Everything in Eternal
Everything listed works in the current development preview. What isn't finished yet is set apart under Still to come, and the roadmap is at the end.
A new renderer for familiar worlds
A WebGL renderer built on Three.js brings the original battlefields into a modern graphics pipeline and keeps their character. Turn the atmosphere up on a powerful rig or down on an old laptop. Graphics settings change how a battle looks, never how it plays.
Cascaded shadows
Up to four 4096-pixel shadow maps at Ultra, with stable cascades and clean self-shadowing.
Reflective water
Screen-space reflections at High, full planar reflections at Ultra, and in Enhanced, Kamino's storm-tossed ocean and live waves under Kashyyyk: Islands' sunset.
Bloom, soft particles and lit bolts
Blaster bolts glow in each gun's own color, and smoke and fire blend softly into the world.
Weather and atmosphere
Animated foliage, rain, dust and Kamino's storm sky, each with a Classic setting.
Light on the move
Soldiers and vehicles pick up the light of the lamps and glowing panels they pass.
Enhanced destruction
Droids short out with arcs crawling over their joints, then blow apart into hot pieces that bounce, settle and cool.
Smouldering power droids
A wrecked ammo or health droid blasts, then burns and smokes for minutes, with sparks and arcs. Repairing it smothers the fire.
Enhanced jetpacks
A jet trooper's flame burns from each nozzle of the pack as a 3D volume, ramping up on ignition and trailing as he turns.
Droideka shields
A clear center with a bright rim, moving plasma threads, and ripples where blasts strike the field.
Kamino's storm
Gerstner swells with foam and spray, a volumetric storm sky, and lightning that lights the clouds and the sea.
Theed's fountains
Arcing jets, spray and a rippling basin.
Kill replay
The Enhanced death camera replays the shot that got you and ends on your killer.
Temporal upscaling
Render below your screen's resolution and rebuild a sharp image, with a temporal upscaler in the FSR 2 family or a one-pass spatial one.
Antialiasing and filtering
FXAA, or 2x to 8x multisampling followed by FXAA, and up to 16x anisotropic filtering.
Performance presets
From Minimum, for integrated graphics of about 2011, up to High quality. Adaptive resolution holds your frame rate.
A fixed 60 Hz simulation
Gameplay always advances at 60 Hz, whatever your frame rate.
Compressed textures
GPU-compressed textures need a quarter of the video memory.
Still to come
- Measured hardware targets. Minimum specifications and 4K performance are targets still being measured, not promises of a frame rate.
Flying, rebuilt
Starfighters, gunships and speeders fly the way BF1 flies, read from each craft's own values, with new controls to tune them to your hands.
Flown as BF1 flew
Craft turn flat at their own turn and pitch rates and follow the stick at BF1's rates, with only the hull leaning into a turn.
Each craft's own speeds
Speed and acceleration come from each class: a snowspeeder cruises at 40 m/s and tops out at 72, fast enough to circle an AT-AT.
BF1's chase camera
A 48 degree view behind the craft, as in BF1.
Starfighter controls
Sensitivity, invert and a response curve of their own, starfighter key bindings, and a first-person view.
Bail out in flight
Press Use to jump out. The empty craft flies on, falls and crashes, and its pad builds another.
Hover vehicles on springs
Hover tanks and speeders ride the ground on BF1's own suspension springs.
Pilots that fly like BF1's
Bots take off and leave the hangars as BF1's AI does, and fly over the ground ahead.
Still to come
- First-person cockpits. The first-person view doesn't draw cockpit models yet.
Hear the whole battle
A new audio engine plays the originals' own sounds, music and voice-over by their original rules. Switch between Original and Enhanced at any time. Both play at the same loudness, so you compare the sound, not the volume.
Original (2004)
Plays what the Steam version plays, when and how it plays it, by the same mixing rules.
Enhanced (2026)
The same decisions rendered for a modern room: a spatial sound stage, rooms, occlusion and a loudness-managed master.
True 3D on headphones
Third-order ambisonics decoded through a measured dummy head, from the University of York's SADIE II recordings of a Neumann KU 100.
Speakers up to 7.1.4
Stereo, 5.1, 7.1 and 7.1.4 with height speakers, a center that anchors the action, and explosions in the LFE.
Rooms and occlusion
Worked out from each map's own geometry. Hear blaster fire across a courtyard, and the battle beyond the wall.
Restored samples
The game's sounds are upscaled offline to 48 kHz, and each one is checked against its original. Any that fail the check play the original.
Surround music
The soundtrack gets 5.1 and 7.1 upmixes. Headphones and stereo keep the stereo mix.
Dynamics
Keep the full dynamic range for a home theater, or choose Night mode for a quieter session.
Still to come
- The last few sounds. Other soldiers' footsteps and foley, and some sounds online, are still to come.
Every screen, rebuilt
A new front end, laid out the way the originals were, in three looks. Every menu, the server browser and the in-battle screens follow the look you pick.
Three looks
Eternal, Battlefront (2004) and Battlefront II (2005). Only colors and surfaces change, so everything stays where you expect it.
The main menu
Battle movies fade in from both sides, and screens cascade into each other instead of popping.
Instant Action
Build a playlist from every map and era, with a flyover of each map.
The server browser
Internet and LAN servers in one list, with search, map, era and ping filters, and each server's details and sponsor.
The spawn screen
Your soldier on a 3D stage with sweeping cameras, a hologram of the battlefield you can click to pick a command post, and a clear team switch.
Scoreboard and pause menu
Stats with table, details and awards tabs, and a pause menu over the blurred battle.
Next
- Galactic Conquest and the Historical Campaign. Their places in the menus are ready. The modes themselves are in active development, slated for November 2026.
Later
- Leaderboards. The tab is in the server browser. The leaderboards themselves are planned.
Netcode, rebuilt
The originals' online play died with GameSpy in 2014, and the GOG and Steam versions came back through rooms hosted by players. Eternal runs every battle on a server at 60 Hz over new, encrypted netcode, built for weak uploads and lost packets. You don't need an account.
All-new netcode
Server-authoritative at 60 Hz, with client prediction, lag compensation and an encrypted UDP transport written for this game.
Light on your connection
About 56 kbit/s and 35 packets a second of upload per player, measured with 64 players.
Holds up under packet loss
With 5% loss, snapshots still arrive at the link's own latency instead of queueing for seconds.
Route racing
A join tries several ports and moves to the fastest route through your ISP: 6 ms quicker on average in testing.
32 versus 32
Up to 64 players, twice the 32 of the 2004 game on GOG and Steam. Bots fill every empty slot, and players replace them as they join.
Browse or connect directly
Find servers on the Internet or your LAN, or join an address directly.
Host from the app
Host a LAN or public game from the desktop app on Windows or Linux. It keeps running after you close the game.
Dedicated servers
bfeserver runs headless on Linux, needs no graphics card, and is free software under GPL-3.0.
Servers that update themselves
A server installs each release, prepares its data, and switches over once nobody is playing.
Direct
Direct connections where possible, NAT hole punching, and a relay for players nothing else reaches. IPv4 and IPv6.
Moderation
Kick, ban and send announcements from the server's admin menu, with an optional shared ban list.
The battles you remember
Instant Action against Classic AI on every map of the 2004 game, rebuilt rule by rule from the original.
17 maps, 30 battles
All 16 original maps plus Jabba's Palace from the Steam and GOG versions, in every era each one offers.
Classic AI
Bots that fight, capture, drive and fly by the original's rules, on every map.
Vehicles and walkers
Speeders, tanks, fighters, AT-ATs, AT-TEs and more, with their seats, weapons and damage effects.
Command vehicles
AT-ATs, AT-TEs and the other command vehicles work as mobile spawn points.
Destructible objectives
Hoth's shield generator, the Techno Union ships on Geonosis and Endor's bunker can all be destroyed.
The locals
Tusken Raiders, Jawas, Gungans, Wookiees, Ewoks, Geonosians and Gamorreans fight where they live.
Map interactives
Ewok log traps, the snowspeeder's tow cable, Jabba's palace doors and the Cloud City forklift.
Still to come
- Ambient life. Birds, fish, light shafts and some lights on props are still missing.
Native on your desktop
A desktop app for each platform, with updates that install themselves. Eternal finds your Steam or GOG copy, prepares everything from it once, and never changes it.
Windows
Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit, with an installer.
Linux
x64 and ARM64: a signed APT repository for Debian and Ubuntu, a one-command installer for everything else, and AppImages.
Self-updating
Every install updates itself from a signed channel and downloads only what changed. No reinstalling.
Steam or GOG
Eternal finds the game in Steam, GOG Galaxy or Heroic on its own. Both copies prepare the same battles, so GOG and Steam players share servers.
Your copy stays yours
About 7 GB of prepared data lives in your user folder. Your Steam or GOG copy is only read, never changed.
Move your data
Export the prepared content to one file and import it on another PC. That PC doesn't need Steam or GOG.
Free software
The engine, the desktop app and the dedicated server are open source under GPL-3.0, with their code on GitHub.
Still to come
- macOS. Apple silicon and Intel builds are coming.
- Signed Windows installer. Preview builds aren't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may warn you.
What's next
The big pieces still to come. Dates depend on testing, so none are promised.
Next
- Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005). Its maps, units, vehicles, modes and interface in the same engine.
- Mixed playlists. Battles from both games in one Instant Action list or one server's rotation.
- Battlefront II's modes. Capture the Flag, Hunt, Assault, space battles and heroes.
- Galactic Conquest and the Historical Campaign. The single-player modes beyond Instant Action, in active development and slated for November 2026.
- macOS and signed releases. Mac builds, and code-signed Windows installers.
Later
- Easier server setup. Fetching your game onto a server through SteamCMD, so you don't have to copy it there.
- Leaderboards. Leaderboards in the server browser, from each server's own stats.
- Custom maps and mods. Full support for the community's maps and mods.
See it for yourself
Free to play with your Steam or GOG copy of Star Wars: Battlefront (2004).