Sith (engine)

The Sith engine is a game engine developed by LucasArts.The game is based on this engine, and its expansion, , is based on a slightly updated version.

The engine has also been used in Grim Fandango, as a basis for the GrimE engine, and used in and Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine.

How the engine works

It does not support per-color transparency, and has a Nintendo 64 level of anti-aliasing. However, it renders with ease, though the background environment and the gun in the first-person view tend to be on entirely separate rendering layers. The background would run at 30 FPS, whereas the gun would render at 60 FPS, though this caused no problems in gameplay.

3do files are the 3D models used in the basic Sith engine. Each one contains texture definitions (called MAT files), and text that details mesh names, vertices, faces, how they are shaded, and the like. MAT files are converted 256 color bitmaps. These bitmaps can only be rendered in perfect squares divisible by 8. Since merging all of the textures into one file was very much not feasible (until more recent methods of assigning textures to fan-made 3do models were discovered) each individual body part has a different texture. In some cases textures are reused.

The 3do models' animations come from keyframe (KEY) files. KEY files are animation definitions, as every frame of the player's and enemy's animation sequences, as well as sometimes even spaceship flight paths are defined in these files. Extensive modifications to KEY files can create entirely new motions for characters, though in some cases an enemy's KEY files and the player's KEY files are not interchangeable.