Back in 2016 after the release of the version for
Jedi Academy, I always wondered how
"The Animal" would have looked liked in
Elite Force with the improvements and updated designs which were incorporated into
Outline THREE and with the abandoned and now-cancelled version for
Elite Force II, I recently decided to pick-up Outline THREE, brushed the dust off and completely re-worked the map towards a version which screenshots are listed here above. While reworking the map, I decided also to browse through my archives looking for content that I had to cut in order to make
Release ONE back then possible although certain areas were already restored for
Outline THREE.
Unfortunately, I hit several limits here and in such a way that even a direct 1-on-1 port from
Jedi Academy to
Elite Force is not even possible. The default stvoyhm.exe craps out with the shader limit hit, the IO-EF variants can't do anything above 950 entities
(around and in total, anything above will result in a HOM Effect *somewhere* in your map) and the special rpgxEF branches are 1) limited by how many tris lines the compiler in GTK Radiant can swallow in the BSP stage and 2) won't even support regular Holomatch
(ERROR: G_Spawn: no free entities, a vague error regarding incompatible versions).
It's obvious that
Elite Force was Raven Software's first stint with the idtech3 engine and although the game was a very good game, especially back then at the turn of the century but as a developer, I say that there is room for improvement and that improvement came with
Jedi Academy. In that respect, I find it a missed opportunity that an OpenEF project does not exist similar and in line with
OpenJK for both
Jedi Academy and
Jedi Outcast and with support for the regular Holomatch and other EF-based mods.
That being said, I end this with the notion that if Raven Software was allowed to make ONE remaster, then it should be
Elite Force !!
