Silverfang

These are the results of last night's stream, they are fully UV Mapped, have Level of Detail models and are fully functioning weapons. They still require textures and are not using any new animation system, that's next on the to-do list.

Going live right now, I'm going to need a little more time before I start working in Substance Painter, in the meantime I'm going to work on getting a few weapons ready to be put in-game (L8 Striker and Pulse Revolver). edit: just wrapped up that nearly 6 hour stream. Vod available at https://www.twitch.tv/jkgalaxies/v/62474913 stream starts at about 5min 45sec. Music starts out pretty quiet but does get turned up later.

Are there any plans for PBR?

I'll be streaming myself learning Substance Painter tonight or over the weekend (maybe both). There's also a good chance that I'll be looking at some of the models for the planned Visual Updates. Also I have most if not all the VoDs downloaded so I'll see about exporting those to YouTube tonight as well.

As a small notation, as of today (April 22nd, 2016) Rend2 does not support single player, but OpenJK is futureproofed for when it does.

Visual update of the L8 Striker pistol, I really liked the overall design of the weapon compared to the original SWG L7 Liquidsilver, I decided to take a blend between the L7 and L8 for the visual update and keep the L8 Striker as opposed to recreating the original SWG weapon. Also, the new visually updated model actually uses less triangles than the old model.

If you're referring to the one currently implemented it's just based off of a poor reference. otherwise, here's an image that clearly shows that it was originally an MG-34

I personally think that straight up "damage increase" skills should be kept to a minimum, I'm okay with things like increasing the damage of non-dual wielded pistols as compared to dual wielding and bigger weapons the effectiveness of single pistols will fall off very quickly. I will have to see how it works in design and practice in the end, leveling up needs meaning but I've always liked the idea that the combat in JKG isn't all about min/maxing builds and having the highest level. That was one of the original design philosophies of JKG and I tend to stick by it. New gear needs meaning too, so there will probably have to be a fine balance between how effective "basic" equipment is versus "high-level" gear.

So looking at pre-production screenshots from The Empire Strikes back, the W-90 Concussion Rifle uses the same prop (or at least same base MG-34) as the DLT-19, I've simply taken the DLT-19 and created a separate weapon for it. To keep some differentiation I've kept the same color scheme and ammo indicators as the original W-90 Concussion Rifle in JKG. In the future I may come back to this weapon at a later date to give it some more variation on the original model... for now it's basically the same as the movie prop (except for the aforementioned coloration and ammo indicator). Currently the old W-90 will still exist within the JKG files but will almost certainly be removed at a later time.

They can, just not with the same skeleton. For the fingers+thumbs there's only 6 bones (2 for the pinky and ring finger, 2 for middle and index, and 2 for thumb). DT's skeleton from his .glm Heavy Repeater for example uses 15 bones, 3 for each finger and thumb.

Unless we get a better skeleton rig from the player models, no. All future player models and ones that are used currently will get the arms/hands separately rerigged to use the first person skeleton. This has the side benefit that I can also increase the subdivision level of the first person arms without adversely affecting performance of third person player models.

As some of you are aware, some of the older weapons in JKG such as the DL-18, L8 Striker, "A"200 ACP Battle Rifle, etc. Have fairly low sided cylinders and even in some cases really bad optimization (the battle rifle is a big time culprit). While these weapons are still high quality, they aren't quite up to par compared to most other weapons in JKG, and in an environment where there are copious amounts of on-screen effects and other people using these weapons there is no room for unoptimized models. The process for updating these weapons is three-fold: Increase the amount of sides on cylinders that sit against the environment as they will stick out the most, especially if you can see the full silhouette of the shape. Make weapons sustainable, a term coined by BlasTech when referring to objects that clip through each other instead of creating unnecessary amounts of triangles, especially when dealing with cylinders stacked on top of one another. Make weapons animation-friendly in preparation for first person animations, this includes making fully rendered clips instead of textured on or pieces that would normally be out of view being culled. The first weapon on my list was the DL-18, as it is the default starting pistol in JKG and is one of the first things you will see every time you start a match of JKG: Versus Other weapons on my VU List include the Bowcasters, DE-10 Pistol, DXR-6 Heavy Carbine, Pulse Cannon and W-90 Concussion Rifle. There are other weapons to do as well, but those are the ones that immediately stuck out in my memory. Additionally, I may take the time to make PBR Textures in preparation for Rend2 by @@Xycaleth, but my priority is currently focused on the three objectives stated above.

Each weapon will use it's own .glm and .gla pair, this includes: Left and Right arm skeletonWeapon modelTags for flash efxTags for attachmentsTags for magazinesTag/Bone combination for animated gun partsAlthough player models use a generic _humanoid .gla, almost every weapon in JKG has a distinct position for where the left arm should be placed, where it should go during reloading etc. However, generic animations can be placed in a separate "noweap" glm/gla that includes animations for both left hand and right hand, we can load a separate .gla for the off-hand for actions such as hand-signals or pressing buttons in first person etc. Additionally, we can load a second weapon .glm/.gla for the left hand only for dual-wielding! An ARC Caster Mk.1, a weapon in desperate need of proper first-person animations. Each weapon will come with its own animation.cfg to define what frames do what: Most weapons will include: BOTH_Idle BOTH_Raise BOTH_Lower BOTH_Fire1 //3 Firing animations to keep it just a little different each time you fire the weapon since it's right in your face. BOTH_Fire2 BOTH_Fire3 BOTH_Reload //Divided into 3 distinct sections that affect what will happen if you cancel reloading Weapons that can be held with one hand will also include RIGHT_Idle RIGHT_Raise RIGHT_Lower RIGHT_Fire1 RIGHT_Fire2 RIGHT_Fire3 LEFT_Idle LEFT_Raise LEFT_Lower LEFT_Fire1 LEFT_FIre2 LEFT_Fire3 In addition to animation, we can load new .efx, models, etc. to bolt to or remove from tags from the animation.cfg, for example, the dressellian projectile rifle will need 2 bullet models bolted to tags every time it cycles the bolt after firing, an empty shell and a fresh shell that has a bullet. These 2 tags will be inside the model to start with, stacked on top of each other, when the animation plays that reveals the chamber of the rifle the first tag that has the empty shell bolted to it will get ejected in the animation, and the second tag that has the new bullet will get moved as though it were ready to fire. As each model moves out of view we can unbolt them since we don't need to render them anymore. This is also how magazines will be attached to weapons, this means that we can have new types of ammo attached to weapons, all without updating the original model as long as whatever animation is already present will fit the new magazine during reload etc. We can have small, medium and large clips for every single E-11, not just dependent on which E-11 you have purchased (there are some balancing factors to this, but that's not what this thread is about). Additionally, this also means we can have things like barrel smoke after firing several shots or smoke/steam coming out of the magazine well just like in Republic Commando when you reload the DC-17m.

(Old model on the left, new model on the right) The first of a visual update pass over some of the older, lower resolution weapons. The DL-18 is the starter pistol in JKG and having cylinders that don't have many sides really hurts its overall visual appeal.

if I recall correctly the bodies of the Zabraks were going to be scrapped in favor of a human_female body (the female counterpart to the already existing human_male by DT85), but the heads would be kept (or at the very least the horns/cosmetics) same with the pre-existing human female heads that are also in the old development files.

Very dark and eerie in its current form, this is a new prototype map I'm working on that will eventually be used to test a planned feature.

That would actually be BlasTech's, I'll poke him about it next time I talk to him, also highlight him here but I don't think he frequents this site at all. @@BlasTech

asset & binary release, there will be both.

Actually phase 2 was originally meant to be a sandbox RPG, limited features in terms of RPG and no over-arching quest storyline, mostly just instance-type quests and, would take place mostly on Tatooine and partially on Coruscant with some ship interiors (such as the Cargo Heist teased in Dev Diary #26). Whether or not that's the direction we're heading now is up in the air.

That's really the point of the phase system, focusing on the biggest mechanics of each phase that are still major features of the more RPG-like phases of the mod. The new vendor system that was just coded into the game uses what we call a Treasure Class, this is something that can be used for Vendors, Loot drops, What weapon an NPC will spawn with etc. This is a small, but crucial feature to an RPG. The Damage Type system I concepted ties into giving a reason to wear armor and give purpose to each weapon as opposed to "get whatever you can afford that you can do the most damage with", you still have the freedom of choice of what to equip yourself with, but with damage types, armor, shields (think Republic Commando here), your choices have meaning. In terms of adding more weapons into the game (I know I know, enough already!) I'm pretty much purely focused on making sure that there's a decent variety of each of the weapon types (such as the pulse pistol I modeled tonight) Blaster, Slugthrower, ACP, Pulse, etc. Also, iconic movie weapons such as the EE-3, Westar-34 and DL-44 because I think it's important to recognize some of of the fantastic art that the movies brought us. Also keep in mind that the artist making the weapons (being me) doesn't have much to do with the actual "RPG" features of the mod, I'll design them in addition to the art I do, but the actual creation and implementation of those types of features relies on the coders, so me making updates to the weapons doesn't actually take away from how fast the rest of JKG is developed.

Going live in about 5 minutes, gonna do some 3d modeling remaking a pistol I made a while back. Edit: Stream over, VoD of me making the Pulse Revolver/Pistol/Whatever And I know I know I still need to export to Youtube!

Wasn't sure how unwrapping this was going to go so I ended up unwrapping each piece individually, this is why the checkerbox texture is varying sizes on each piece (I'll pack it later so it's all even), just need to do that one tiny little piece and I think I'm going to redo the muzzle.

Expanding upon the Trandoshan example, they would also spawn rarely with LS-180 Heavy repeaters and Bowcasters, but more commonly with ACP Shotguns and LT-60 carbines. As another example a sniper Trandoshan class might spawn most often with a "Hammer of Shirke" ACP sniper rifle, but may also sometimes spawn with a scoped heavy bowcaster.

Doing an early morning stream right now! Edit: stream over. Link to VoD Note: I switch over to windowed mode a little ways into the stream, OBS wasn't playing nice with JKA I'm going to get all the VoDs uploaded on youtube tonight