Terminator Unity is an attempt to create a Unity wrapper around the game Terminator: Future Shock, that will allow the original game to run cleanly on modern systems, with many quality-of-life upgrades. It is based directly on the extraordinary work done by the Daggerfall Unity team, who already achieved this for The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall.
Daggerfall Unity is an open source recreation of Daggerfall in the Unity engine created by Daggerfall Workshop.
A sadly overlooked achievement in gaming, Terminator: Future Shock was released in 1995 by Bethesda Softworks. A truly revolutionary game, it was the first mouse-look FPS game released (no, that wasn't Quake!). As well as creating the basic control scheme of all future first-person games, it also featured 3D free-roaming levels, 3D enemies, the ability to enter and explore buildings around the map at will, and driving/flying vehicle sections.
None of that may sound particularly impressive today, but when you consider that Future Shock came out only one year after Doom II, and one year before both Duke Nukem 3D and Quake, it's far more so.
It was also just a pretty damn good FPS, if you ask me. Future Shock was moody, atmospheric, lonely, occasionally terrifying and mostly faithful to the world created by the films. For myself, Future Shock was a formative experience, directly contributing to a lifelong love of gaming. Unforunately, it sits forgotten in the annals of the medium, with no digital release (owing to its status as a movie-licensed game), system requirements too archaic for modern machines, and visuals/AI that - let's be honest - hold up as well as a chocolate teapot. I hope to help resolve some of these issues and make the game more accessible to modern audiences.
Future Shock got a standalone expansion pack, SkyNET, in 1996. If possible, I would like to support that release as well, but for the initial work I will focus on Future Shock (while leaving space to accommodate SkyNET where possible).
The primary goals of the project are:
- Seamless gameplay on modern Windows and Linux systems (I do not have Mac to test)
- Widescreen support
- Controller support
- Improved resolution
- Improved enemy AI/pathfinding (the original's is pretty rubbish, let's be honest)
- Accessibility enhancements where appropriate
- Translation support
- Integration with RetroAchievements or similar
- Some form of cloud save integration
There are also several prominent bugs I would like to patch:
- Enemy AI & animations are deactivated at a range slightly less than the draw distance, allowing them to be killed and freeze mid-explosion.
- Some level edges have incorrectly placed invisible walls that allow the player to get permanently stuck.
- (If SkyNET is integrated) The "Twisted Ankle" bug, where sliding down even small slopes can result in massive health loss when reaching the end.
- (If SkyNET is integrated) Game-breaking bug where a mission-critical target cannot be killed if running Future Shock in SkyNET's enhanced mode.
Linked here are some development notes from my initial work on the project. These will be uplifted into a wiki in future.
- File Types - The files in the
GAMEDATAfolder and their technical specs (where they differ from Daggerfall)
Terminator Unity requires a legal copy of Terminator: Future Shock to run. This provides all necessary game assets such as textures, 3D models, and sound effects. Terminator Unity does not distribute any copyrighted material. Unlike Daggerfall, Future Shock was never made available as freeware, and because of its movie licensing it will likely never be released again, so you will have to source an original copy of the game.
There's nothing I can do about this. Do not try to circumnavigate this restriction. Any issues or discussions created asking for a copy of the game will be deleted and the user banned.
Don't worry, no need to run DOSBox and manually install everything! The Future Shock disc contains the full
installation data in an uncompressed form. Simply copy the /SHOCK/GAMEDATA/ folder to your hard drive and point
Terminator Unity to it.
(The original installation process does not copy video files to the hard drive, even when "full installation" is selected, so Terminator Unity will not work against copies already installed via DOSBox.)
- Operating system: Windows, Linux, MacOS
- Processor: Intel i3 (Skylake) equivalent
- Graphics: DirectX 11 capable with 1GB video memory and up-to-date drivers
- Memory: 2GB system RAM
- Operating system: Windows, Linux, MacOS
- Processor: Intel i5 (Skylake) equivalent
- Graphics: GTX 660 with 2GB video memory and up-to-date drivers
- Memory: 4GB system RAM