Jedi (engine)

Infobox Software
name = Jedi Engine



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website =The Jedi Engine was a game engine developed by LucasArts. It was historically significant in bringing the first-person shooter genre from the "2.5D" era to the "3D" or "True 3D" era because of its ability to support a three-dimensional environment with no limitations on the Y dimension. In Doom and earlier first-person shooters, environments or levels were limited to existing in the X-Z plane only -- levels were laid out linearly, and while floor and ceiling heights could differ, earlier engines could not construct areas that overlapped vertically. The Jedi Engine supported areas or rooms (called "sectors") "on top of one another," and thus was the first engine in which an entire environment could exist in three dimensions.

The Jedi Engine was hailed as significant for many other improvements over earlier engines as well, including the ability to jump and crouch, the ability to look up and down, and atmospheric effects (achieved by careful manipulation of 256-color palette files). The engine was still limited in its rendering capabilities, however, and used two-dimensional sprites for most of its object graphics.

The Jedi Engine was short lived, and only used in two titles, and Outlaws. The sequel to Dark Forces, , used the Sith engine.

It was sometimes rumored that "Jedi" was a product of reverse-engineering the Doom engine to find out how to build their own. "Jedi" was in the end more advanced than the Doom engine. The large differences in the internal structure of the maps and the way elements such as textures are used make the claims somewhat suspect.