Jedi Outcast mod to improve weapon accuracy.

[Ein]

First, a little introduction about accuracy:

 

I think people are aware that Jedi Outcast has a bit of a reputation for very inaccurate / hard to aim weapons, especially against moving targets. The best explanation I've seen is that the game's auto-aim messes up the ability of the player to lead their shots. I think it is still a mystery though, because if you disable auto-aim (using cg_dynamiccrosshair 0) it doesn't seem to help very much. I've seen some people comment further (such as here) that this only disables the "visual" crosshair from snapping to enemies, but doesn't disable your actual weapon's invisibile crosshair from auto-aiming. I've also read explanations that don't involve auto-aim, such as this game's weapon projectiles being slower than most games and the hit detection being based on polygon-perfect hitboxes and not blocky ones (see this clip for an egregious example!)

 

Anyway, I've always enjoyed the game as-is but recently I've been thinking about the modding potential here. It would be quite the novel experience to play the singler player portion of JK2 as a more "gun focused" character, like the original Dark Forces. Basically we need a mod that does some or all of the following:

• decrease weapon spread

• increase laser projectile speed

• increase laser projectile hitboxes

• decrease or remove weapon recoil

• truly disable auto aim (if it exists?)

If there are already mods that do any of this, that would be a start.  How hard would it be to create a single purpose mod for this?

 

I'm posting this in the request thread since I am a complete novice at modding.  I can code though, and this does sound easy enough if I could ever get past the hard part: learning how to make a mod in the first place.

 

[mrwonko]

Ah, I see you found your way here. Welcome! (This was initially on /r/jediknight, I directed Ein here.)

 

I suppose if you want to do this yourself, you should start with the OpenJK compiling guide. OpenJK is basically a backwards compatible community patch for Jedi Academy (SP & MP) and JK2 SP; JK2 support isn't well tested/supported though...

[Raz0r]

There is no auto-aim or recoil. cg_dynamicCrosshair is purely visual, and gives you a better idea of where your projectiles will land by ray casting from your eye position in your view direction (the same vector used for spawning projectiles) and mapping the resulting 3d coord to screen space.

Without the dynamic crosshair, the crosshair is just painted in the middle of the screen.

 

If you want to improve accuracy, your first three suggestions are spot on. Also look into the missile "pre-step", which fudges the starting position of the missile.

Running the server at a higher framerate (sv_fps 40) will lead to better visuals, but affects other game behaviour to a small degree.

[Ein]

How "not well tested" is JK2 single player?  Can you complete the game in OpenJK?