Once upon a time, there was Dark Forces. 

Dark Forces was an awesome game, so many people out there wanted to extend its life a whole lot, create extra levels, objects, etc. In fact, I started working on DFUSE when I got the Dark Forces DEMO on a cover CD. The file formats were similar (except the level was stored in binary instead of text, which made it even more fun to decipher :)). I didn't want to release the formats or an editor for the DEMO even though it existed (before DFUSE) for ethical reasons -- i.e. you could have made additional levels for the demo. Anyway, long story short, DFUSE was coming... and when Dark Forces shipped and I got time to adapt to DEMO->RELEASE changes, DFUSE followed soon after (along with the very full size add-on level that my friend Serge and I made -- Secbase Revisited).

Then there was DFUSE.

As far as I know, DFUSE source code is entirely lost. The snapshot of the code base I gave Brad Oliver to get a head start  on the Mac editor (what was it called again? Dark Forge?) might still exist if he kept it... Not that it really matters, it was crappy code from another age. It was all written in Borland C, the graphics were using BGI. Can you imagine I had to actually program functions to draw boxes on the screen, and build menus from those boxes, and handle interrupts to detect mouse movement? :) 

DFUSE was a pretty big success, in a couple of weeks (the internet wasn't what it is today with news sites all over the place!) I started receiving emails from all over the world. From the US (including some emails from people at LucasArts who'd become colleagues later on!), to Russia and Japan, etc.

In fact, DFUSE was maybe a bit too much of a success, which caused the next version to become shareware... I was raking in insane telephone bills from spending all that time on the net (there were no flat rates in Belgium at that time, we were paying by the minute). Also, quite frankly, I wanted people to pay the little shareware fee just to screen my emails to people who actually cared about making Dark Forces levels, and exclude  the typical 'net d00d' who is looking to release a quick 1 room crap level and believes the entire world owes him everything.

Then there was WDFUSE.

WDFUSE was born as I got a copy of Delphi at work, and I had to learn it professionally. What better way than to take a few week ends and rewrite DFUSE? It was my first real complex app in Windows (I had written a few tools using Win32 directly, but they were much simpler) and it showed... I'd do many things differently today :)

It still worked real well, and more and more people made levels. Registrations checks came in the letterbox, 90+% of which were never taken to the bank -- I tried some from non-Euro countries, they told me the fees would be like $15... I told them what I thought of bankers and walked out :)

Still, it worked to screen, and my phone bills dropped down tremendously (also due to the fact I could use work connections, etc. more easily).

Lots and lots of levels were made with WDFUSE, and the most prominent and active people in the community gravitated together to work on the Dark Forces specifications, etc. I also moved to the US to work at Lucas Arts around that time. 

And then there was Code Alliance.

All this led to the creation of the Code Alliance. Everyone involved did research on Dark Forces formats, gave feedback on usability, everyone went in to do some changes to the codebase, etc. 

However on top of those common things, David Lovejoy was the webmaster extraordinaire, Alexei Novikov was an excellent coder and Jereth Kok came up with some great testing. 

When I got totally out of time -- i.e. I started work on Jedi Knight after a transatlantic move with my wife, my cats and all my stuff -- those worthy friends took over WDFUSE and everything else. That was pretty awesome :) I lost my last copy of WDFUSE's codebase recently in an HDD crash... hopefully one of my co-conspirators kept it around.

Sadly, I never met David and Jereth... But I got a chance to meet Alexei and got him to visit LucasArts, see some stuff and "pressure" him to make an editor for Jedi Knight. 

That's how Jed was born, but that's another story :)

The links to the left are pretty much all I salvaged from those times...