Circa

If you’ve been wanting to jump into Star Wars Jedi Knight Jedi Academy, chances are you’ve heard about these different client options like OpenJK, EternalJK, TaystJK, JAEnhanced, and so on. What’s the difference between them all and which should you go with? I’ll make this guide as quick as I can, so a lot of this will be basic history and info on these projects, so if you are involved in those teams or are aware of more detail than I’m providing, leave it in a comment for others to check out if they want more. We’ll start with OpenJK, what is it and why use it? This is where the quick history lesson begins. Prior to 2012, code mods were made from the very limited source code for multiplayer that was provided by Raven Software as part of the official SDK or Software Development Kit. In simple terms this allowed for the community modders to take the backbone of what made the multiplayer mode function on the client side and the server side, and alter it in various ways. Lots of mods were born out of this, such as the hugely popular JA+ mod which most popular server still run to this day. However, that code not only was multiplayer only, but was limited in terms of what could be done without reverse engineering it all. So what happened in 2012? Well as you may know, Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, and in turn shuttered their game publishing and licensing arm LucasArts. Among the chaos that most likely ensued behind the scenes, some devs over at Raven Software released that source code to the community since LucasArts didn’t exist anymore and other Quake 3 engine games like Quake 3 Arena had gone open source by that point too, so it seemed fair. From that source code posting, the OpenJK project was born. OpenJK’s main focus has always been to maintain the source code as best as possible, fixing bugs and generally just making sure it runs on modern hardware. It’s core function is to be as vanilla as possible, which benefits those that want a vanilla experience but want to get those fixes. That also means that other projects can take that clean foundation of OpenJK, fork it, and build upon it to add their own features as a new project. That’s where the others come in. What is JAEnhanced? JAEnhanced essentially takes what OpenJK has and builds upon it with some new features that go past the scope of what OpenJK sets out to do. It has things like RGB sabers, ingame character and saber menus, new force powers, first person lightsaber, and much much more. It is meant to be an enhanced experience of the vanilla singleplayer game. It has no multiplayer version, it is just strictly singleplayer. What is TaystJK? For a few years there was a multiplayer client called EternalJK that aimed to add a ton of quality of life features on top of OpenJK, and it was the go-to client for anyone wanting a vanilla multiplayer experience. However the people working on it ceased development indefinitely, and the community member named Tayst took the reigns to keep development of it going in his own fork. So TaystJK has all of the great features of EternalJK and builds on it even further. This is the current recommended client for Jedi Academy multiplayer, as of now. EternalJK is still available for those that still want to use it, however its last build was in 2020. What about other clients and mods? There are a handful of other clients out there that are similar to these, however the more popular names you may have heard of are most likely much bigger mod projects or conversation rather than just a client. Mods like Movie Battles 2, Movie Duels, Galactic Legacy, or Knights of the Force are all huge conversion that drastically change the gameplay and add tons of Star Wars themed skins, maps, and weapons. Movie Battles II is a multiplayer-only mod, and takes a lot of inspiration from the original Battlefront games with its gameplay. Movie Duels is currently a singleplayer only mod that lets you play the different battles and duels from the films and series. Galactic Legacy is essentially a new spinoff from the older Knights of the Force mod that aims to replace it, being a sort of sandbox experience where you can play with any characters from Star Wars you want to in any location, but it also has a set of missions to play through from the films, series, and old EU. That should cover all of the big ones that we recommend checking out. It doesn’t hurt to try them all, you can pretty much have all of the clients and mods I just listed installed together to try them all if you wanted. The bottom line though: if you want a pure vanilla experience but with bug fixes and smoother running on modern hardware, go with OpenJK. However if you want some of those quality of life features and additions, I highly recommend going with JAEnhanced for singleplayer, and TaystJK for multiplayer. Why would you need any of these? On Windows, you might not need any of these depending on your hardware, however as PC components and operating systems continue to evolve, these older games aren’t evolving with them, since the developers no longer support or maintain them, so it comes down to the community’s passionate and knowledgable fans to do that work. The biggest reason to use these clients is if you’re on macOS or Linux, since they don’t have native versions that run on anything modern. These games did have a Mac version but that only runs on an operating system from over 6 years ago on outdated hardware. Another huge reason is if you’re wanting to play multiplayer, the vanilla game won’t have a functional server browser. Occasionally it will work, but what’s happening is the official master server from Raven is down more than it is up, most likely due to attacks. The community has a handful of other master servers, the main one being from JKHub. OpenJK and other clients default to this new master server so the server list is reliably functional and you can pick and choose your servers to play on. Otherwise, the other reasons are for bug fixes and features that the base game doesn’t have. Hopefully that clears up a bit about OpenJK and other clients for Jedi Academy! For help on installing the clients themselves, check out this tutorial: How to install OpenJK/EternalJK/TaystJK/JAEnhanced and other clients for Jedi Academy