Jedi Engine

A screenshot sourced from level #14, titled "Smuggler's Hijack", depicts this scene. At the level's commencement, the protagonist is presented with a rotating walkway. This walkway serves as a connection between the space station and the ship that he is destined to reach. This walkway, visible from an outside perspective, is capable of rotation, facilitating player traversal. Stinnett noted that this particular element of the game demanded a clever geometrical "trick," involving "phenomenal computer geometry" that "the level designers really had to know the engine to pull off". The 3D game engine created for Star Wars: Dark Forces is known as Jedi Engine.

This 3D engine represented the core technical and mechanical component of the game. Its development commenced in late August 1993, spearheaded by project leader Daron Stinnett and programmers Winston Wolff and Ray Gresko. Initially programmed in Assembly language, their efforts were primarily focused on this task until Christmas of that year. After six months of work, a functional basic engine was achieved, and its improvement continued thereafter. With the increasing availability of more powerful processors (486 and Pentium), the code was subsequently translated into C.

Initially, levels were designed using AutoCAD software before being imported into the game engine, which occasionally resulted in errors and geometries that exceeded the engine's capabilities.

In contrast to contemporary first-person shooters, the Jedi Engine enabled multi-level environments and, seemingly impossible at the time, allowed players to look up and down within rooms or across different floors. Elevators facilitated access to these various floors, a feature that, from a programmer's standpoint, involved "stupendous" geometry. Another aspect requiring "phenomenal" geometry and programming ingenuity was the ability to view an object (such as a movable corridor or container) from the outside and subsequently walk inside it.