Porting Red Baron (DOS, 1990) to WebGPU browsers.
Red Baron (1990), rhe iconic DOS Flight Sim by Sierra/Dynamix ported and upgraded for the modern web in about a week using a mostly autonomous coding agent (primarily Claude Opus 4.8, downgrading from Fable/Opus5 for better results).
Unlike Syndicate [1] and Populous [2] this was a more involved project as no reference code for the game exist, nobody yet bothered porting it to modern systems and as a result code, file formats, game rules and world content had to be recovered by the harness driving driving a debugger (radare2) and reverse engineering the original executable in Dosbox-x.
The game used real 3d models for planes and world, albeit with a low resolution renderer (VGA Mode-x) with a very low frame rate, which made it a natural target for upgrades
The game is fully ported including campaign, historic missions and multiplayer duels, with only minor omissions and upgraded for modern systems in various ways that can be toggled in game.
- Upgraded terrain, including procedural foliage
- Full 4k capable WebGPU renderer
- Enhanced Skies and Cloud Cover
- Upgraded 3d plane models (Claude Opus driving Blender) for all planes
- Cockpits texture mapped into the 3d plane to allow seamless head look (hold right mouse button), critical given the lack of radar to find enemies
- Volumetric smoke, fire particle systems for burning planes,
- Destructible ground scenery
- Flak Searchlights in Night Missions
- Pip Event Camera for in game events
- Custom in game settings menu for all changes.
- Press and hold H for parachuting out your doomed plane.
- Websocket Multiplayer Duels (requires hosted server, not enabled in the demo above)
It used to take months, if not years to do these kind of digital archeological digs by hand, now it’s basically bounded by compute availability and even without access to the original source code only takes about a week for complex 1990s game.
Porting to a more capable engine like Unreal would be trivial, but ultimately boring, I do enjoy the challenge of maintaining the essence of the original game while modernizing the technology.
Red Baron (1990), The iconic DOS Flight Sim by Sierra/Dynamix ported and upgraded for the modern web in about a week using a mostly autonomous coding agent (primarily Claude Opus 4.8, downgrading… | Georg Zoeller
Red Baron (1990), rhe iconic DOS Flight Sim by Sierra/Dynamix ported and upgraded for the modern web in about a week using a mostly autonomous coding agent (primarily Claude Opus 4.8, downgrading from Fable/Opus5 for better results). [Demo here](https://redbaron.tooclever.org) Unlike Syndicate [1] and Populous [2] this was a more involved project as no reference code for the game exist, nobody yet bothered porting it to modern systems and as a result code, file formats, game rules and world content had to be recovered by the harness driving driving a debugger (radare2) and reverse engineering the original executable in Dosbox-x. The game used real 3d models for planes and world, albeit with a low resolution renderer (VGA Mode-x) with a very low frame rate, which made it a natural target for upgrades The game is fully ported including campaign, historic missions and multiplayer duels, with only minor omissions and upgraded for modern systems in various ways that can be toggled in game. - Upgraded terrain, including procedural foliage - Full 4k capable WebGPU renderer - Enhanced Skies and Cloud Cover - Upgraded 3d plane models (Claude Opus driving Blender) for all planes - Cockpits texture mapped into the 3d plane to allow seamless head look (hold right mouse button), critical given the lack of radar to find enemies - Volumetric smoke, fire particle systems for burning planes, - Destructible ground scenery - Flak Searchlights in Night Missions - Pip Event Camera for in game events - Custom in game settings menu for all changes. - Press and hold H for parachuting out your doomed plane. - Websocket Multiplayer Duels (requires hosted server, not enabled in the demo above) I suggest playing a squad based mission as the default dogfights in this game suffer from the same problem all flight sims have ... planes flying around each other, but without radar it’s much worse. It used to take months, if not years to do these kind of digital archeological digs by hand, now it’s basically bounded by compute availability and even without access to the original source code only takes about a week for complex 1990s game. Porting to a more capable engine like Unreal would be trivial, but ultimately boring, I do enjoy the challenge of maintaining the essence of the original game while modernizing the technology.
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