Strike Commander Remake Targets Oculus Rift

Fabien Sanglard has always wanted to play Origin's Strike Commander with a virtual reality headset. The upcoming Oculus Rift is the first best chance at consumer grade VR, but games must be specifically designed with the equipment in mind. Without access to Strike Commander's source code, Fabien has set out to create a new, VR-ready game engine for Strike Commander using the original (extracted) game assets. He's already got a good handle on maps and fighter assets, and some progress has been made on dialogs, savegames and menus. Strike Commander uses similar file formats as some of the Wing Commander games, so HCl's tools and documentation has been helpful.

Back in the early 90s, one company was on the bleeding edge of PC gaming: Origin Systems. Their motto was "We Create Worlds" and boy did they deliver: With the Ultima series, Crusader series and Wing Commander series, they consistently took gamer's breath away.

One of them took four years and more than a million man hours to complete: Strike Commander. The famous flight simulator had its own 3D engine called RealSpace which pioneered many of what we take for granted today: Texture Mapping, Gouraud Shading, Level of Details and Dithered colors.

You can follow Fabien's progress (and learn a thing or two about reverse engineering) on the project's website. The latest version of his source code can be found on GitHub, but you need your own copy of Strike Commander for the various game assets. The game is available from Good Old Games for just $5.99. Below you can see some extracted ships and terrains with simple OpenGL rendering functions applied.