Progress Report: 1/24/20

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PROGRESS REPORT: 1/24/20

Even with the disaster surrounding the updater these few weeks, things for the mod have still been done!

DUEL OF THE FATES

The fixes for the Duel of the Fates mission are progressing very nicely. I'm utilizing everything I've learned from developing the other missions to improve the overall quality of this mission. So far for Obi-Wan's POV, everything up until the forcefield hallway scene has been reviewed and fixed. While not too many visible changes will be immediately noticeable, each script has been looked at and carefully edited. I didn't realize until actually playing through the mission again that the mission was less broken than I realized.

Despite this, some changes will be noticeable, for example the introduction cutscene has been slightly extended to include the walk up to the door. Other changes may be slightly less noticeable, as no npcs will have their origins switched while in plain view in the middle of a scripted cutscene, allowing for a higher quality experience.

The majority of changes to the actual mission will be primarily focused on the forcefield hallway to the ending of the mission. Originally, the hallway was a live cutscene, with almost a whole minute of waiting for Obi-Wan's POV. I have received a lot of criticism for this, and I will be taking steps to correct this. To begin, the forcefield hallway will be a properly scripted cutscene and will no longer be live. Additionally, a checkpoint will be triggered when the forcefield opens and you're able to confront Darth Maul, so just in case if you die, you won't be forced to endure the entire mission again with a lot more waiting.

Concepts have been finalized and I will be working closely with Darth Voiid to have these endings as entertaining as possible.

THE FETTS

While we always had the option to give Jango and Boba Fett the performance of Termuera Morrison, we were always held back by the major inconsistency it would cause concerning Boba Fett's brief appearance in the Jedi Academy mod, as he was voiced by Tom Kane. We felt that having 2 very different voices would be incredibly odd and wouldn't have been of an acceptable quality for the mod.

However, thanks to the hard work of one of our team members that desperately wanted this change done, Jango and Boba Fett will have a full soundset in the voice of Temuera Morrison. In addition to this, the team member was also able to find suitable replacement dialogue for Boba Fett in the Jedi Academy campaign, so Temuera Morrison will completely replace Tom Kane's performance as Boba Fett in the main game.

LIGHTSABER LOCKING

We were successful in creating a new console command for the mod to allow you to completely enable or disable lightsaber clashes/locks, allowing you to further play the mod the way you would like to play it.

Additionally, this has also been implemented into the BehavED scripting tool, which will allow us to enable and disable saber locks during cutscenes where NPCs are fighting each other. This will also cause a greater quality for the mod as lightsaber locks can often ruin cutscenes and can cause some very silly issues.

MORE MISSIONS

2 new missions (excluding Duel of the Fates) are in active development, with 6 others currently in concept phases. We will reveal them when they are ready to be announced, please stay tuned.

ORDER 66

After our decision to remove our Order 66 challenge mode from the mod with our previous update, we were met with immediate backlash on our Discord server, with community feedback overwhelmingly wanting the mode back in the mod. We have recognized our mistake and will place it back in the mod at some point. We would like to create more Delta Squad challenges to accompany it however. We will have more details at some point in the future.

MUSIC MENU

We have approached the mod lead and head of UI creation, Fire Phoenix, and have approached him with a frequently suggested feature for the mod, a menu so you can select your own music. He has also expressed interest in this and we will be discussing this later on in further detail. A spreadsheet is currently in active development with a list of all music tracks currently in the mod which we will make available at some point in the near future. We have listened.

NPC SKIN SELECTION AND NEW CHARACTERS

We have a giant list of characters that you all have requested us to put in the mod. While we very much would like to add all of them in, we also understand that even though we were successful in greatly increasing the NPC limit in the source code, we still only had a finite amount of space to put npcs.

On one late evening, I fiddled around with the code, and was able to create a very basic system to allow the npc spawn command to dictate the npc's appearance. If we are able to get this implemented properly, we will be able to remove hundreds of npcs from the mod and still offer the same number of npcs, and more.

Similar solutions are currently being looked into for the NPC's alignment and weapons, to allow us a better quality for the NPC Free Choice System we implemented in the mod back in July 2018 and to allow you, the player, more control of the NPCs you populate the mod with.

If we are successful with this endeavor, we will be able to populate the mod with even more characters, and even allow the opportunity for you to place your own characters in the mod.

CONCLUSION

We hope to make this year a great year for Knights of the Force, and we are thankful for all of your support. We may have lost the updater, but never our resolve, and we will continue to learn and grow for you.

Thank you for following the development of Knights of the Force 2.2, and may the Force be with you.