Jedi Engine

Jedi Engine is the name of the 3d game engine developed for Star Wars: Dark Forces.

The 3d engine was the main technical and mechanical aspect of game. Development began in late August 1993 by project leader Daron Stinnett and programmers Winston Wolff and Ray Gresko in Assembly language and focused almost all their effort until that year's Christmas. The basic engine was workable after six months of effort and continued to be improved upon. As more advanced (486 and Pentium) processors became more available, the code was translated into C.

Levels were at first designed in AutoCAD software, before being transferred to the game engine, sometimes producing bugs and geometries beyond the engine's limits.

Unlike contemporary first-person shooters, the Jedi Engine allowed environments of multiple levels, and, while seeming impossible at first, the looking up and down the room or different floors; elevators provided access to different floors which, from a programmer's point of view, involved "stupendous" geometry. Another element that necessitated "phenomenal" geometry and programming tricks, was the ability to see an object (such as a movable corridor or container) from the exterior, and then being able to walk in it.