On the 28th of February we have a, if we go by merit, most likely really cool remaster of the 28 year old first person shooter Star Wars: Dark Forces to look forward to. The developers are the remake/remaster kings at Nightdive Studios, who are long in the tooth by now, but according to a recent interview with PCGamer the development of Kyle Katarn's first adventure still proved to be a challenge.
Max Waine, Project Lead at Nightdive:
"Dark Forces has been difficult to change, from the technical end of things, because it is very heavily over-designed [...] There were a lot of small details in how LucasArts did things at the time that made stuff particularly difficult. [...] They managed to do multi-threading effectively, using a task system in the mid-1990s. We had to use sophisticated modern techniques to be able to get it to work nicely, while keeping the same basic idea."
But one factor made things easier right from the start:
"[unlike] other projects, we managed to get the source code from the start."
Unfortunately, the problems didn't end there. The menu system and UI proved difficult to translate to console standards with a hand controller instead of a mouse and keyboard:
"The other thing that's been difficult to appropriately modernise is the user interface that they had, in terms of menus and such, because the menus are all mouse driven in the original [...] Finding an appropriate balance that feels faithful to how the original menus are, while being able to work while you're on a controller, was quite difficult."