Earthsiege 2Excavated · Lost Engines

The Lost Engines Project

Inside
Earthsiege 2.

A look through the models, battlefields and code of Dynamix’s HERC combat simulator. Recovered from the original game, with tools to see how it all fits together.

Read the investigationOpen the model hangar
An enemy HERC and explosion ahead of the player's cockpit in the original Earthsiege 2
Assault training, captured from the original Windows executable.

Dynamix’s second
HERC simulator.

Earthsiege 2 puts you in command of a squad of HERCs: heavily armed walking machines fighting the Cybrids. You fit weapons, recover salvage, keep your pilots alive and follow a campaign that eventually reaches the Moon. The Razor lets you take the battle into the air.

We reverse engineered the game’s data and behaviour to build a modern C++ reconstruction. These are some of the things we found along the way.

Open the files and have a look

The HERC hangarModels & animation

The HERC hangar

Walk a Colossus, fit different weapons or look through the buildings. The model files contain far more than a single mesh.

Across five theatresMissions & scenery

Across five theatres

Inspect the terrain, bases, squads and routes in 61 missions, with their original briefings and compiled launch states.

The view from the seatArtwork & instruments

The view from the seat

Nine cockpits, four directions and three video modes. Try the instruments and see how palette schemes give each HERC its own interior.

Raptor II in the model viewer

Following on from Earthsiege 1

Some very familiar parts.

Nine model libraries survived unchanged. Mongoose differs by a single byte. Pilot recordings reappear at a higher sample rate, and both games share the same random-number generator.

What carried over, and how we checked →

The original software renderer

Six pixels of sky.

The sky’s colour bands stay six pixels tall when you double the resolution. Textures fade through authored palette tables. A cloud filename is read, then discarded. Small details explain quite a lot of the game’s appearance.

Try the sky and colour controls →

Browse original terrain renders →
Lunar terrain produced by the original drawing routines
The steering and trigger inputs recorded in one of the game's attract-mode demos

Three recordings, 7,060 inputs

The demos are recorded flights.

The menu demonstrations contain whole mission setups and recorded controls. They preserve older equipment choices, a misleading filename and a bug involving recycled projectile memory.

Inspect the recordings →