Why can Jedi Outcast .gla skeletons not hold objects in Jedi Academy?

[RebornKyle]

I use the Jedi Academy Outcast mod frequently, and the author explained that the reason for some cutscenes missing objects that characters are holding in base Outcast is due to "a handbolt issue"

My understanding is that this is referring to the bone structures being different in key ways between the two games.

My question is, what causes this particular issue? And is it fixable? I've been able to fix some of the issues of that mod, and this would be the last major thing I could fix if I could figure it out.

I've attached an image to show what I mean in case people don't know. It is the cutscene in Mon Mothma's office after the second mission of JK2, where Kyle is supposed to be holding a crystal. This happens to every JK2 animated npc. Objects disappear! But they can reappear if say its a lightsaber and thrown in the air, but will then disappear again once it travels back to their hand. I believe that may be the key there to solving this.

[Linken]

So this is sadly an issue that can only be resolved via coding. When I worked on getting this mod into Galactic Legacy, I struggled a fair bit to figure out the cause. 

Though I can't confirm/deny any other solutions, what I ended up needing to do was add the jk2anims.gla file to 2 functions in the source code to a couple of if statements, which basically told the game "Hi there hello, this is a real humanoid file, treat it like that please or I'll be very sad".

I am at work as of writing this, so I can't provide screenshots, but if you're able to compile OpenJK yourself, search for the function G_StandardHumanoid and add the path to the jk2anims gla in a new if statement (have it return the same value as all the others) , and then there's one other function to do the same thing in which I cannot for the life of me remember what it's called.

This will fix the objects not being held but will also fix character heads moving in the wrong direction too.

[RebornKyle]

3 hours ago, Linken said:

So this is sadly an issue that can only be resolved via coding. When I worked on getting this mod into Galactic Legacy, I struggled a fair bit to figure out the cause. 

Though I can't confirm/deny any other solutions, what I ended up needing to do was add the jk2anims.gla file to 2 functions in the source code to a couple of if statements, which basically told the game "Hi there hello, this is a real humanoid file, treat it like that please or I'll be very sad".

I am at work as of writing this, so I can't provide screenshots, but if you're able to compile OpenJK yourself, search for the function G_StandardHumanoid and add the path to the jk2anims gla in a new if statement (have it return the same value as all the others) , and then there's one other function to do the same thing in which I cannot for the life of me remember what it's called.

This will fix the objects not being held but will also fix character heads moving in the wrong direction too.

Oh wow thank you! Yes I'm able to compile OpenJK myself, wouldn't have guessed this was required for the skeleton as other than this and the head turning you mentioned, it works rather well. I would've guessed bone mismatch or something.

Honestly I should've realized it though because that's how I managed to fix Galak and his animations, among many many other things that JKA either didn't bother importing or disabled completely.

[Linken]

5 minutes ago, RebornKyle said:

Oh wow thank you! Yes I'm able to compile OpenJK myself, wouldn't have guessed this was required for the skeleton as other than this and the head turning you mentioned, it works rather well. I would've guessed bone mismatch or something.

Honestly I should've realized it though because that's how I managed to fix Galak and his animations, among many many other things that JKA either didn't bother importing or disabled completely. 

If I recall correctly, I believe that the game does actually account for Jedi Outcast models being present and has code to make them behave like normal so you'd never notice. 

The problem is that the game hardcoded the expected humanoid filenames. This presents other problems, like being unable to play through the JKA campaign with a character with their own humanoid file because cutscene animations don't work. 

[RebornKyle]

Happy to say this worked! Kyle and co. are no longer schizophrenic, pretending to hold a crystal. It pops in clear as day. This also fixes the Nar Shaddaa bar scene, which was afflicted by this bug the most.

Linken, it's not very scientific or even smart to do this, but all I did was duplicate the if statements found in the OpenJK project mentioning _humanoid for it to work. Thanks again!

[Linken]

40 minutes ago, RebornKyle said:

Happy to say this worked! Kyle and co. are no longer schizophrenic, pretending to hold a crystal. It pops in clear as day. This also fixes the Nar Shaddaa bar scene, which was afflicted by this bug the most.

Linken, it's not very scientific or even smart to do this, but all I did was duplicate the if statements found in the OpenJK project mentioning _humanoid for it to work. Thanks again!

That is a very common programming practice and is used constantly. You're just following the crowd.