(This post is part of a series on the subject of my hobby project, which is recreating the C source code for the 1989 game F-15 Strike Eagle II by reverse engineering the original binaries.)

Now that the reconstruction project is more or less stable, we needed to fork it for the modernized port where we were going to make it run natively on modern systems while adding bugfixes and improvements.

The F-15EX Eagle II is an evolution of the F-15 platform that grew out of the Advanced Eagle program, and first took to the skies in 2021. I thought it only fitting that our modern rebuild of 1980s technology that made the original F-15 SE2 share its name.

The rate of progress has been pretty wild. It’s been no more than a week since I opened the repository and added some SDL3 boilerplate to it with a rudimentary build system based on CMake and Ninja, and already we have:

  • the software rendering ported over to SDL
  • entire game is fully playable (mission selection-flight-debriefing)
  • input works, including joystick support
  • sound works! Based on the Nuked-OPL3 emulator.
  • flight engine decoupled from the renderer freed the game of its 15FPS limit
  • input handling moved over to SDL events made the game much responsive
  • new level of detail (4) gets rid of draw distance limitations, makes the world look much more full
LOD3 LOD4
Before (detail 3) After (detail 4)

I wish I could take credit for any of it, but really it’s the contributors (and @AJenbo in particular) making this possible. I could not keep up and decided that the best I can do for the project is stand back and let nature take its course. I’m currently adding some more feature to mzretools, and plan to do some more cleanup and refactoring of the reconstruction project which is not seeing too much development – it had some fixes and cleanups backported from the EX project, and it will probably see more in the future, but there will inevitably come a time where it stops being modified and remains set in stone as proof of a bygone era.

Meanwhile, in EX land, the sky’s literally the limit. I hear that high-res OpenGL rendering backend is in the works, and have even seen some initial screens. I have put together a list of potential new features for the game in the project’s readme, and am hoping to be able to make some contributions to it in the near future.