Open source Jedi Knight in a modern engine

[Tempust85]

Found a Lightsaber blueprint: https://bohriumdev.wordpress.com/2015/12/29/lightsaber-in-ue4/

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQvm_5VMyxc

[Teancum]

A nice thing about both Unity and UE4 is that they have asset stores. In addition to stuff like this the actual store allows you to buy pre-made stuff to get started, and in doing so you retain the usage rights for your games. Some things are free, but if you're serious that might be a consideration for filling in some of the gaps.

[afi]

Maybe basing it on the jedi knight sourcecode would be more realistic at this point.

[ShakeThatSalt]

any updates on this?

[afi]

If we base it on the JKA sourcecode we need people who can do animations and models. Everything else (sounds, menus, maps, effects, etc) is quite easy and there are more than enough people who can do that. I think this project is only going to be realistic if at least 10 people volunteer to contribute. First step should be to outline the goals and features then.

[Tray]

Since there has been raised the old question about JKA remake, I would offer you to read another article linked to that and JKA as "cybersport discipline". Some food for you thoughts:

https://jkhub.org/topic/9373-cybersportiness-of-games-or-why-jka-has-no-future-in-this-state/

[Onysfx]

You could make the project require JKA at first and temporarily load pk3 files from base for the time being right? Even without texture or model overhauls, the enhanced lighting will work wonders with the game.

 

Also, later down the road would it be possible to port custom maps, such as atlantica and what not?

[afi]

Yea you could start it as a mod and make it standalone later on

[the_raven]

Maybe people need to rotate? (is that the proper word?) You know, like when the first group of people get tired or bored, they're replaced by a second group, permanently or temporarily, and then back. In the end, the project gets finished with the people who are indeed into the project, be they from the first or the second group. Of course, everyone'll have to be given credit (long as they actually did work on the project).

[afi]

I think it should be just completely opensource so literally everyone can contribute. It shouldn't rely too much on a small group of people

[Tempust85]

So you're ditching the different engine idea and looking to enhance JKA on openjk? Bit confused here.

[Tray]

Different engine only. There can't be any doubts anymore.

[Tempust85]

Could mod UT4 or go with the Shooter Game.

[ensiform]

I should point out that you aren't forbidden from making a community effort on GitHub with UE4.  You just can't technically allow freely access with a copyleft license.  You're still bound by the terms of the Unreal Engine License regardless. Also, allowing modding is possible too but you do have to do a lot of work to get that in place.

 

Also, the ShooterGame is bad. No decent physics, no gun code prototypes besides the crappy blueprinted ones.  For a project like this you definitely want to be heavily Unreal C++ based and only Blueprints for later design/spinoff code changes.

 

I have yet to find a good quality maintained C++ in the forums or store that has a bit better base for building fast paced shooters.

 

FWIW if you are interested in bringing some custom maps from JKA either built by you or with permission, you can look at using HammUEr for getting the maps over to UE4 as a start.

[gerbilOFdoom]

Let's say a UE4 game is made with blade dueling mechanics and acrobatics similar to way JK does it... what's to stop somebody from making a star wars mod? It'd be a totally unrelated enterprise so it'd sidestep the legal issues as far as the game goes, then star wars fans can have a star wars skin on it

 

Let's just hope their lawyers don't find this post

[afi]

Let's say a UE4 game is made with blade dueling mechanics and acrobatics similar to way JK does it... what's to stop somebody from making a star wars mod? It'd be a totally unrelated enterprise so it'd sidestep the legal issues as far as the game goes, then star wars fans can have a star wars skin on it

 

Let's just hope their lawyers don't find this post

 

Yea I can totally see this happen. In the worst case the SW mod gets stopped but not the whole project.

 

About the engine: Obviously it would be technically better making it in UE4 but also way more work since you would have to start at zero. I wonder how many of the people here who demand to make this in UT4 are actually willing to commit and contribute. Personally I'm not familiar with UE4 so the work that I personally could do would be quite limited. I'm not against it but if there are not at least a couple of people who want to contribute and know what they are doing in UE4 then I don't see this happening.

[Boothand]

Yea I can totally see this happen. In the worst case the SW mod gets stopped but not the whole project.

 

About the engine: Obviously it would be technically better making it in UT4 but also way more work since you would have to start at zero. I wonder how many of the people here who demand to make this in UT4 are actually willing to commit and contribute. Personally I'm not familiar with UT4 so the work that I personally could do would be quite limited. I'm not against it but if there are not at least a couple of people who want to contribute and know what they are doing in UT4 then I don't see this happening.

 

What kind of work could you see yourself doing if it was based on the JKA engine? I'm sure you could learn working with UE4.

 

I can't promise how much time I can dedicate to it, but I'd be willing to try to set up a starting point given some basic UE4 compatible animations, and start building the saber combat system.

[Tempust85]

Should get that guy who's making the JK2 film on UE4 to help.

[afi]

Yea I would surely get my head around UE4 at some point. I'm just saying that most people who support this idea are into idtech3 so people will have to adapt.

 

It would definitely be nice to have a starting point.

 

@@ClydeFrog wanted to bring melee combat to UE4

[ClydeFrog]

Hello Everybody, this is a great topic 

 

I've been working on the exact thing being discussed in this thread - and I have a bare bones network capable (i.e. dedicated server) prototype.  I plan on uploading a video in the next few days so you guys can see the progress so far.  Basically, this is what I have so far:

 

1) One game mode - duel.  Two players fighting (obviously), and the rest are spectators.  All clients run through a dedicated server.

2) Three basic attacks (right, left, overhead), along with their respective blocks.  For testing purposes, I have a bot as client #2 - who can never be hit because he blocks everything perfectly (more on this later).

3) A light saber blueprint which handles all of the light saber stuff (i.e. it's blade color, turning on/off, etc..)  Also, the hit detection system is done by the light saber itself.  And this actually ended up working quite well.

 

I used the animations off the Adobe Mixamo site (mocap which can be downloaded by anyone for free).  The skeleton used for the animations was re-targeted to the UE4 dummy (very easy to do with any skeleton really).  A note about the animations.  They definitely need some more work, but they are good enough for now.  I'm using root motion for the combat - so the player attacking lunges forward a bit and takes the camera with him.  So during the attack, you lose player control until the saber hits something (which stops the animation) or the animation swing ends.  I tried the combat without root motion and my personal opinion is that you lose all tactical aspects of the combat - and face to face combat pretty much turns into players running around trying to get a lucky hit.  Just my opinion, ultimately the community will decide.  In either case, the way it's set up right now it is very easy to switch between both.

 

As for the blocking, what would be your opinion on this?  Should it be automatic, player driven, or a hybrid based on something like the angle the player is facing?

 

I'm still working on this every spare moment I have.  I think that even the most basic of foundations is enough to get the ball rolling on a project like this.

 

Also, I would really appreciate any suggestion you guys might have on the combat - as I'm still tweaking the shit out of it.

 

On another note, I have yet to write a single line of code (and I do know C++).  Yes, it might be required at some point - but so far it has not been needed for anything.  I've done no optimization work at all and so far it runs fine (and I have an old graphics card).

 

So after I clean up the code, and more importantly, document it - I will setup a Git project.

 

 

So something where you can jump high and have this movement based directional attack system with a sword with various slow/fast styles? How would blocking/staggering work? Stuff like wall-jumps/climbs? Strafe jumps? What about various bugs and stuff people use from JKA like backflip delayed swings and stuff that is important to JKA duels?

 

Some time ago I did some live streams where I put Kyle and his anims in Unity and started playing around with the movement and combat system. Unreal would probably be better suited. I wanted to change up the combat a bit, but I'd rather try out my ideas some more before I try pitching it to someone.

 

I think an ideal combat system for something with the Jedi Knight-series movement style would be some hybrid between JKA and JK2 1.04 and 1.02. No matter the implementation, I have some ideas on how to make stuff like blocking look good and got a ton of experience in Unity and some experience with Unreal. If your/the community's ideas get developed enough, I'm sure I could help coding/blueprinting.

 

Hopefully, a lot of people will be willing and able to contribute. 

 

Exactly this. I could imagine this to become what Blade Symphony wanted to be. Blade Symphony was advertised as a game similar to JK2 but failed completely.

 

I think poke/wiggle and all broken mechanics like broken wallflips etc would have to go. Remove all the bullshit and streamline the combat while not dumbing it down. Of course it would have to be discussed what is a bullshit and what is a legit gameplay mechanic. Delayed swings for example are probably too important to remove them. But all this would have to be discussed of course.

 

Agreed 100%

 

Can port the animations, onto a new set of bones with different names. We also have access to the full animation source as well. No one would be able to prove that they were ported.

 

Any animations would be great, if you could re-target them to the UE4 skeleton.

 

If you intend to make a game like Jedi Knight that has sabering, I'd say do that from the start. Get the prototype up with the important features immediately. I think projects easily come to a halt if you say "we'll add that later when this part is good", if it's actually part of the core, even if a MP shooter is easier.

But I guess it's more about what the community wants in such a game. Personally I'd focus on saber combat, as this is the unique part that warrants a remake, since there is no other combat system like it outside of JK series.

 

Exactly, get the bare bones combat working and then take it from there.

[Tempust85]

If this is MP, I suggest manual blocking. SP, you could have auto block for easy difficulty and manual for hard.

 

 

If any re-targeting happens, I suggest redoing the fingers animations yourself to properly grasp the hilt. JKA's animations have pretty bad finger placement so I say, so why port the crap placement over.

 

I imported the UE4 dummy skeleton against JKA's and the proportions are fairly close.

[Bek]

If this is MP, I suggest manual blocking. SP, you could have auto block for easy difficulty and manual for hard.

Just don't have the character strike a weird action pose every time they manually block.

[Tempust85]

Had a go at re-targeting a top-to-bottom slash:

 

 

 

Not perfect, largely due to different root poses that you can fix in UE4.

[z3filus]

Well... if you replace the lightsaber with a sword, a katana that has a futuristic design to it, change the side rolling (a,w,s,d  all directions) with a doge-leap similar to some modern games, and that alone would impress many. Manual blocking would be awesome too, but I'm not sure a bout the special attacks. Those have divided players since Jedi Academy came out, so maybe include only a couple of those, if at all. Force powers can easily be re-invented, like for example, in Witcher 3 there is Aard (which is basically force push) and Axii (which is a form of Force Mindtrick) and I'm sure that's just the tip of the iceberg. So I'm saying that as long as you can make new, smoother animations and effects for some of the force powers, you just need to think of another explanation for the powers, and give these abilities new weird names.

 

Now that you've read a few lines of text, I can wrap this into one sentence; Make it like Witcher 3, combat wise, choosing the powers, movement.  Perfect.

https://youtu.be/ekShmx0fe7Q?t=44s

[afi]

Sounds like great progress already!

 

Personally I don't think manual blocking would benefit the combat. It takes away a lot of the movement aspects. In Jedi Academy and Jedi Outcast movement and footwork is so important because you can't rely on blocking. If there is blocking it shouldn't be implemented in a way that it takes away the importance of footwork, jumping, crouching etc, aka dodging the enemy saber manually by movement mechanics.

If you add manual blocking you also have to add some kind of stamina system and then you do pretty much the same thing that games like Chivalry are doing and it wouldn't have much to do with JK anymore.

Combat in Jedi Academy would work completely fine if there was no blocking at all.

 

For me one of the core aspects of the combat in Jedi Academy is how you can avoid the enemy saber completely, just by good footwork. So I would definitely suggest automatic blocking or manual blocking that is really hard to pull off and is very risky to perform.

 

As for special attacks... In Jedi Knight high level play they are at best unnecessary, at worst annoying. I think if you give the player a big amount of possibilites in movement, acrobatics and saber attacks and the possibility for players to combine them the way they can in Jedi Knight, then special attacks are not needed. Acrobatics could also be expanded a lot compared to what you have in JK. But I wouldn't want dodging as a special move, I don't think it's a good mechanic in any game, it makes the movement clunky and predictable.