well as the many community mods designed to work with the original games.”
Came for same as TheForceEngine has been now released as a flatpak. But flatpak is very hard to install on Ubuntu or at least very confusing as the command line is needed for it with skill to coding.
Would be so nice to click install on App Center and be done with it.
Although there finally is a flatpak for this now, it unfortuntaly doesn’t honestly work much at all. Even if you get it installed, the program does not recognize the game path for installed Dark Forces of Steam even if one browses to it with the TFE’s own interface. 3rd party additional app (flatseal) is needed too and tweaking inside that.
So The Force Engine flatpak does not work as its own. Who can know these things? Never mind those new comers.
Not sure if a snap packaging would actually work better with TFE as the snap permissions AFAIK can be made more flexible for the snap package itself when required.
I have a local build that works but there’s a catch: I really need core24 released to make it easier to support. It can totally work on core22 but it will need more work.
People like you are God sent. Utter friendliness and understanding
For example Lutris project in the face of trouble (and believe me there are many) has always been if not out right toxic, then “grumpy”. I was about to provide more info just to see the thread was already closed getting back https://github.com/lutris/lutris/issues/5335#issuecomment-1970753744
I know i shouldn’t tell this here put the kind of “elitist” behaviour still harms Linux alot at certain cases!
All settings are kept in $HOME/snap/the-force-engine/common/Data. Game data for Dark Forces are imported and auto-detected from $HOME/snap/the-force-engine/common/DarkForces.
Enjoy!
Edit: Have a look at Install The Force Engine on Linux | Snap Store – the snap is now available for x86_64 and aarch64, although I have not yet tested it there (anyone with a desktop-mode Raspberry Pi around?)
This works fine on my nvidia-equipped system. I will test it on some other places to see if anything is missing.
EDIT: It should also work on integrated graphics. It _even _ ran fine on WSL2 but input was messed up and I was unable to move the mouse cursor correctly.
Thanks alot already for your hard work. But alas, The Force Engine launches yet does not recognize the game files automatically (the autodetect paths button does nothing and on the path row there is nothing) and when attempting to click the browse button (that also does nothing or bring any file manager to browse in).
I have manually copied the Dark Forces game files from a Steam snap install even to BOTH places now ~/snap/the-force-engine/common/Data/ and ~/snap/the-force-engine/common/Data/DarkForces (there i had to also of course manually create the “DarkForces” folder additionally.
The result is same or even worse as in Flatpak TFE then “Game Source data cannot be found” reads in the settings in red that is all and the autodetect and browse buttons do not work. Ubuntu 23.10.
Tried also clicking Start in the main window (in hopes of TFE recognizing the data files copied manually to folders anyway) - and that just brings to that uploaded screenshot of Game Settings with that Game Source data cannot be found text.
You are supposed to copy game data to ~/snap/the-force-engine/DarkForces/. I’ve included basic instructions in snap info the-force-engine. There’s also a program that automatically imports data from a GOG installer.
I know about the limitation that clicking browse does nothing. Will fix that in the next revision.
“Game Source data cannot be found” reads in the settings in red that is all and the autodetect and browse buttons do not work. Ubuntu 23.10.
