NimForUE VS systemshock

Glad to see that the windows executables are working again.

I had tried a little while ago to test things out on my windows machine after seeing the NimForUE project (https://github.com/jmgomez/NimForUE) and was sad to see that my computer would auto-mark any nim binaries as malware and delete them. I wasn't too invested so I just shrugged rather than looking for too many workarounds.

For people scared off by C++ and who want faster recompile times, check out the Nim bindings [0]. Check out his Twitter/X account [1] for plenty of cool things it brings to the table.

[0]: https://github.com/jmgomez/NimForUE

[1]: https://twitter.com/_jmgomez_

I started using Nim because i wanted to port some of machine learning models written in python with the idea of making them more portable. It was a lot of work as community is relatively small and a new user would end up writing a lot of code.

But Nim has a pretty solid standard library with clearly written code and an awesome community to help with problems. I generally read a lot of standard library code to expand my knowledge of language and discover common patterns which repeat themselves in a lot of real world problems.

C inter-op is really first class, and as far as i know it has one of best C++ inter-op as well, you can take a look at: https://github.com/jmgomez/NimForUE for a real world example.

I use Nim for my work in both professional and personal capacity and also have written about some of it at https://ramanlabs.in/static/blog/index.html

I've switched over to Unreal and helped out with NimForUE early on. If you have any interest in Unreal, you should check it out since it's in a really good state. It does assume knowledge of Nim, Unreal, and C++ to really get the most out of it.

In NimForUE, we ran into issues with nimble early on, so we resorted to using nim for the build scripts because we needed to do code generation gymnastics to work with Unreal's build system and Nim's C++ codegen. The Nim compiler has had some patches since we first worked on the build system, so maybe if we had to do things over again we could go back to NimScript.

They would be better off just paying the guy developing NimForUE some money and making it first-party.

NimForUE is an Unreal Engine plugin that aims to replace the verbose and tedious C++ with the concise and clean Nim language, supporting blueprints too and giving hot reloading and native speed performance. https://github.com/jmgomez/NimForUE

(https://github.com/jmgomez/NimForUE)

For what it's worth, Nightdive did release the source code for the old Mac version and there's currently a cross-platform source port in development based on it: Shockolate.

if you want a source port that looks like the original (none of that KEX engine crap that looks awful), but also has mouse look, you can try shockolate (https://github.com/Interrupt/systemshock). it's not 100% stable though and sometimes crashes. i could not figure out the reason in two full playthroughs, but it was good enough for me if i can avoid the disgusting KEX port.

Though the Ultima Underworld maps were made out of a 2D grid, the rendering was done using texture-mapped polygons - and not just that but they even used dithering for more light variations. While pretty much all objects were rendered as 2D sprites, there were a few 3D polygonal objects too.

Wolf3D has a much more limited renderer - only walls are rendered, no lighting (the shaded side for walls is actually different textures) and the viewport is fixed at the middle of the walls for example. On the other hand Wolf3D was much faster and responsive and had a larger render window than UU.

UU itself was not open sourced, however System Shock 1 which is based on the same engine was[0][1].

[0] https://github.com/NightDive-Studio/shockmac

[1] https://github.com/Interrupt/systemshock

last example, system shock - got open sourced and ported by the community in no time https://github.com/Interrupt/systemshock

I have a more modern source port that works on my Mac (Shockolate), but I still find it clunky to control. Funny how preferences and expectations change over time. I don't remember having an issue with the controls back then (or with Ultima Underworld), but now, it's just really hard for me to get past.

I don't know if you still care, but there's also Shockolate. It's meant to run on modern hardware.

The official KEX Enhanced Edition has had the most work put into it, but Shockolate might be an option if you want to give it a shot.