Dusty's Patch: An SP mod for JA

[Dusty]

mrwonko seems like he's looking into the screenshot stuff. He's currently working on his own version of a JA SP proxy DLL which should help you out.

Any plans for JK2 stuff?

 

To Mr.wonko, thank you. About the jk2 stuff, I'm mainly just bring some sounds and models that might be cool. Like say the reborn3 sounds that I noticed are missing from the JA reborn boss npc. I mean, I have JK2, so it's no big deal.

 

 

But back on topic:

I'm mainly saying I could use another pair of hands or two just for some small stuff. Like if someone wanted to do me a huge favor, and put together an inventory select menu for me...

 

Eh I don't know, it seems easy on paper but it's way more tedious and time-consuming when I actually try to do stuff.

[Dusty]

So I basically told myself I was done messing with the saber combat... wrong...

 

Uhh, this game frustrates me with how it's set up. You can't tweak things to a subtle end except for animation speeds. Like, if I give a bonus to a saber for breaking a parry at the lowest value of 1, that makes the saber so powerful as to obliterate the defenses of any sabers with a parry bonus of less than 3, and this also works inversely with -1.

 

And if I just make sabers good at blocking each other then it gets annoying because every swing you get completely parried/stunned for like 2 seconds which gets old fast. Headaches...

[Dusty]

So even though this mod is mostly unfinished, I need some feedback. Here's a beta version of the mod. If you guys could try it out and tell me what you think, I'd appreciate it. I'm honestly overwhelmed by the amount of time this has sucked up, especially because I keep changing my mind on certain features. Expect some menu stuff to be a tad awkward and buggy.

 

What it currently includes:

Changes-

Saber Combat:

- Medium style deflection speed increased about 20%

- Strong style deflection speed increased about 5-10%

- Faster recovery from swings being parried for single saber

- Staff saber twirl replaced with hilt bash attack

- Dual sabers twirl replaced with overpowered spin attack (dual sabers are listed as dualssab_1, dualssab_2 etc.)

- Saber throws removed, now all sabers can kick (front kick is slowest, then side kicks, then rear is fastest)

 

NPCs

- Stormtroopers fire faster and have better accuracy

- Force cultists have less force points but run faster

- Slightly improved accuracy for impworker, human_merc, trandoshan

- Rebornmasters given shorter sabers (they had a fracking cheap 6 ft long saber)

- A couple slightly tougher Jedi NPCs

 

General:

- Most saber lengths increased slightly

- Running animation speeds tweaked slightly (purely visual)

- Saber ignited walking back anim now holds the saber in a guard stance for all saber types

- Changed HUD (uses JA remix hud by I forget who on jk2files)

- Has holster button added to Weapon controls (these buttons all work as a cycle, you click the field and the games binds it to a key I preset for you, in the case of the mblock button, it will bind it to MOUSE3 when you click)

- Has Manual block and Meleekata (gives you normal punching melee without katas, and acts as a button for performing katas) buttons as well as inventory controls added to interaction controls

- Has game tips added to loading screens

- Speeds up melee punches slightly

- Has a toggle between 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person views controlled by the default P key.

- Has some options added to the setup menu

- Has some half-working options and inventory select menus in the SP campaign

- Adds 4 hilts to SP saber selection, Forge (credits to Inyri Forge), Buster (credits to Bust0 I think?), a skin of the Stinger, and Retribution/the Desann hilt.

- Some SP strings edited slightly

 

Here's the link:

http://www.gamefront...y's_mod.zip

[Dusty]

No one wants to help me test/critique my mod?    I'm just looking for some basic feedback, like how the little adjustments I made to saber combat feel, how the camera views are working, npc tweaks, which buttons I should set as bindable for my mblock command... (the 3 downloads on the filefront page are me, I was testing the download.)

 

I'll edit this post with some screens to show you guys what I've done specifically.

 

 

Some SP options for starting a new game. Saber Damage doesn't do anything right now.


A loading screen.




Over the shoulder, normal 3rd person, and far cameras.


Over the shoulder with a gun. (I should prolly move the camera so you can see the gun a tad.)


M-Blocking, raises the saber for a quick block.




Force blur effects toggled on and off.


The rebound animation for medium style is a tad quickened, resulting in more reliable blaster deflection, as well as faster saber parrying.

 

[therfiles]

Wow...that's...really good! That looks really solid! I would love how to know how you did over the shoulder SP. I've tried to do that tons of times for my Harry Potter mod. If you feel comfortable, maybe PM how you did it. Again, wow! Great work!

 

Sorry for not critiquing your mod yet. I haven't had a whole lot of time, will do same!

[therfiles]

Had a chance to poke around...really good! The 2nd person and tips were really cool. I couldn't get them to work without execing and vstring, but hey, for beta phase it looks good. The ui's could use a little polish, but not much. I'll keep looking.

[Circa]

Just saw this thread. Looks really good! I'm a full supporter of SP mods, as an exclusive SP player. Great stuff here.

[Dusty]

Sorry for takin a while. That's weird, everything should work without any activating... I know the camera views and some special controls only work by going into the controls menu and clicking the control button once.

 

So I'm playing with the saber combat again.

 

One thing that always annoys me is the really strong saber wielding enemies. I like how they're saber combat is strong, but at the same time, it's really annoying how their main skill is in interrupting your own slashes with theirs... like when you sit still and they come and swing at you, its normal attacking. But then when you slash at them they move at ridiculous speed and pull off a 4 hit combo in less than a second that completely interrupts your attack if you don't time it just right. Really annoying because it basically forces you to rely on force powers and special moves for damage. Thinking about how I'm going to work this...

[therfiles]

Ah...maybe that's it. Autoexec is exec'd when the game opens, and on the ingame menu. So if you put commands in there that only work ingame, they probably won't work.

 

Don't we want strong saberers? Don't we need much more difficult enemies. Sure, they may spam attack a lot, but they force the player into dueling with skill, not simply hacking with no aim.

[Dusty]

The reason for the controls is this. I can have the buttons for my special commands (aka manual-blocking) work like other controls...

 

however... since I can't edit the game code, the buttons like my "mblock" will work, but they won't show your key bind status, rather it will always display as "Manual Block: ???", even though it will bind to the key like normal, it won't show the button you chose. I thought maybe I'd make it a list/multi command where you click the ??? field and it cycles through a couple pre-defined buttons for you so it'd be less confusing.

 

The thing about the strong saberers is that, I feel like they're really cheap about how they hit you, they only wait for you to start to attack and then suddenly gain the ability to swing at 10x normal speed and chain a 5-hit combo. Ideally I'd like to make them actually launch some furious assaults at you without just waiting for you to attack and cheaply interrupting you always. Thing is I don't want to make their close combat weaker, I just dislike how this method discourages the player from toe-to-toe combat. Rather maybe I could make enemies focus less on swing interruption and more on blocking and attacking somehow...

 

 

EDIT: Also, I apologize, thank you guys for the support and postings, and all the help everyone has given me so far, I appreciate all the support, and thanks for helping me test therfiles! 

[Dusty]

EDIT: Basically what I'd want to do:

Blocking strength: Defense 1 < 2 < 3 (right now defense 1 can block offense 3 attacks, no difference)

Attack strength: Offense 1 < 2 < 3, rather than 1 = 2 = 3 except for saber locking

 

And also, defense 0 is actually better at blocking blaster bolts than defense 1, at defense 0, the character doesn't even try to auto-block blaster bolts, and where they would normally bounce off your saber, they just go through you without dealing damage 90% of the time.

[Agent Jones]

looks nice!

[Dusty]

Time for a little update.

 

Here's the latest version:

http://www.gamefront.com/files/22888584/dusty%27s_mod.zip

 

Changes from Base to the last version:

 

 

Changes-
Saber Combat:
- Medium style deflection speed increased about 20%
- Strong style deflection speed increased about 5-10%
- Faster recovery from swings being parried for single saber
- Staff saber twirl replaced with hilt bash attack
- Dual sabers twirl replaced with overpowered spin attack (dual sabers are listed as dualssab_1, dualssab_2 etc.)
- Saber throws removed, now all sabers can kick (front kick is slowest, then side kicks, then rear is fastest)

NPCs
- Stormtroopers fire faster and have better accuracy
- Force cultists have less force points but run faster
- Slightly improved accuracy for impworker, human_merc, trandoshan
- Rebornmasters given shorter sabers (they had a fracking cheap 6 ft long saber)
- A couple slightly tougher Jedi NPCs

- Some NPCs like rebel troopers, bespin cops, kyle, luke, desann stats edited

General:
- Most saber lengths increased slightly
- Running animation speeds tweaked slightly (purely visual)
- Saber ignited walking back anim now holds the saber in a guard stance for all saber types
- Changed HUD (uses JA remix hud by I forget who on jk2files)
- Has holster button added to Weapon controls (these buttons all work as a cycle, you click the field and the games binds it to a key I preset for you, in the case of the mblock button, it will bind it to MOUSE3 when you click)
- Has Manual block and Meleekata (gives you normal punching melee without katas, and acts as a button for performing katas) buttons as well as inventory controls added to interaction controls
- Has game tips added to loading screens
- Speeds up melee punches slightly
- Has a toggle between 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person views controlled by the default P key.
- Has some options added to the setup menu
- Has some half-working options and inventory select menus in the SP campaign
- Adds 4 hilts to SP saber selection, Forge (credits to Inyri Forge), Buster (credits to Bust0 I think?), a skin of the Stinger, and Retribution/the Desann hilt.
- Some SP strings edited slightly (like better force power descriptions, changed "enemies killed:" to "enemies defeated:")

 

 

 

Changes in the Last version I forgot to mention at the time:

- Punches should play punch sounds correctly

- Altfiretime for sabers increased (makes it so you can't kick/saberthrow as rapidly)

- Defeated enemies now grunt sometimes when you mess with them

- Changes the startup JA screen to one with Jedi Academy box art

- Changes the loading screen to the green glowing Jedi Knight Series symbol

 

 

Changes since the last one-

Saber combat:

- single saber saber locking strength increased

- hilt bash from staff temporarily removed (has saber twirl again, due to my laziness)

- medium style swing speed increased slightly (this affects only the "A" animations)

- single saber ----> parry bonus increased from 1 to 2

- saber lengths reset mostly except for staff which has lengths of "33"

 

NPCs:

- RancorSNP's NPCs fix integrated into my mod

 Alora_dual is now using Alora2 skin. 
¤ Assassin_droid sound fixed .
¤ Fixed Bartender, no longer weird dance.
¤ Deleted Cultist Destroyer (Its just lack of animation, if you wanna keep him just delete Cultist_destroyer.npc from my *.pk3)
¤ Imperial Commander is now using his own voice, no longer same as Imperial Officer
¤ Deleted Jawa_Armed, he's weapon was never fully created, crashing game, no use of them.
¤ Fixed Morgan Katarn, added him few force powers (no saber, he was forceuser not jedi).
¤ Rebel and Rebel 2 are now using their own voice
¤ Rebel 2 now have changed look to rebel pilot
¤ Deleted duplicated Rebel2
¤ Fixed Remote to look like it should be looking. (Still glitchy... but sometimes usable)
¤ Removed RocketTrooper_ver1 this is just scaled stormtrooper, game have another rockettrooper NPC, guess they forgot to delete it.
¤ Tried to fix rocks NPC, it failed so they're deleted. No use of them.
¤ Increased Rosh's hp to prevent him from killing himself while jumping over the river. (has about 50 hp now)
¤ Deleted Test NPC.
¤ Deleted duplicated STOfficerAlt
¤ Changed Tusken Sniper ally and enemy side. Now they're like normal tusken FREE/FREE.
¤ Fixed walk speed of nearly all NPC's. (Useful to scripts, or roleplay NPC controll)

- stormtroopers given class_stormtrooper again (as opposed to class_jan, this makes their aim a tad more sloppy and scales their abilities with the game difficulty), hp increased from 30 to 40

- tie pilots now fire slightly faster, have slightly better aim than a stormtrooper, and run slightly faster, however has 30 hp

- impworker aim improved slightly

- jedi npc stats tinkered with more 

- saber wielding cultists buffed slightly

- rebornmasters made slightly less cheap, single wielding masters get tavion style instead of fast style

- reborn adepts (the blue new reborns) get an extra force power (it was Force Heal I think) and faster running speed (they seemed kind of pointless as they were just less strong versions of the red reborns)

 

General:

- added Saber Crystal Color Icons by Zicmak

- added Masterhill's sabers MKIII

- added broken staff sabers by minilogoguy18

- inventory menu works now kind of 

- new game options (like force hints: on/off) work now I think

- adjustments to the 2nd person camera view

- adjustments to control settings in the control menus

- slight ui fixups here and there

- Dynamic glow height and width sliders changed to a "dynamic glow intensity: normal/low/very low"

- not working hud option added (supposed to let you change HUDs ingame, but is buggy, worked at first but I seem to have messed it up somehow)

- slightly modded lightning effects (uses purple lightning gfx from JK2, went for less quantity, more powerful looking lightning)

 

Credits:

Minilogoguy18 – broken staff sabers

Zicmak – saber crystal icons

Inyri Forge – Forge hilt

Buster Senatu – Buster hilt

Angel Soul – new Force icons

RancorSNP – NPCs mod, helpful website with SP cmds

MasterHill – Masterhill’s Sabers MKIII

[NFOR]Neo_Knight – JA Remix hud

Darth NormaN- Elegance hud

TheRFiles, eezstreet, Mr.wonko, Master_Ibonek, Agent Jones and others on JKHub for their help and support so
far!

 

 

Screenshots and descriptive captions following:

Single Sabers can kick now. Too bad I can't let you have throw and kick at the same time...

 

The vstr melee kata command. If you haven't used it in a level yet, it adds melee to your stock. After that, it switches you to melee, or if you're in melee, makes you do a kata. Melee right now only gives you punching. I did it this way so it wouldn't be too overpowered. I sped up the punches a bit though.

 

Increased single saber lock strength a bit. Why does wielding a single saber make one weaker in a lock than staff/duals? Silly IMO.

 

Those reborn master chumps. I made their saber a bit shorter, so it looks less like a lance. The single wielders now get tavion style instead of fast.

 

Those reborn adepts I was talking about.

 

 

 

 

A look at some of my menus. Inventory menu works now and gives you your items when you start a level, as long as the scripts and cfgs exec correctly. A bit austere looking though.

 

Dynamic glow settings (from top to bottom): normal, low, very low.

 

The plight of the electro binoculars. Pretty sure they switch to first person view, but in JKA unlike JK2, there is no first person lightsaber view, so they stay in 3rd person for lightsabers, but work appropriately otherwise.

 

 

 

[Dusty]

^Updated my post a bit.

[Circa]

This looks great. 

 

I wish I could get dynamic glow to work period. It doesn't work on my MacBook. It looks so much better than without it.

[Dusty]

Time I bumped my topic I suppose. I will say, I don't have a big update to make, as I haven't been working on this a whole ton lately. Here's what I will say.

 

This mod is actually nearing completion I think, more or less. The main things I need to do, are to fix up some of my menu stuff that doesn't work right and also some of the UI bugs I've managed to cause in the normal game menus. And then, I need to finish adding the bonus missions which is probably the biggest job.

 

And I also am changing around the mod's setup (like separating the cosmetic music, effects and animation changes into their own .pk3 for easy removal, changing sabers so they don't conflict with MP, maybe having it load through the mod menu etc.).

I also finally decided on what I'm going to do about the saber offense/defense thing. I want to give a sense of progression of saber abilities during the game.

 

So basically through .sab files, you start out weak and progress automatically to a point at the same time as your saber offense and defense powers increase. With each level up though, you'll get to pick a stat increase like how you add a saber style. 

 

Starting out:

Saber speed = 0.92

ParryBonus = -1

BreakParryBonus = -1

Force Points = 80

 

1st level up:   (when you'd normally pick your 2nd saber style)

Auto Increase:

Saber speed => 1.0

ParryBonus => 1

BreakParryBonus => 0

Force Points = 100

 

2nd level up:   (when you normally pick the 3rd saber style)

Auto Increase:

ParryBonus => 2

DisarmBonus  => 1

LockBonus => 1 (might keep it 0 and make it an increase you have to buy)

 

Choice Increases (Pick 3):

Offense Boost;   Saber speed => 1.05, LockBonus => 1    (or 2 if I make you start with 1)

Defense Boost;   ParryBonus => 3, DisarmBonus => 2

Learn Tavion Style;   gives tavion style

Force Points;   100 => 120

Force Regen;   100 ms => 95 ms   (makes a difference you'd be surprised!)

[Mandalorian]

Some cool features you plan to use! I like to see more singleplayer mods and get ideas for my own. I think that jk2 definately had some features that would be cool to see again in jk3.

[Dusty]

So, I was wondering if I could discuss methods to make close-combat more rewarding in SP saber duels. I'm talking mostly codeless edits or simple/small code edits.

 

Basically, I want to make hit and run sabering a bit less rewarding and make close-combat more rewarding. Here's what I've thought about:

1. Decreasing saber movement speed while attacking slightly

- Forces you to get into range with saber attacks earlier

- Makes it harder to pop in and out of close range while swinging

- This is more realistic? Wouldn't you slow-down slightly IRL if you were putting a lot of power into a swing?

 

2. Removing saber throw

- NPCs are cheap with it, you can be cheap with it

- NPCs drop the saber occasionally leaving them defenseless

- NPCs/you have to use force powers for ranged attacks instead (Reborn master and Desann force lightning moar?)

- Only downside is you have to use guns against turrets and stuff

 

3. Decreasing max chain for all styles

- Well this wouldn't make much of a difference

- It'd just give you less control over the saber

- Maybe decrease spamming a bit though

 

4. Increasing saber damage

- Doesn't really make much difference either way, or does it?

- Makes using your saber more purposeful as opposed to force powers etc.

 

5. Decreasing frequency of saber locks

- Makes it less risky to be blocked vs. bosses and stuff

- Takes away fun/makes saber contact less important (which I don't want)?

 

6. Make blocking more reliable and purposeful

- I can speed up blocking making it faster and better

- Make countering more important; where you block a weak swing then do an auto-aimed attack that rips through defenses

- ^This is a double-edged sword:

Over-doing it can slow down gameplay and make it annoying when you are always staggered by blocks or can always stagger NPCs and encourage even more hit-and-run gameplay

 

 

Anyone have any other ideas? Or comments/suggestions on my existing ideas?

[Circa]

I like all of these ideas.

 

As far as realistic lightsabers, turning on g_sabermorerealistic in SP makes that happen. It's crazy how much more distance you keep from an NPC when that's on because the slightest touch can kill you.

[Dusty]

^Huh. Yeah if I used g_sabermorerealistic I wouldn't take it past 1. I'd probably just scale damage up in the .sab files though. Maybe 25% about.

[Circa]

I thought it was just a toggle anyway? 0 or 1, on and off. I can't imagine it being more realistic than 1 is.

[eezstreet]

Make sabers shorter. That would encourage close combat, wouldn't it?

[Dusty]

Make sabers shorter. That would encourage close combat, wouldn't it?

 

Lies. Dey already short enough.

 

 

I thought it was just a toggle anyway? 0 or 1, on and off. I can't imagine it being more realistic than 1 is.

 

Oh hoho just try turning it up to 2 or 3. Each level racks up the damage even more.

[Circa]

Lies. Dey already short enough.

 

 

 

 

Oh hoho just try turning it up to 2 or 3. Each level racks up the damage even more.

Seriously? On 1 if yo just touch an idle saber you die pretty much. Crazy! I'll have to try that.

[Dusty]

Seriously? On 1 if yo just touch an idle saber you die pretty much. Crazy! I'll have to try that.

 

On level 1 unless you have on some mods sabers shouldn't do any idle damage. They will damage during blocks or transitions however. On level 2 the damage and dismemberment is ramped up further I believe. On level 3 the damage is ridiculous and idle sabers are changed to do damage (and since idle sabers aren't "blocked", this leads to very cheap fighting).