The LDSO site has just recently undergone some major updates. The old TRON 2.0 Chat Room has been resurrected. A new download section has been added. The forum software has been upgraded to the latest version. The site's front page has been revised to include, among other things, a new status display showing when the LDSO TRON 2.0: Killer App Mod multiplayer servers are online. (This status display can also now be seen at the top of every page on this site.)

And, finally, a new TRON 2.0 Wiki has been created. The TRON 2.0 Unofficial FAQ will be merged into this wiki over time, and in the process it will be revised: to bring it up to date. Some of the information in the FAQ is outdated.

The wiki is also meant to serve as a resource for mapping and modding tips and tutorials, for those who would still like to attempt creating content for the TRON 2.0 game. If you become a member at the LDSO message forum, you will automatically become a member of the wiki as well. Then, if you choose to, you can participate in contributing to wiki articles.

Simply visit the LDSO site, and check the left-hand side of the front page for links to these new additions. Hope to see you there!

Despite the lack of updates, I just wanted to let everyone know that this site is not dead.

Other projects I'm doing (that I feel are more important) are leaving me with almost no time to spare. However, these endeavors are still related to TRON 2.0. Most notably: an updated version of User Error that self-installs and adds widescreen support, and an updated Killer App Mod, are in the pipeline. With the updated UE due shortly. (Yes, really this time.) Some of the other projects I've been working on, will be mentioned in another article that I'm posting today. If you want to see a full list of some of the things I've been up to, you can visit this page.

So, for now, this site is going on somewhat of a hiatus, and again focusing mainly on its original purpose: to act as a support resource for the PC and Mac versions of the game TRON 2.0. However, I will still continue to post articles about other more general TRON related news. Though on a less frequent basis. (I'm sure once the upcoming TRON Uprising animated series hits, I'll have plenty to say about it.)

As I said last time, in a similar article: Thank you again for visiting. I hope to provide TRON, TRON 2.0, and TRON Legacy fandom with continued useful information you may not find anywhere else.

Download it from here
The TRON 2.0 Editing Tools have always been a pain to install, especially for new users. For a long time, I've been wanting to do something about it. So recently I found some time to put together a program that installs the tools for you.

The program installs the Editing Tools, released Prefabs, and some extras like: additional documentation from other Monolith games (some useful info in them that isn't in the TRON 2.0 tools documentation), video tutorials made by me long ago to get you started, WinREZ LT Studio, XN Resource Editor, and some community-made prefabs.

During the installation, the program will extract game assets from TRON 2.0 that you'll need to do any editing. These assets take up about 2.5 GB on your hard drive, and they take a while to extract. Please be patient during the extraction process and WAIT until it's finished. You'll see several windows open and close during this time. Just let the program do its work without interruption.

You can decide whether you want to install WinREZ LT and XN Resource Editor or not, by either going through with their installation or canceling them at the start as each launches. I recommend you install both. But during the installation of WinREZ, choose a Custom install. When you get to choose the components to be installed, I recommend not picking ResEdit. Use XN Resource Editor instead.

Also, if you're using a 64-bit version of Windows, don't install the WinREZ Shell Extensions. They only work on 32-bit versions of Windows. So generally on XP you are fine, but on Vista and 7 you'll need to check to see if you're using a 64-bit version. If WinREZ wants to install to "C:\Program Files (x86)", then you are using a 64-bit version of Windows. If there's no "(x86)", you are using a 32-bit version.


XN Resource Editor is meant for editing the CRES.DLL file, which is where all the text for the game is kept. After you open the CRES.DLL file in XN, click the plus sign "+" beside "String Table" and then the plus beside each number to see a table of text which you can click on. Then you can either edit existing text, or add a new text line.

If you need assistance with editing TRON 2.0, please visit our message forum on the LDSO site.

November 11th, 2011 UPDATE: The TRON 2.0 Editing Tools has been updated to Version 1.1. The new version adds more documentation from another Monolith game, an extra tool and plugin, and some other minor changes.

Today, Disney and Microsoft - together with a team at Vectorform - revealed a newly redesigned site demonstrating what the future of comics and graphic novels will be.

The TRON Legacy Digital Book site features a TRON Legacy interactive comic: with animated, glowing panels that slide, scale, and feature highlights you can click on to reveal intel on characters like Sam Flynn and Rinzler. The site uses the new HTML5 spec and what's known as GPU or hardware acceleration in Internet Exlporer 9 to achieve the level of interactivity, smoothness, and responsiveness you'll experience when visiting the site. Hardware acceleration offloads the work of drawing the screen from your computer's CPU (processor), to the GPU (video card/chip).

The results are highly impressive, and what's even more impressive is that from start to finish the site only took approximately one month to complete. The site was created by first drawing traditional comic panels in Photoshop, then isolating elements so they could be treated with the added effects mentioned earlier. Then the team at Vectorform worked hard to reduce the bandwidth required for all the high resolution imagery, while keeping the quality and performance of the site high.

I was given an opportunity to chat with one of the creative leads at Disney and a senior director on the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft. During this Q&A, I asked who originated the idea of this new project (Disney), and whether the TRON Legacy filmmakers (Steven Lisberger, Joseph Kosinski, and the rest of the team) were involved in the project in any way (the answer was yes). It seems Disney really wanted to push the boundaries of what could be done with an interactive comic, and remain committed to the TRON franchise for the forseeable future.

If you visit the TRON Legacy Digital Book site, you'll need a browser that supports HTML5. All the latest versions of the most popular browsers now support this new standard, including: Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and of course IE9. But the site will be best experienced in Internet Explorer 9, which you can download from Microsoft's site.

The site is also promoting a new TRON Legacy interactive book application for the iPad, that you'll want to check out if you own one. The app presents the complete story presented on the web site in the same interactive format.

Below are a couple of videos: the first demonstrating the site in action, and the second going into the technical details of how the site was created. The second video is quite long, about 15 minutes.

The original TRON is finally arriving on Blu-ray, along with TRON Legacy, on April 5th, 2011.

Yes, I am probably the last person in the world to report this. This has been known across the internet, as far back as January 2011. Sadly, though, I did correctly predict that the original TRON would not show up on Blu-ray in 2009 or 2010. It's been a long wait.

Here are links to the various releases of TRON and TRON Legacy you can purchase on Blu-ray.


The best value is probably the Five Disc set that isn't the Limited Collector's Edition. It includes everything ‒ TRON Legacy in 3-D Bluray, TRON Legacy in 2-D Blu-ray, TRON in Blu-ray, all the extra features ‒ minus the special light-up Light Disc holding case. An unboxing preview from IGN below, has put off a lot of people from buying the expensive Collector's Edition. (Thanks to mikezero on Tron-Sector for the tip.)

With both TRON Legacy and the original TRON arriving on Blu-ray shortly, I thought I'd take a look back at how both TRON Legacy the film and TRON Evolution the game did.


TRON Legacy was still showing in theaters right up until mid-April, 2011. Though in a very limited number of theaters by this point.

During its 17 weeks in release, it earned a total of $400,062,763 ‒ just managing to pass the $400 million mark. Of that total, $172,062,763 was earned domestically (U.S. and Canada) while $228,000,000 was foreign earnings. These earnings figures are sourced from the site Box Office Mojo.

Previously, I predicted that TRON Legacy would be a box office smash. Whether that actually turned out to be the case, is debatable. With a production budget claimed to be $170 million and a marketing campaign rumored at an additional $100 million, for a total cost of approximately $270 million: earning about $400 million couldn't necessarily be considered a smash hit.

Still . . . it's not a flop, either. Though, to be honest, it's the foreign earnings that saved TRON Legacy from being a box office bomb. Earning roughly $170 million in domestic receipts is a poor showing. American audiences weren't really enthused about TRON Legacy, apparently. While international audiences as a whole were more receptive.

So what did I think of TRON Legacy? It was . . . okay.

Coming from something of a TRON fanatic, calling Legacy "okay" is akin to damning it with faint praise. I saw it in IMAX 3-D, and visually there is no question that it was impressive. (Though I still don't like the costumes for the programs in Legacy. They're uninspired and bland without the detailed circuitry patterns from the original costumes. Interesting then, that the preview for the upcoming TRON Uprising animated series seems to have addressed this complaint by adding back some detail. It can be seen starting at the 0:49 mark. Disney actually listening to the fans' feedback? :o )

Rather than type out a long diatribe about what I thought was wrong with Legacy and how it could have been better, I'll just direct you to watch Spoony's rant on TRON Legacy below. It sums up everything that I thought was wrong with the film, far more eloquently than I ever could. I'm not quite as down on the film as Spoony is, though. I at least liked it and thought it was decent. Just not great. Some of the things he took exception with in the story can be explained away, but on the whole he's telling it like it is.

Be warned, though, that the video is a very long rant at almost an hour long. It's also full of SPOILERS if you haven't seen the movie yet, and NSFW either due to language. Even if you intend to watch the entire thing, you might want to skip to the 4:09 mark because he doesn't really talk about TRON Legacy until then. If you want the "short version" where Spoony gets to the point ‒ and the part that really stood out for me, the part I wholeheartedly agree with ‒ then skip to the 44:18 mark.

For the TL;DR crowd, suffice to say that Legacy's story was its biggest flaw. "So much wasted potential."



So will there be another TRON sequel? A TRON 3, for lack of a better title? Rumors point to yes.



As I predicted would occur, TRON Evolution did not do very well. In fact, it was a massive bomb across all three platforms (PC, 360, PS3) doing even worse than I ever imagined. As a result, the Disney-owned developer of Evolution, Propaganda Games, was shut down this January.

Even Disney Interactive itself is in a state of disarray, thanks in part to the poor sales of Evolution. At least two executives at DI either resigned or were fired in the last year, alone. If you've been following this site for any length of time: then you know exactly what I've thought of Disney Interactive over the years, and all of this comes as absolutely no surprise to me. It's a sinking ship that won't be rescued any time soon.

So how did TRON Evolution do, exactly? It sold 190,755 copies worldwide on all three platforms (PC, 360, PS3), as of January 2011. This information was sourced from the L.A. Times.

Going back to one of my previous articles, which talked about how well the sales of TRON 2.0 did, we again have to look at expectations in today's marketplace.

Already, in 2003, sales of 100,000 (estimated) for TRON 2.0 on one platform (PC) was considered "okay" but disappointing. Fast forward 7-8 years, where expectations have essentially increased tenfold. Today, sales of 1 million are just "okay" and still disappointing. Meanwhile, Evolution didn't even reach one-fifth of that number across three platforms.

Then factor in the undoubtedly much larger development and marketing budgets for Evolution vs. TRON 2.0, and the fact that Evolution had the massive hype machine that is the film TRON Legacy behind it . . . and you begin to see that, by today's standards, Evolution essentially did even worse than TRON 2.0. Disney must be reeling in shock, especially after touting how they hoped Evolution would be a huge hit.

To put this in even better perspective, let's look at the sales of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. (A game I highly recommend, by the way.) It's a title made by an independent developer, PC only (at this time), with virtually no marketing behind it. Yet it sold the same number of copies as Evolution, if not more. (Yes, I realize it took a little longer at four months versus one month. But still!)

Ouch.

As for what I think of Evolution: my opinion of it hasn't really changed since I predicted what it would be like, based on the trailers and other previews. In fact, it turned out exactly the way I expected. Here's a summary of TRON Evolution written by a game critic that I fully agree with, as stated in this article under the "Unfortunate Disappointments" heading.

Tron Evolution: The Videogame was a far different kind of bad. This was a game that was creatively bankrupt when it came to gameplay. Looking at what Disney Interactive Studios put together is a game that is essentially a mod for a Prince of Persia game. You could put a Prince of Persia skin on this game and you would never know the difference. I love Tron, and the entire franchise. I am one of the few that has probably played Tron 2.0 at least a dozen times, and have enjoyed it each time. It was a fantastic journey and it felt like something associated with the Tron universe. This game ended up being an injustice to the Tron franchise and actually takes away from what is there from the prior games and movies.

- Joe Haygood, Aeropause Games

To sum up, in my view: TRON Legacy was at least decent if not exceptional, but TRON Evolution was a major disappointment.

June 3rd, 2011 UPDATE: I've updated the article due to the fact that TRON Legacy was still in theaters until a couple of weeks after this was first posted, and because Box Office Mojo has continued to adjust the earnings figures over the last couple of months. This article now reflects the current figures as of June 3rd.

The December 2010 issue of the Hungarian edition of GameStar magazine is including the full retail version of TRON 2.0, for free.

As can be seen in the image on the right, the top of the issue's front cover has the words ""Teljes Játék: TRON 2.0" which means "Full Game: TRON 2.0".

Also, if you visit the GameStar.hu site, you'll see another phrase saying: "Decemberi Tron-áradat: ajándék teljes játékunk minden idők legjobb Tron-játéka: a Tron 2.0, címlapon pedig a Tron: Evolution!" The Google translation result is: "December Tron-tide gift complete game of all time best-Tron game: Tron 2.0, while the front page of Tron: Evolution!"

Frankly, I'd like to know how GameStar's publisher IDG managed to convince Disney Interactive to let them give the game away for free. To me, this seems like a small miracle. Disney has yet to re-release TRON 2.0 in any form, and seems to pretend that it doesn't even exist. (Sure, it gets mentioned in their press releases now and then, but it's always downplayed and treated as unimportant now that Legacy and Evolution are here.)

Perhaps, then, there's some small hope for TRON 2.0 showing up in the not-too-distant future on a service like GOG.com (Good Old Games).

Fandango has sent me some cool preview images of their upcoming Limited Edition TRON Legacy gift cards, that can be used to pay for movie tickets at any theater that accepts them. They'd make great gifts, or even collector's items to TRON fans.





I'd like to thank Fandango for giving me this exclusive first look at their TRON Legacy gift cards. I'll post more information in the future as I receive additional details about them.

If you've been reading this site for any length of time, you've probably noticed that I've said very little about TRON Evolution for the last year. Why is that, you might ask.

Out of fairness to the game, I've been waiting until the last possible moment prior to release, before forming an opinion. I think I've seen enough previews now, to draw an accurate conclusion about the quality of the title. Evolution is scheduled to be released tomorrow (November 26th, 2010) in the UK and possibly most of Europe. (I've found conflicting information as to whether it's just the UK, or a broader European release. So it's not clear at this point.) The North American release date is December 7th, 2010.

Frankly, I don't understand the reasoning behind the staggered release schedule because it's practically inviting people to pirate the game. In fact, the 360 version of Evolution was already pirated a couple of days ago. (So much for piracy only being a PC problem.)

There's also Battle Grids for the Wii, which is a completely different game from Evolution for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. And there are also DS and PSP versions, which are again different.

But let's now take a look at a couple of videos that preview Evolution.


After seeing that, you're probably thinking: "OMFG, this game is going to own!" Yeah, of course it looks awesome. It's a pre-rendered animation done by Digital Domain, who did the CGI on TRON Legacy. But it's not actual gameplay, so it's useless as a means to base any kind of informed opinion.

Let's take a look at Giant Bomb's preview instead. It's a whole half-hour of real gameplay. But be warned that the preview spoils a fair bit of the game.



Let's go over certain points in the video.

• 00:20 - Disney/Propaganda decided to drop the "The Video Game" subtitle from TRON Evolution. Good call. Any game with "The Video Game" as part of its title sounds more than a little tacky.
  
  
• 03:26 - Watch as the employee from Disney Interactive tries to do the parkour moves in order to progress through the level. Is that supposed to be fun? Having to make jumps with fairly precise aim and timing, and then having to do them again and again when you don't manage, doesn't look all that fun to me. A lot of players grumbled about the jumping puzzles in TRON 2.0. Now they've taken the worst part of the previous game, and made that the main gameplay mechanic throughout the entire Single Player campaign.
  
  
• 3:43 - The game's director, Darren Hedges, reveals that there are around 9 levels in the game. (They're on Level 6 and he says they're roughly "two-thirds" of the way through.) Much later at the 17:54 mark, he mentions that total Single Player gameplay length is about 8 hours. This game is short.
  
  
• 5:57 - Hedges makes a point about the player having all sorts of choice in Evolution, and then explains how in a particular area you can either jump up and hit a switch or stay below to hit the switch. That's meant as a good example of choice? Whether to hit a switch from above or below? Sorry, but the level progression still looks very linear to me.
  
  
• 7:01 - Here we can see the other main game mechanic. Brawl style combat, from a third-person perspective. I prefer first-person, but could live with third-person if the gameplay makes up for it. Unfortunately, this brawling combat looks repetitive and boring. The AI seem like pushovers. Just mash the buttons, and beat the crap out of your opponents without having to think too much. The disc is auto-aim, so you have no fine control over it like you did in TRON 2.0. So not much skill or finesse required for disc combat. Also note the text hints on-screen. I hope there's an option to turn this hand-holding measure off.
  
  
• 9:14 - Hedges mentions persistent player progression, where the player can take his or her skill level and abilities from the Single Player game into Multiplayer, and vice-versa. While this sounds cool in theory, I have to wonder how well it will work in practice. The game had better do player matchmaking based on the players' levels, or else matches in Multiplayer will not be very fun.
  
  
• 15:30 - Here again, the Disney Interactive employee demoing the game falls to his death more than once. Jumping puzzles still aren't fun.
  
  
• 19:00 - Hedges mentions that the energy strips on the walls are supposed to keep you constantly moving and progressing rather than "just, basically, walking into a room, plowing your way through - you know - a bunch of bad dudes, and then going to the next room and just repeating it ad infinitum". Well, how does this "high mobility system" prevent that? What a load of bafflegab. It doesn't change anything.
  
  
• 22:33 - Hedges mentions how the PS3 version supports 3-D. What he neglects to mention is that the PC version also supports 3-D. But, honestly, how many people will have the 3-D TV or monitor and glasses, to take advantage of it? It's not a huge selling point at this time. It's really more of a marketing gimmick, than anything.
  
  
• 23:07 - Here, Single Player Light Cycle gameplay is demoed. And, again it looks boring. It's entirely an on-rails experience. You're only allowed to go down a guided track, while explosions go off around you and structures collapse. So all you do is just dodge things, with the occasional opponent Light Cycle showing up. If that's all there is to riding Light Cycles, then it's not really impressive.
  
  
• 25:08 - The DI employee mentions that 90 degree turns have been implemented for Light Cycles in Multiplayer. This was not originally the plan, and only because of fan protests did Propaganda add it at the last-minute. Kind of astonishing to believe they hadn't made it a priority earlier. Then they go on to gripe about how it was difficult to make it work with the physics middleware they're using, which is why they didn't do it sooner. They make it sound so difficult when it really isn't.
  
  
• 27:01 - Now we're shown the Light Tank. While this game mechanic is simplistic as well, at least it will give players an immense sense of satisfaction when they go around blowing away enemies. This is one of the few parts demoed that actually looks like it could be fun.

Finally, at the end of the preview at the 30:32 mark, Hedges is asked if he looked at what came before, when designing Evolution. He mentions TRON 2.0, shareware TRON games, and reading up on what fandom said they wanted.

Indeed, TRON Evolution looks like a game that made a shopping list of must-have features. Those features read pretty closely to a wish list I compiled years ago. But unfortunately, along with implementing what fans wished for: Propaganda also went shopping for what they thought were "cool" features in other current games and ripped them off, in an effort to be trendy and to create what they desperately hope is the recipe for a very successful game.

TRON is not Prince of Persia. TRON is not Mirror's Edge. TRON is not Assassin's Creed. TRON is not Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions. TRON is not Enter the Matrix.

TRON is TRON. Instead of focusing alone on the strengths of what makes TRON unique (Light Cycles, Recognizers, Tanks, pure Disc Combat), they crammed in all these other gameplay elements that fit uneasily into the TRON universe and instead seem forced.

I think Spoony summed up best in his video preview a lot of people's reactions (and certainly mine) when he essentially said: "Parkour? In TRON? No. Just . . . no." This isn't the first time Propaganda has blatantly ripped off other sources, as Yahtzee explains (video is NSFW). The developers try to justify these "borrowed" gameplay elements at the end of this article, but it sounds like they're really reaching when they come up with reasons as justification.

TRON Evolution doesn't look like it will be the kind of game that I'll enjoy much. It's all about being cool and edgy, with lots of sprawling combat and not much else. It has none of the charm or sense of wonder that TRON 2.0 had. The only positive things I can say are that the environments (graphics) look very good, the Light Tank sections look like they could be fun, and Multiplayer seems as if it could be promising. That's about it.

And I think a lot of fans will agree. Particularly those who like old-school TRON. Disney, naturally, is saying and hoping that Evolution will be a huge hit. Of course they would say that, what else would they say? But I'm going out on a limb to predict that Evolution won't be a great success.

Sure, it will probably sell decently. At least one million copies. Which seems to be the minimum required not to be a complete "failure" in today's market. It gets to ride on the coattails of TRON Legacy and has the massive marketing hype machine of the film behind it, after all. Something that TRON 2.0 didn't have, and it went under most people's radars unappreciated as a result.

Disney's Interactive division had some more management shake-ups and has been seeing losses for a long time. TRON Evolution won't change that. It won't be a big hit.

Meanwhile, the film itself - TRON Legacy - should be a box office smash.

November 26th, 2010 UPDATE: Disney Interactive has delayed the PC release of TRON Evolution in the UK until an unspecified date in December. (Scroll to the bottom of this article for the news.) I imagine it will be December 7th, the same date as the release in North America. Unless Disney pulls the same stunt here too, and delays it again. How did I know they would pull this crap? Thanks to fellow LDSO member Win3K for the news.

Early last year, I predicted correctly that the Blu-ray remaster of TRON would not be released in 2009. And I think it's safe to say, that it won't be coming out in 2010, either.

The Blu-ray edition of TRON was originally supposed to appear either shortly before, or at, the release of TRON Legacy in theaters. But once we reached late October/early November with still no word of a Blu-ray release, Disney's silence on the matter was speaking volumes.

The reason for the change in plan, is apparently due to a screening of the film during the summer at Disneyland that Disney executives attended, as detailed over at Blue Sky Disney. The audience reaction was negative. People laughed at the film and thought it looked extremely dated.

I don't know that I agree with Disney's decision to hold back the Blu-ray release until 2011, particularly if they based their decision on a single screening. One negative reaction isn't really enough of a sample to be accurately representative of audiences as a whole. It comes across as a bit of a knee-jerk response.

But we will see the Blu-ray release eventually, which is all I guess really matters. It will now be released at the same time as TRON Legacy is released on Blu-ray. Steven Lisberger, director of the original TRON, has done work on the remaster and comments on it toward the middle of the following video from Collider.com.