[Project] Stargate Worlds MMO– custom C++/Vulkan engine running the original QA client content

[Pixel112]

Hi everyone,

I'm want to introduce a project I've been working on: bringing Stargate Worlds MMO back to life. SGW was the Stargate MMO by Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment. It was cancelled in 2010 and never released. What survived is a QA/beta client: UE3 packages, maps, models, animations, UI, audio and mission data. The server side is gone.

Instead of trying to patch the old Unreal 3 client, we went a different route. We built our own native engine ("Naquadah") in C++20 + Vulkan 1.3, plus an extractor tool that reads the original UE3 packages directly and converts everything into our own formats. So the original content runs in a modern, fully controllable engine. No browser game, no Unity/Unreal wrapper.

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What we did so far

1. The extractor (sgwextract) Reads the QA client's UE3 packages (v486, LZO compressed) directly:

• All 5,208 static meshes and 14,290 textures decode without errors
• All 2,155 skeletal meshes plus the animation sets (786 animations for human males, 759 for females)
• All 22 original maps: levels plus streaming sublevels, terrain, BSP rooms, lights, prefabs, baked lightmaps, skydomes with their original materials, sun and fog, kill-Z
• 31 VFX packages archived losslessly (1,654 particle systems)
• Mission data from the client cache: 1,040 missions, 5,405 dialogs, 4,661 NPC topics, 28 stargates, 91 worlds
• 6,059 items, 1,886 abilities, 3,216 effects
• Original UI: 2,594 images from 35 CEGUI atlases, the original fonts, plus the Lua scripts and the Scaleform minigames (Livewire, DHD, Hack, Bypass …) for reference
• Original audio: FMOD FSB4 banks, 4,627 sound definitions, and the interactive music system (decoded from globalMR.fev)
• Kismet sequences from the maps, the UnrealScript sources embedded in the packages (2,156 files), and the BigWorld server entity definitions (.def) as a reference for later server work
• A material baker that evaluates UE3 material graphs per texel (in progress)

2. The engine

• Vulkan 1.3 HDR renderer: cascaded sun shadows, SSAO, bloom, up to 64 point lights, bindless textures, instancing and frustum culling, original lightmaps in the shader
• Quality presets (Low → Ultra).
• CPU skinning for the original characters with original animations and blending
• Particle runtime for the original emitters
• A Kismet interpreter that runs the original level scripts (triggers, stargate dialing sequences, matinee movements …)
• Crash logging with stack traces and minidumps

3. The game

• Character creation in the style of the original: all races (Tau'ri, Free Jaffa, Asgard, Goa'uld) and both factions (SGU and Praxis), with original heads, hair, armor and weapons
• All archetypes: Soldier, Commando, Scientist, Archaeologist, Jaffa, Goa'uld, Asgard
• Stargate travel: dial via DHD or the SGC dialing computer, original gate addresses, kawoosh (it kills you if you stand in front of it), iris, wormhole transit
• The original SGC with 1,512 objects and 292 lights, plus Harriman, Landry, Carter, Daniel, Teal'c, O'Neill, Vala, Woolsey and SGC staff. SG teams regularly gate out and come back on their own.
• Original worlds: Harset, Omega Site, Dakara, The Castle (prologue), Tollana, Lucia, Beta Site, Men'fa, Ihpet Crater, Sewer Falls, plus interiors
• Missions from NPCs like in the original: "!" and "?" markers, original dialog texts, quest tracker. The prologue (escape from the Castle) is playable.
• Cover-based combat: the enemy AI patrols, takes cover, peeks and flanks. There are abilities with the original icons and effects, and an SG team of up to 3 companion bots.
• Talent trees (41 points, level 10–50). The tree names come from the original data; we decoded them from the CRC32 ability tags.
• Loot, an inventory with original items, vendors, levels up to 50, saves
• In-game developer tools: world editor (move, rotate and scale objects, lights and NPCs), console, NPC routes, a script editor, a quest editor, loot tables

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What works right now

• Create a character, start in the SGC, dial out, travel between the original worlds
• Accept missions from NPCs, fight, loot, level up, spend talents
• The prologue mission from start to finish
• Original music and sounds in-game
• Stable on hardware with quality presets

What does NOT work yet (honest list)

• No multiplayer server yet. Right now it's a single-player client with bot companions. A server is the long-term goal; the original BigWorld definitions are already extracted as a reference.
• Enemy spawns in the original worlds were server-side and are lost. We are reconstructing them from cover nodes and mission texts.
• Combat stats were server-side as well, so the numbers are generated for now.
• Not every one of the ~1,000 missions is verified yet. We keep a checklist with all 3,365 mission steps.
• Large outdoor maps still have long load times. Voice-over banks are missing from the QA client.
• Graphics are being upgraded right now (materials with normal/specular maps, glass and reflections, real falling physics).

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What's next

1. Finish the material/graphics overhaul
2. Enemy placement in all original worlds
3. Go through the mission checklist step by step
4. Load-time optimizations
5. Later: networking/server

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Screenshots are below. I'm happy to answer questions, and I'd love to talk to anyone who:

• has knowledge about SGW internals or the BigWorld server
• has other SGW client builds or data (especially voice-over banks or server data)
• is interested in helping with testing

Thanks for reading. Chevron seven… locked!