Little known SvStrife-plus 1.4.1 port found

[Redneckerz]

(Reposting from DW because heck, why not.)

Introduction:
I am sure we all remember Strife: Veteran Edition, bringing an OpenGL renderer to the often overlooked title Strife.

Many years prior, a reverse engineered source release known as SvStrife was released by Samuel @Kaiser Villarreal. Based off PrBoom 2.23, it brought not only the Strife experience to modern platforms, it also provided a codebase for the Strife source code, whose original version remains unreleased as of today.

As it turns out, there was however a source port based off SvStrife.

SvStrife-Plus:


(Opening scene of SvStrife-plus ran in OpenGL mode using glstrife.exe, default 640x480 resolution)

History:
When SvStrife 1.4 released in January 2006, Entryway took the source code, and applied some of his PrBoom+ code work, and released it on February 1, 2006.

Features:

• Includes an OpenGL 1.1 renderer through a separate executable, glstrife.exe. It is based off GLBoom
• Uncapped framerate (movement_smooth)
• "Invert mouse" feature (movement_mouseinvert)
• Smoother mouse control (movement_altmousesupport)
• Mouse acceleration code (mouse_acceleration)
• Variable gamespeed (Num+, Num-, Num*)
• OpenGL: Full mouse look (movement_mouselook, mouse_sensitivity_mlook, movement_mouseinvert)
• OpenGL: FOV (render_fov)
• OpenGL: "Smart Items Clipping" setting (render_smartitemsclipping)

It is experimental for a reason however, as Entryway released this untested. Enjay ran in one error, and from own experience, it is definitely a bit rough around the edges. However, when it does run, it does look really good, and provides another way of playing Strife in OpenGL.

Its however a shame that it went by so unnoticed - You could play Strife in OpenGL on its own native port in 2006, several years before Strife VE was released.*

Note: * Ofcourse, GZDoom could run Strife at the time given support was included in ZDoom 2.0.90, dated October 21.2004 and GZDoom's first release was based on 2.0.96x, so it inherited Strife support from day one.

Legacy:
Kaiser was impressed by the port and wanted to include it in a future SvStrife release, however, this never came to be.

Outside of that post, SvStrife-plus was never mentioned. Its also not directly found or visible on the Sourceforge page for PrBoom+: It resides in a hidden folder, called OldFiles.

Downloads:

• SvStrife-plus 1.4.1 binary
• SvStrife-plus 1.4.1 source code

DoomWiki entry: Here

[Ike12]

I'm doing a let's play and I'm thinking about switching ports
Is moving over my save data to another folder possible?

[wildweasel]

I'm doing a let's play and I'm thinking about switching ports
Is moving over my save data to another folder possible?

No. GZDoom uses an entirely different save format from any other Doom engine port.

[Graf Zahl]

Don't get too excited here.
SvStrife was not a proper reverse engineering effort, a lot of its functionality was redone by guesswork and observation.
This port is not particularly accurate, so no comparison to ZDoom of the same time or even Vavoom, which reconstructed the functionality from reverse engineering the DOS EXE.

[Rachael]

There likely will never be a demo-compatible (if the original Strife even has demo support) or fully save-compatible port until a Nuke.YKT-like reverse engineering effort is done to the original Strife executable.

Keep in mind that such an effort never produces an original source - it merely produces a compatible source that tries to byte-for-byte reproduce the original EXE as closely as possible.

[Graf Zahl]

If it has demo support, it would not be able to handle the dialogues. Those are just a plain menu, unsynchronized with the game logic. So if the demo playback hit a dialogue it'd be stuck.

[Kinsie]

There likely will never be a demo-compatible (if the original Strife even has demo support) or fully save-compatible port until a Nuke.YKT-like reverse engineering effort is done to the original Strife executable.

Chocolate Strife is probably the closest thing possible.