Don't like tricking your game in to letting you finish it? Me neither. Happy birthday.

This is a compilation of key mappings and a GlovePie script that is intended to allow the game to be played more like a modern FPS while retaining close to a vanilla aesthetic. The GlovePie integration launches automatically with the application and shuts itself down afterward, so you don't have to fuss with turning it on and off.

Download

Installation:
Extract all of the files in the archive to your Dark Forces main directory.
Launch DarkForces+.exe to run program.

Controls:
WASD = walk/strafe
L Mouse = fire 1
R Mouse = fire 2
Wheel = change weapon
M Mouse = last weapon
Space = jump
Shift = crouch
Control = run
Caps = sneak (toggle)
E = activate
C = lamp
X = night vision
Z = gas mask
V = ice boots
Tab = map
F1 = objectives
Escape = menu

Configuration:
To modify key mappings, use the DOSBox Control+F1 tool.
To modify mouse mappings, modify the GlovePie dforces.pie script in the /gpie folder.

I also included a pack of mods I compiled a very long time ago. I'm not sure what is and isn't there or where it came from, but I've always wanted a near vanilla experience, so none of it changes the game much and at worst some of the content to make some elements closer to Jedi Knight. For example, I know there's a bowcaster in there, but I think that's the biggest modification. Just did some checking and the imperial officers wear grey uniforms (because the brown looked awful) the blaster bolt is a brighter color, and the gear up cutscene from the demo is added back in. If you don't want the mod, just remove MOD.GOB from the Dark Forces folder. Everything else will keep working.

Similarly, if you'd rather not have mouse look (because reasons?), don't remove completely but instead remove the contents of the dforces.pie script and the game will continue to function as anticipated but without mouse look. Realistically, this is just the vanilla game but with my bindings and the mod pack. Whatever floats your boat. If you decide to go that route, F is secondary fire and Q/R scroll your weapons.

DarkXL is neat, but I did a play through with it once, hit a game-ending bug, and decided I was done, work-arounds be damned. Immersion means a lot to me and I don't want to have to fix a game just to finish it. That being said, I can live without anisotropic filtering if I have to, but I can't force my brain to go back to a world where mouse look doesn't exist.

I'm not posting this to gain recognition or anything like that. I simply can't play the game the same way I originally did and the most popular alternative wasn't doing it for me. I know there are other people like me and simply wanted to share for the love of the game. Hope you enjoy.

One last thing worth mentioning, the control remapping completely breaks cheat codes, specifically mapping for WASD because A is used as part of the prefix for every cheat. It's not a terribly hard game, especially on the easy difficulty, and there's only one ending, so there's no value-adding benefit to using cheats. If cheating is very important to you, you can build a workaround in GlovePie. I know exactly how you'd go about doing this, but that's the best clue I'm going to give you. Consider it a challenge.

My AVG AntiVirus is highlighting your Darkforce+.exe as a Trojan Atrod.ADRY. I'm sure that this is a false positive, but I mention it as you'll probably have more folk beating at your door about it.

Thanks for that TQuin. I'll be using your modified exe (once I make it an exception in AVG) to auto-start the GlovePIE script so I don't have to fiddle around with it before playing. A great idea!

Might be worth mentioning that the sensitivity of the mouse look can be adjusted in the GlovePIE script by altering the number at the end of the PAGEUP and PAGEDOWN lines.

PageUp = delta(Mouse.DirectInputY) < -4
PageDown = delta(Mouse.DirectInputY) > 4

At the moment in your script, the sensitivity is set to "4". As the number after the "delta(Mouse.DirectInput)" mapping is a sensitivity number - the lower it is, the more sensitive it is. I usually set mine to = 5, but you could try editing it to 4,3,2, or 1. There should be a marked difference between 5 and 1. Folk should remember to do this for both lines (both PAGEUP and PAGEDOWN) of the "delta(Mouse.DirectInput)" script.

Another thing to mention is that some people have experienced crashing to desktop while trying to access DosBox's internal keymapping utility. I've found that if you hit Ctrl-F1 before the DARK.EXE has a chance to fully load in DosBox (or in your case Darkforce+.exe), then it has a better chance of running.

I wonder if you'll get anyone begging you to tell them how to work around the key-mapping in GlovePIE to get cheats to work properly. Not me though... I'm a Retronaut. ;)

Cheers,
G.

Yeah, it's a false positive. I like to convert batch scripts to executables to make things cleaner and many security applications find these to be suspicious. This one in particular includes a taskkill command to kill the GlovePie process after the game exits, so that possibly raises another red flag. On a given timeline, every major antivirus software I've ever seen eventually makes the shift from rational to paranoid security logic.

For the purpose of full disclosure, this is all the script does.
cd gpie
start glovepie.exe -dforces.pie
cd..
cd dosbox
DOSBox.exe -conf "..\dosbox_DF.conf" -conf "..\dosbox_DF_single.conf" -noconsole -c
taskkill /f /im glovepie.exe

For the mouse sensitivity, I played around with a range of values and I found 4 to be the most smooth since Dark Forces doesn't lend itself to very natural view angle adjustment. 5 was effective, but I thought 4 felt more natural. Fortunately, it's easy to change in this configuration, so anybody can tailor it to their liking.

I hadn't heard about the keymapping tool difficulties. That's interesting. Thanks for the heads up on that.

I too am interested to see if anyone will rise to the occasion on the cheats. They're not necessary, but I always like to see people take the initiative to answer a challenge.

Thanks for the comments, friend! Glad you like it. It's not an incredible feat of intellect, but it does what it needs to do and I'm glad to share.

Sounds interesting.
I can't play the original version due to the control scheme, and DarkXL suffers from secondary fire not being implemented (which takes out much of the tactics involved with grenades and such), so this is good news.

So I've downloaded your key mappings and the script, but I'm having a weird issue. When I mouse up, I go forward, mouse down makes me move back, when I press the right mouse button I fire and look down, and some of the other keys did really random things as well. Not sure why this happening and how to fix it. But any help would be great!

You probably need to disable mouse movement in the game's setup file. There should be some input configuration options in there, and it allows you to disable mouse movement by unbinding those axes. Once you've done that, the external script should work as intended.

I tried that and it still is doing the same thing, except this time I couldn't move at all with the mouse.

Would it matter that I had messed with the key settings before downloading this?

Yeah, suffy. That's what is doing it. There's a custom mapping file included. Rather than overwrite the one you created, rename the file and add .bak after the file extension. That way you can always bring it back if you decide to unload my version. I wish the mapping tool was less counter-intuitive. It sounds like you've got multiple inputs triggering and it's increasing your velocity. With my configuration, you'll move forward and back some, I couldn't rig up a way around that, so I opted to reduce it to a minimal impact as a work-around. I actually did find a dos command script that disables verticle mouse movement so the verticle movements would be isolated to the GlovePie input, but it made the menus difficult to navigate, so it wasn't an effective solution.

I run the GlovePie script independently, and I don't have the problem of moving forward and backward with the mouse. I just disabled forward and backward mouse movement in the game's setup program before running the GlovePie script. Now that that setting is saved as disabled, I never have the forward/backward problem and get more or less perfect mouse-look. Disabling forward/backward mouse movement in the game's setup program still allows the mouse to work just fine in the in-game menus, too. The only quirk of the GlovePie method is that up/down mouse-look moves a bit faster than left-right mouse-look, but that's unavoidable and easy to get used to.

These posts have been really information, but I still have some questions, unfortunately.

I installed the GOG DarkForces game via their setup. I then extracted DarkForcesA+ into the directory, overwriting the files the extraction required.

I then went into the DOSBox Dark Forces launch settings, where I changed some of the settings, mainly within the Mouse config area. I enabled mouse, and put None for all options except for Turn Left/Right (X Axis) and Fire (Left Button).

I'm now using a combination of TQuin's Gpie settings and my own, and for the most part, everything works great. The only issue is have is that I can't mouselook up/down. I can everything else.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

I was actually using DarkXL because it allowed for looking around with the mouse, but also found it frustrating that some of the gameplay aspects had changed. This is a nice compromise between vanilla Dark Forces & DarkXL.

I changed 2 things according to my tastes. First was that I swapped the ">" & "<" signs so that scrolling up looked up, and down looked down. I also changed the value to "3", since I found that my horizontal scrolling was a lot slower than the vertical. Along with that, I increased the mouse sensitivity in game to make up for the slower look speed.

All in all, I love it! One question though, how do I swap shift to running & control to crouch? I'm too used to using shift to run in games.

EDIT: Also curious as to what you mean by, "tricking the game into letting you finish". What was the issue with DarkXL?

I use pinnacle, bought it a long time ago.. works well with DF (I own the cd so I just set it up via dosbox myself) takes a little tweaking (Gotta disable the mouse y axis in the DF settings app) but you can get pretty good mouse look with the right analog stick. Set the left sticks left/right to strafe instead of turn and it plays like a more modern fps

Hello!
do you know how to use this with linux ?
Cheers
John

Secondary fire is implemented in DarkXL. It's just not configurable in the game, which is likely why you didn't realize that it's available. It's set to the 'R' key, but you can change it to another key or even a mouse button. I wrote a post on the DarkXL forum with instructions how:

http://xlengine.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=30&amp;t=1232

Edit: It appears that detonators (grenades) thrown with secondary fire don't have the 3-second delay that they're supposed to. They just explode on impact, like the primary mode. So, that appears to be a bug or missing feature. The secondary modes for the other weapons seem to work, though.

Thanks you! That's very useful to know.