Our Picks

Today Nightdive Studios in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games officially announced they are remastering the original game from 1995 that began Kyle Katarn's journey, Dark Forces. No strangers to remastering classic 90's shooter games, Nightdive has System Shock and Quake II under their belt showing they know what they're doing when it comes to modernizing these games, while keeping their identity and charm in tact.

This is a remaster, rather than a remake, using original assets and code where possible while implementing modern controls, upscaling textures and sprites, 4k resolution, and widescreen support. Nightdive prides themselves on what they call their "KEX Engine" for these projects.

Dark Forces Remastered will be released on PC, Xbox One & Series X|S, PlayStation 4 & 5, and Nintendo Switch. According what Nightdive's Larry Kuperman told IGN, the game will be competitively priced around the $20-$30 USD range and a release date is expected for 2024. An official release date will be announced later this year.

The first question many people will ask, especially in this community, is how likely are we to see the rest of the series get remastered, especially Dark Forces II, and the answer is: very unlikely. The sequel uses a completely different engine which may mean Nightdive's KEX engine wouldn't support it easily, etc. It is not impossible, but I don't think one remaster automatically confirms the whole series will get touched, especially since Outcast and Academy got console releases so recently.

The game is looking great, and I'm looking forward to playing it again, as someone who has tried to play the original many times but gets frustrated with the controls, this remaster is a much welcome release and is another example of Lucasfilm not completely letting their legacy content completely be forgotten.

Source: IGN

It's already July! The 20th anniversary of Jedi Academy is upon us, and what better way to celebrate than with a new theme! Actually, there are 3 new themes to choose from: Academy, Academy (Stone), and Outcast. These are inspired by the cover arts of both games while keeping the function of the site the same. You can pick which one you like best or go back to the old theme, the theme picker is in the very bottom of the page. The Academy one has two separate options: default and stone. I took the stone texture from the original cover art and made it the background, but I honestly wasn't a fan of it but I figured there are people that may like it so I made it an option. I think the Outcast one may be my favorite.

This map is nearly done, needs a couple of tweaks before public release.

This is a roleplaying map, its intended use is any of the following - a mountain outpost, secure storage facility, force nexus, crime lords base, underground prison, hydro-power plant.

 

Post in Mino's Mediocre Maps

A couple months ago, Imgur, the most popular anonymous image upload service, announced that all anonymously posted images would be deleted, and all uploads going forward would require an account. As many of you know, thousands of images posted on these forums were hosted on Imgur anonymously. It has been the standard for posting images for years. Hearing that news had us concerned, not that losing all of those images in the forum was a dire situation, but that it would leave many of the threads that show progress of mods from the last decade completely useless.

For the recent Hekathon speedrunning event DrMeowington, a fellow jka speedrunner, and I have recreated the first Act of the JKA Singleplayer along the Speedrun route. You can see us run the map for an unsuspecting crowd of JKA speedrunning legends here:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1807641558?t=05h50m5s (at the Timestamp 5:50:05)

We have implemented Quicksave/Quickload mechanics, Force Jump I, aswell as other small gags and referneces.

In addition we have found an old Minecraft mod kept alive by ZeithComms that implements Quake1 movement into Minecraft. Since the Mod was open-source I have adjusted it to replicate Quake3 movement instead. 

Here is a more in-depth Showcase of the map

You can download the map along with the modified Squake Mod and the Resource Pack we made for this here:

Alternatively: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ll_7Opj3w--wZSvWTwmHnJ0WCldwJ8aD/view

We plan on finishing the other levels aswell. First we want to finish up the Speedrun Route, then we'll tackle the parts of the maps that are skipped in the run and lastly once the maps are done we plan to turn it into a fully working Adventure Map with enemies and objectives.

If you would like to help on this project or hava any questions,feel free to dm me at Laay#6969 on Discord.

 

 

It's been a month and a lot of work has been done.  We've discovered several new methods thanks to the kind and supportive people who have generously given their time and talent into helping this project move forward.  What we've found is that we needed to move every area into a blender file first, and use them to move it into radiant.  So we've scrapped some of our earlier work that was done in Radiant and in game, to recreate it new in Blender.  After doing that we started to fill in more of the areas that we needed to create, as well as new rooms.  So enjoy these preview shots of the areas lit up in Blender. 

I. Tron City


 


 


 


 


 


 


 

II. Disc Arena


 


 


 

III. Lightcycle Grid


 


 

IV. Arcade


 


 


 


 

V. Oasis


 


 


 


 


 


 

VI. End of Line Club


 


 

VII. Emerald Palace 


 


 


 

VII. Amber Garden


 


 

There is still a lot of work to do, but we have come a long way.  We will of course being giving proper credit to the numerous people who have helped us, the places where we were able to get models and textures.  Once we are finished putting all of this into Blender, we will then be going over a final pass to make sure all the textures are proper.  Then we can get into radiant and start making this thing a reality.  I hope you look forward to the future updates here, and we'd love to hear what you have to say about our progress thus far!  Till next time, programs!

Beginnings of a very familiar cabin.

Going smoothly with the plethora of reference material available to me 😁

Circa and SiLink spent a whole episode on the podcast "Among the Noise" talking about first memories, jk3files, JKHub, running clans, and how it effected their lives as part of the 20th anniversary of Jedi Academy.

Hello again, for all those who are wondering where the main inspiration for the next three maps, well, the inspiration comes from an album: The Gallery by Dark Tranquility (Because I'm a fan of Metal Music), from this album I was inspired by its aesthetics to create the new environments that have been created and are in the process of being created:


Since 3 months ago, I have been working on these maps, well let's start with the presentation of them (Note: The credits section is updated every time there is a new update): 

 

Post in Work in progress: New Republic Prison Ship from The Mandalorian

Due to a lot of security breaches and hacks that have been going on around the internet over the last year or so, and an uptick in spam posts recently, we've enabled two-factor authentication as an option for all accounts, and a requirement for all staff accounts.
In other news, this month marked the 21st birthday of Jedi Outcast, which isn't as exciting as the 20th, but in the States JK2 is old enough to legally drink, so raise a pint! 🍻

I just released the first verison of rend2 in a very long time. I've been busy with fixing and reworking alot of things. The weather system is fully functional now as also alot of other things.

You can grab the latest release here:
https://github.com/SomaZ/OpenJK/releases

Changelog:
- MSAA antialisaing cvar changed to r_ext_multisample which is the same as in the vanilla openjk renderer
- Added external hdr lightmap support
- Added autoload of images with following suffix "_specGloss", "_rmo" and "_orm"
- Realtime sun shadows won't flicker anymore when the player is moving around
- Some fixes regarding the HDR rendering pipeline (means rendering in hdr colors, but there's no HDR display support (and never will because OpenGL))
- Thanks to @Almightygirfor contributing a velvet shader (you can use it per shader stage, just add a 'cloth' to it (same as with glow or detail)) and fixes regarding pbr shading
- Added a shader stage keyword to "pull out" parallax mapped surfaces ('parallaxBias [0.0 ... 1.0]', you can easily test this with r_forceParallaxBias [0.0 ... 1.0])
- Added mikkTSpace for normal mapping (means baking normal maps in blender or substance will result in the same shading in rend2 now)
- Fixed rendering cloud layers
- Fixed wrong camera exposure on maps with sky portals
- Fixed alot of problems regarding fog
- Added flare rendering back
- Added most features back to surface sprites (only thing missing afaik is wind handling, swaying is implemented though)
- Speed up rendering dynamic lights with parallax occusion mapped surfaces by alot
- Added distortion rendering back (invicibility sphere, push/pull sphere)
- Added glass shattering back
- Added ghoul2 sabermarks back
- Added r_showTris 1 back
- Fixed a crash regarding md3 model caching
- Lots of other small things

I think that's all for now.

Some WIP pictures of my bespin duel remake with hdr lightmaps

This month hasn't been the most exciting, but we're still getting closer to our goal!

OPERATION: KNIGHTFALL

Progress continued on the Operation: Knightfall remake. Recently the 2nd gameplay level of the remake has been released to the team for testing. So far initial testing has shown promise, though there are a number of bugs to be ironed out. However, these bus should be fixed very quickly and we can move on to the 3rd gameplay level very soon.

The Operation: Knightfall remake is designed to show off areas of the Jedi Temple never seen before or only hinted at in other novelizations. Though some locations will bring you to familiar areas, other areas of the temple may not be so easily recognizable.


MORE CHARACTERS

We also spent some time this month gathering up more characters for you to play with, here's a small list of them that should be coming to the mod in the next update.

Narkina V Imperial Officer


Kino Loy


Narkina V Prisoner


Grohto


Darth Krayt (Updated Model)


Naboo Guard (Battlefront)


Hanharr


8t88


Vana Sage


Skohani Ren


Eleena Daru


Kaevee


Rebel Vanguard


Rebel Smuggler




As always, we're always looking for new characters, if you have any suggestions, please post the character you'd like to submit along with a link to the character.

COMMUNITY QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

I'd like to attempt to interact with the community more often, so this month I'll be taking any questions and will answer every single one in the March progress report. If you have any questions for us (or want to ask something silly), please fill out the below Google form.

If we get plenty of questions from the community for next month's report, we'll keep going!

LINK: https://forms.gle/PANTQw8MGBuad8wr5

CONCLUSION

This month hasn't been the most active one as substantial changes have occurred in my personal life which have prevented me or exhausted me to the point where I couldn't work on the mod as much as I'd like to. The month of March will likely be the same with things hopefully settling down by the end of the month.

I will continue my side of development during this time as best as I can, but please understand if the next progress report is lacking in content.

Regardless, thank you for following the development of Star Wars: Galactic Legacy, and may the Force be with you.

It’s no secret that older games are increasingly harder to get into, especially as support for them on modern systems continues to dwindle down and the more steps you have to take to get them to work properly continues to rise. Then, once you get the game running, you are taken aback by the graphics after being used to playing the latest AAA games and immediately go hunting for mods to enhance the graphics and experience to help you enjoy your time. Or maybe you literally have no idea how to play the game, but enjoy it enough to learn more about getting better. Well, here is some basic info to hopefully make all of that easier when it comes to Jedi Academy.

This game is turning 20 years old this year, and it is still one of the greatest Star Wars games of all time with an active modding and player community. I took some time making a video and wirtten guide on all of the basics of getting started with Star Wars Jedi Knight Jedi Academy in 2023. Keep in mind this is geared towards new or returning players, so it is meant to be as simple as possible. Watch the video below or read the written guide at the bottom below that.

Getting started with Jedi Academy [Written Guide]

Take your pick of a client below, or try them all.

OpenJK EternalJK JAEnhanced

Check out some of the big Star Wars conversion mods.

Movie Battles II Movie Duels Galactic Legacy

 

If you ever have questions or need help, post on our Tech Support forum, or join the Jedi Knight Discord and people should be able to help you out. Have fun out there!

This tutorial shows you how to install OpenJK or other similar clients like EternalJK, JAEnhanced, etc.
Since Jedi Academy is over 20 years old now, running it on modern hardware can be a bit of a challenge. On top of that, the default server list no longer works in the game, making it difficult to find servers to play on. To fix those issues, it is best to use a community patch or client to help get the most optimizations and features for the game.
OpenJK is a community-led project to make Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy code run with minimal bugs and on modern hardware. Many other clients have been made based on OpenJK but take it even further with new features.
Nowadays it is recommended to use a client called EternalJK to play Jedi Academy multiplayer, and JAEnhanced to play single player, but you can stick with OpenJK if you want as close to the classic game as possible.
This tutorial can be used for any of those clients, they are all mostly installed the same way. For this video I will be using OpenJK since it includes both single player and multiplayer and will get you casually playing either mode the easiest. If you plan on playing multiplayer a lot, EternalJK definitely should be downloaded instead.

Some cockpit details.

Hope the first month of 2023 has been good to you all! Let's get started!
OPERATION: KNIGHTFALL REMAKE
Much of the month of January has been focused on ironing out bugs from the initial build of the remade Operation: Knightfall mission. As the original author has been unable to complete this work, I volunteered to finish what he started. As of typing this report, the first of the gameplay levels has been completely ironed out and is at a quality we can deem to be finished.
Production on fixing up the next level has begun, with this level appearing to be the most complex to fix. Primarily we are introducing a small puzzle to the level and one boss fight has to be completely reworked.

Merry Christmas!

The time has come to upload new previews, throughout the end of this week and next week previews will be uploaded, so first things first, the first maps have been redesigned and new ones have been added, this campaign may have quite a few maps, some are of short duration, others of medium duration, and others of long duration. One thing this mod has is a hard difficulty that will gradually go up.

Credits:

Let's start with the presentation of the maps:

 

You can see more images in the Moddb forum. Tomorrow the weapons will be presented, and soon I will see if it is possible to upload videos about everything presented.

Happy New Year! It's been a long time, but we're back with a new update!

Although we hadn't originally planned it, this version ends up being a big full patch called Update 6. We added so many new things, not just bugfixes, during its development that we ended up waiting a whole year before releasing it. We really hope you will enjoy this update, because we have invested a lot of our time, effort and sometimes nerves into it.

Update 6 has arrived to start the new year with new content and features such as new and updated missions, combat improvements, and bug fixes! Tales of the Galaxy: Season 1 is also now available allowing you to play the duels from Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II.

 

 

https://www.moddb.com/mods/movie-duels/downloads/md-update6-part1

https://www.moddb.com/mods/movie-duels/downloads/movie-duels-update-6-part-2

https://www.moddb.com/mods/movie-duels/downloads/movie-duels-jedi-outcast-addon

https://www.moddb.com/mods/movie-duels/downloads/tales-of-the-galaxy-dark-forces-ii-duels

Changelog:

 

 

It was a very close call between me and @MagSul despite so few votes overall, but Mag pulled ahead and is declared the WINNER OF THE HOLIDAY MOD CONTEST 2022!

His mod Kyle's Holiday Afternoon is a charming little mod that I personally voted for, so I'm glad to see it win! Seeing Kyle in a Christmas Sweater getting pummeled by snowballs is something everyone needed, for sure.

Congrats and well done to the other contestants! Hope everyone had a safe and happy holiday season, and welcome to 2023! Jedi Academy turns 20 this year, so we have some exciting things planned!

We get 4 entries this year for the Holiday Mod Contest, which is a solid number! I personally have entered a mod this year, so of course we are leaving the voting to you people! Which one do you think is best?

CHRISTMAS PLAZA by Circa
KYLE'S HOLIDAY AFTERNOON by MagSul
IMPERIAL CHRISTMAS BASTION by Kessno
FIREWORKS & SNOWBALLS by Ramikad

Everyone been nice, with a pinch of naughty this year? 🎅

It's been quite awhile since we've done a end of year holiday or Christmas event around here, mostly due to lack of activity. We used to do Secret Santa events but that requires a lot of participants and many great mods made for them don't end up getting released, so we don't really do that anymore. But since Christmas is my personal favorite holiday and season, we're going for it.

Updated Dantooine. The farmland and spaceport areas are expanded a bit, but are a lot more detailed as well. The gameplay is also slightly changed so that the mission is nothing like 'a very long corridor, you run through'. While on a mission with Luke Skywalker, Kyle encounters a few enemies near the landing area and has to deal with them.




 

 

Hey, been wanting to start a thread for a while for all my mapping happenings. Decided to kick it off with one of the buildings from Star Wars: Visions, the Ninth Jedi.

Put this together within a few hours so it's a first pass.

 

 







 

Hope you all like it and would love to hear your thoughts!

 

- Mino