Raven: "No C&Ds for modders"

[eezstreet]

Singleplayer modifications and engine hacks are now officially not cared about if you're a modder, as one employee of Raven emailed me:

Realistically no-one here cares ( in C&D way that is ) about people tinkering with old games to mod them, there are many web pages about this and in the past ( when our games were specifically designed to be modded ) we actively supported this.

[MUG]

Singleplayer modifications and engine hacks are now officially not cared about if you're a modder, as one employee of Raven emailed me:

Would be good to have a screenshot of that email about for people so they can be sure they have proof =P

[Astral Serpent]

Here you go, eezstreet was talking to us about this on #jacoders, doubt he'll mind if I paste the emails here:

his emails, not mine, I'm not nick.

E-mail sent to Ste Cork

 

Hello.

Ah, good. I had some weird feeling inside me that I was going about this all wrong, heh. Well, no need to fear, I'm certainly no game suggester or Nigerian prince, but rather I'm an aspiring programmer who's looking for a bit of direction when it comes to this industry here. I've seen your work on Jedi Knight 2/Jedi Academy, and those are where most of my modding projects lie. Interestingly enough, one of my projects was something which brought a sort of Modern Warfare-ish atmosphere to Jedi Academy. I'm not really asking for any sort of handout or a job offering or anything like that (I've still got a year of high school + college ahead of me), but I'll be right to the point.

As I said above, I've been getting myself deeper and deeper into the workings of the C and C++ programming languages. I don't know how much I can say without getting a C&D slammed down on me or something for violating EULA, but I've been working on a solution for Jedi Academy which will allow us to begin doing single player modifications to the VM. So far, I've gotten the whole of the spawn functions remade, with what little I can do with RE'ing and transferring of stuff from MP to SP. However, I really feel that that doesn't "cut the mustard" so to speak. I've been hearing rumors that Raven has lost the source code to Jedi Knight 2/A, and I wasn't sure if this was true or not. I've had this kind of growing suspicion that there's something within the singleplayer source code that Raven doesn't really want to have anything to do with. Maybe you guys had to give it in to Lucasarts, I'm not really sure. But either way, some information regarding this would be nice. I think perhaps you can understand where I'm coming from, as a fellow programmer.

Oh, but er. In case you're not able to give out any sort of information, a handout wouldn't be bad. Not a job of course, but maybe some insight into JK2's singleplayer development. I know about two cut singleplayer missions already. What's this about a mission called "prototype"? I also see some dialogue here mentioned with no sound files.

But wait! In case you can't do that either..uh...heh. Put my name on a plaque in Modern Warfare 4 or something? Pwetty please? :3

 

 

His Reply

 

Hey Nick,

 

 

 

Realistically no-one here cares ( in C&D way that is ) about people tinkering with old games to mod them, there are many web pages about this and in the past ( when our games were specifically designed to be modded ) we actively supported this. Nowdays the games we make don’t tend to work that way so it’s really a non-issue. But modding old games is still a pretty good way to get an interview at different places IMO, and a number of our programmers here ( including at least one 15 year vet ) got started in the mod scene, since it usually shows you can at least code. Not everyone has degrees, and in this industry it’s more dependent on what you can do, rather than paper qualifications ( I myself have none at all for instance, just longevity from the old days ;-) So don’t worry about if you don’t feel that it’s “cutting the mustard”, it shows both technical awareness, and an ability to persevere even with a dearth of support on an older engine.

 

 

 

We haven’t lost the source code to it, we’ve got 99% of our code lying around though we no longer use SourceSafe ( as was current at the time ) so there’s no version history. This is again pretty common in the industry, virtually every studio uses Perforce now so any games written before then exist solely as a directory-dump, not as actual Perforce projects with revision trails etc. The odd utility may have got lost over the years, since they were often in separate ‘tools’ dirs. That maybe someone forgot to back up when shutting down SourceSafe but TBH there’s nothing that we’d care about from that many years ago anyway. In either case the SourceCode for JK2 and JKA belong to LucasArts, so we’re still not free to release anything anyway. It’s no secret that it was a Quake 3 license, the rest is just things bolted on to that. I wasn’t a gameplay programmer on that project, having diverted into tools/tech programming soon after arriving at Raven, so while I do know things about the audio and video streaming, foreign language support, model compiler/viewer and the like, I know almost nothing about the VM system ( other than some of the coding limitations it placed on the Asian-string-parsers ) since that was part of the quake license code and didn’t need fiddling with, so I probably can’t help out with any tech queries about that. I was involved with the IBI/BehavEd scripting system/tools, but there’s nothing mysterious there and indeed at least one enterprising chap has already written a disassembler for it, so it’s fairly well known about.

 

 

 

Re: ‘prototype’ I asked one of the other guys here from that period ( James Monroe the lead programmer of JK2/JKA ) and he said that to the best of his knowledge every single game he’s worked on here has had a level called ‘prototype’, even if just as a filename, not some onscreen string. Kind of like having a map called ‘test’ then eventually keeping it, the average end-user never sees actual filenames so it saves renaming various scripts etc to leave some level files as is once they get good enough to go in the game. No worse than level0.map, level1.map … ;-)

 

 

 

Regarding the dialog with no sound files: nothing mysterious there. Back in the day we’d have all sorts of assets that may or may not have ended up in the final game ( as levels were cut/split/etc during story changes or time constraints ) so it was sometimes hard to know what files to ship, and shipping all of them would take up too much room, so the quake-engine simply had a ‘copyfiles’ variable that you set for making a master disk, and played through the game with it on to force a copy of every opened file from the network to a local drive. Once you’d finished playing through the game then everything that was on your local drive was what the game needed, and the files that were only on the network could stay there as being unused. Dialog though was in string files, which might contain hundreds of text strings but the inclusion of them was an all-or-nothing affair since the entire file was either kept or it wasn’t, there was no cleanup code to removed dead strings. Since recorded dialog was usually placeholder stuff by staff members back then only the final dialog that shipped would have real recording done towards the end, so many text strings had no audio recording backing them up if they were never used by the game, hence the discrepancy.

 

 

 

And sorry, but adding names to plaques in MW4 is out of the question. With (literally) hundreds of people involved in making the game ( across several studios ), if we even tried to put references to all the developers into the ingame world it’d look like a complete mess, never mind people not even involved with it. There are only so many places you can sneak stuff in shop names and posters on walls after all, and they have to fit the local game environment. For instance in Quake 4 one of the NPC scripted marine characters has my surname, but that’s my entire onscreen presence since joining Raven, so it’s not something we offer, aside from perhaps the occasional ATVI-sponsored competition to have your face on a character or something ( I think we did that in one game…)

 

 

 

Regards,

 

 

 

Ste Cork

 

Tech Programmer

 

Raven Software

[MaceMadunusus]

This is win.

[Raz0r]

Millions of win.

[Nick00105]

This is win.

[MagSul]

Could you not have asked after JK4 whilst you were at it? D8

[eezstreet]

FYI, Raven doesn't work with LA anymore...

[MagSul]

Meh, they should do it anyway.

[Inyri]

Whilst I assume that was a joke, in case it wasn't it doesn't work that way.

 

Besides... point out a really good game they've done.

[Malkav]

Whilst I assume that was a joke, in case it wasn't it doesn't work that way.

 

Besides... point out a really good game they've done.

Singularity. A bunch of reused ideas (feels like HL2 most of the time), though still a pretty underrated game. Had great fun playing and completing it.

[Saiaku]

Now that this is settled.. Who wants to beg LucasArts for the source?

[Akimoto]

I would like to point out that I am still waiting for JK4.

[Inyri]

I hope JK4 never comes. They've ruined the series enough. Let sleeping dogs lie.

[The One and Only]

I hope to one day have the rights to make JK4...

[Inyri]

Modders might do it right... as long as they backtracked and pretended Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy never existed. Ugh I mean Outcast wasn't that bad, but it was stupid compared to Dark Forces and Dark Forces 2. I just swear to god they went in completely the wrong direction with those two games.

[eezstreet]

Now that this is settled.. Who wants to beg LucasArts for the source?

I have already asked them through customer service like a week ago. I haven't heart back from them in 24-48 hours like they said. LETS SUE? etc

Modders might do it right... as long as they backtracked and pretended Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy never existed. Ugh I mean Outcast wasn't that bad, but it was stupid compared to Dark Forces and Dark Forces 2. I just swear to god they went in completely the wrong direction with those two games.

Care to elaborate? I think Outcast is a bit better than DF2 in some regards (graphics, the cinematics make more sense, the music is better, the combat is better, I liked the puzzles) but it falls short in others (the story is a bit weak)

 

As for JA, well, let's not go there...(the graphics are about the same as JK2, the music took all the wrong cuts from Williams, the combat is awful and based off of execution of special moves, ZERO puzzles, dialogue sucks and overall feels like a child version of JK2)

[minilogoguy18]

OMG, you need to email him back asap, if they still have info on the model compiler then they may have a way to properly decompile .glm and .gla files into say Softimage since the basemodels that were released by Keshire are all borked and import with no bones where the nonhumanoidmodels like rancor and such all import with full heirarchy, bones, envelope weights and animations.

 

While with the source models files someone like myself COULD compile every animation with a model rigged to it into 1 file with each animation labeled in the mixer but it would take FOREVER.

[Scooper]

OMG, you need to email him back asap, if they still have info on the model compiler then they may have a way to properly decompile .glm and .gla files into say Softimage since the basemodels that were released by Keshire are all borked and import with no bones where the nonhumanoidmodels like rancor and such all import with full heirarchy, bones, envelope weights and animations.

 

While with the source models files someone like myself COULD compile every animation with a model rigged to it into 1 file with each animation labeled in the mixer but it would take FOREVER.

 

I'll be finishing up the .glm importer / exporter plugins for 3DS max soon.

[minilogoguy18]

Exporter isn't that useful IMO, best to have a newer .md3 exporter and .qc file generator since you can just use md3view to convert to glm so that weapon models mainly will have a proper mesh when dropped.

 

Whats the point of having one for 3ds max when I don't think there are really that many people using it anymore? With Mod Tool 7.5 and now a blender plugin you can mod this game solely with freeware.

 

Maybe we can get some .xsi files that work properly?

 

Currently trying to find someone to make a .md3 exporter and .glm importer for Mod Tool 7.5

[Scooper]

The point is that it's been requested, and multiple people have shown interest.

 

The exporter will allow you to export a model from 3DS max to .glm format, which will be directly useable by jka/jk2. How is that not useful?

The importer allows you to import a model from .glm format properly weighted and rigged into 3DS max. You just have to specify the correct .gla file which holds the skeleton used. For the base _humanoid.gla I will probably make it so you don't have to specify it.

 

There is a pair of importer/exporters for blender created by mrwonko, which it seems like you're aware of. So if that's your preference, you can simply use those.

 

Edit:

And 3DS max supports a bunch of formats, and many people create plugins for it. So you can probably find a way to get the model into any editor you prefer, to work on it there. I'm just providing an effective method to do the modeling process in JKA/JK2, for 3DS max.

[lervish]

The importer/exporter Scooper's talking about would be extremely useful. Looking forward to it. For example during MB2's development there's often been a need for just a quick change in say tags or caps of the model, but without the original .max project files it's not worth the time to import it to Max, do the needed changes and re-weight the model entirely (as the current glm importer doesn't import the skeleton) and then export.

[eezstreet]

tbh, I'd rather have an assimp-based GLM exporter app (or ghoul2 for iojamp, hint hint), that way a lot of the different formats could be supported and nobody would be limited to one tool that does a specific thing.

[minilogoguy18]

The only thing a .glm exporter is good for is weapons, unless you found some way to export while going around the compile process that was used by the very developers of this game which was .xsi 3.x->assimilate->.glm that calls for the _humanoid.gla.

 

The only thing with 3ds max is that unless you have a student license it costs $$ and it hasn't been able to export a working animation since version 5 because of a watermark.

 

Does the newer version of max even support dotXSI 3.x?

 

I guess I could always install it since I have full legit student licences for all Autodesk 3d packages but have no interest in downloading and installing just to see if 2013 can export a proper dotXSI 3.x file.

[eezstreet]

The only thing a .glm exporter is good for is weapons, unless you found some way to export while going around the compile process that was used by the very developers of this game which was .xsi 3.x->assimilate->.glm that calls for the _humanoid.gla.

Assimilate is just a compiler, the assimp method I was thinking of using would eliminate the need for assimiliate and exporting to .xsi and just export straight to .glm (with an optional skeleton from .gla) from any normal model format (.dae, .xsi, .obj, .max, .blend ...)