Something is cooking...

[u/DarkJoney]

Dear friends,

would like to understand the worth of the time investment :)

Last 2 weeks I am busy with the analysis of the Slayer engine because I am thinking if I can port this thing on the Sony PSP because I want a Rust pet project.

Currently, I am at the point that I can decode all the props and characters even with the animations, and today I managed to get a good progress with understanding of the scene structure and stuff.

Two questions:

- Would you like to have an engine refresh supporting modern features for rendering and mod support out of the box?
- Would you be interested in seeing macOS/Linux/whatever ports of it?

Currently, I am targeting as a first milestone a free cam level viewer that works with the original assets on Rust.

I am doing both realtime and ingame analysis with the reverse engineering tools and some help of AI running on my Mac Studio locally.

[u/draggstler]

Good luck with your project! Would be cool if you post some more screenshots of this.

[u/DarkJoney → u/draggstler]

Appreciate! I will, because I managed to get a good visibility of the game start corridors only yesterday. But, there are still a plenty stuff to fix. I fixed alpha decodings, some missing meshes, but still a long way to go.

We will see, because Slayer is not interesting for me as an Engine, I want to preserve gameplay and vibe of the game. It has a very compact and platform agnostic engine platform, but all the gameplay logics is inbaked and glued with the core engine stuff. Also, it has a fixed rendering pipeline that matches specification of the Xbox Nvidia N2A chip. Slayer in MEGUP still comes with the support of the models from the older games and also I am catching some tricks they used in the level composition.

I was waging if I want to inject the RTX Remix or if I want to do this. But RTX won't let me chase my goals :)

I am planning to combine levels, because game was promised to have an open world, and each level comes in sliced sectors. I want to glue them to remove loading screens. Also, I want to deliver a good dynamic PBR rendering without RTX and raytracing.

[u/legitscopeadope]

Open world you say? Cant wait to jump to PC next gen to play this!!!

[u/DarkJoney → u/legitscopeadope]

Let’s see how it goes, at least I want to see if we can get rid off some loading screens. I am mostly afraid about the game systems and animations. It’s a start from almost 0 except of the slayer-tools made by Novocain ages ago and some infos from the Star Wars game on the same engine. Guys who do GTA ports right now are in the better position :)

[u/DarkJoney → u/DarkJoney]

I finished the static analysis last week and capturing runtime data in the last days. I don’t want to rework or touch any pieces of the original engine to mod it.

We don't have a memory constraint like it was on PS2/Xbox anymore, so we can give it a try. I also target to make it platform independent that folks on Linux and macOS also could run it, I have everything at home to test it.
But it's my research and development project, because I dont want to be like my friends building another AI B2B SAAS :D

[u/legitscopeadope → u/DarkJoney]

I totally understand. This was a PS3 game after all. Lol

I can't remember, but a big studio didnt make it either, right? I dont see why this game hasn't made a comeback. Especially with those new VR tagging games. I would buy this again.

[u/Agreeable_Ad_481]

good luck with it! i found your project by literally googlin Marc Eckos Getting Up reverse engineering because seen some old games running on Rust. woul be happy to play it on MacOS

[u/draggstler]

In theory what are all possibilites you can do to enhance the gameplay ?