Circa

We really need a good male Twi'lek model. But yeah, looks good so far. Agreed with Noodle though about the hands.

I think options such as no auto refresh, no levelshot transitions (one is enough imo), and the ability to select a font would be nice. Like a choice of the select default browser fonts. But, don't put off features just for my sake. I'm now using the tracker on my site with the flat dark theme with 0 transparent background and it's very close to what I was wanting!

Okay, so still can't use it on my hosting. Bummer. I think the Flat themes look good, though I'd change a few things still. I'd come up with a theme myself to show you guys what I'm wanting, but using the iframe from your site forces it to use auto-refresh. That's one thing I really don't want. An option to disable that would be great. I could then use dev tools in my browser to edit things I want and send a screenshot, and maybe someone could make it happen? Again, I'd do it myself but can't without hosting it myself. Also, the levelshots don't seem to be loading in Safari for some reason. On macOS or iOS.

Hello friends. It’s been awhile since writing a legit article around here. I want to do more, but both lack of motivation and topics makes it difficult. I think this may change from now on, because we are starting a new article series, called Mod Features! Mod Features will be exactly what it sounds like: an article dedicated to showing off a mod, what it features, small interviews with the creators, etc. The first mod to get this special treatment is the Epic Challenge Mod III. Now, apparently this mod has been in development for a few years, with a couple previous versions made. If you were like me and had no idea this mod project even existed until recently, you should definitely check it out. A little about the mod Epic Challenge Mod III is a single player mod, complete with it’s own story, maps, enemies, and quirky thematic choices that make you feel like you’re in a Star Wars-themed Nintendo game. The amount of content in this mod is vastly great, arguably more than even the base Jedi Academy single player story. This mod took the creator, RJA, almost 2 years, which definitely shows in the amount of stuff there is in this thing. You will find yourself fighting to survive enemies that are in your way of an objective, or you may just need to find a way to reach a certain area of the map in a certain way. Much of this mod will involve using your brain and survival skills to reach the end. The story features a villain named Darth Lawn, which has created this “Zone of Trouble” to which you play as Kyle and a couple new characters, with help from Luke, to defeat him. Each area you reach contains various challenges ranging from a great number of NPCs, or a few tough NPCs, or certain climbing and jumping obstacles, and much more. Many areas are complex to where you need to get one area unlocked or retrieve something, and make the trek back to where you started to find a new unlocked door or pathway. The effort put into creating all that is admirable. You don’t see that in many JKA mods like this. One of the first things you’ll notice is the charming French accent. RJA voiced most of the characters in the mod. As an English-speaker, hearing Kyle and Luke with a French accent speaking English was very amusing, especially since it was the same person with a different inflection. The Overall, the mod can be very difficult, especially for new players. Saving often is my best advice. I think my biggest challenge was getting used to the single player movement, after playing multiplayer for so long. The movement is very different in each. So climbing up a bunch of platforms to reach the top of a mountain was a great challenge for me, whereas it would have been cake if it was multiplayer. The NPCs can be difficult as well. Sometimes you have to favor sneaking around huge hordes of them instead of attempting to fight them all at once. A short interview I took a bit of time asking the creator of Epic Challenge Mod III, RJA, a few questions about his mod, to get some more info about his process, inspiration, and more. So what gave you the idea to make a mod like this? Was there anything outside of Jedi Academy that inspired your work? I would say the real goal is to propose challenges to everyone, but I'm with those who think that every creator has a personnal purpose. Mine was an obsession to revisit the games I played in my childhood, especially early childhood. It was some kind of porting impressions, sensations in my favourite game (which is Jedi Academy). So what inspired me where these games. This mod is the third one I made for SP. Like the others, some parts of are based from a game I used to played in the early last decade. If ECMI was inspired by Croc: Legend Of The Gobbos and ECMII: Rayman 2: The Great Escape, this one took a lot from Tonic Trouble, an underrated UbiSoft game made the year before Rayman 2 (it was supposed to test 3d Games rayman-lookalike before releasing the true Rayman 2). Tonic Trouble gave me the taste of absurdity, psychedelism. The form of the mod came in a simple way. I always knew It would be my thing to make HUGE MODS (like 35-55 maps), with a lot of ennemies, places, challenges and the best of all... secrets. This one has a lot of secrets. And my passion about secrets came from these platform games I used to play. How long did it take to complete Epic Challenge Mod III? How does that compare to the previous versions of the mod? Asgarath83 edited the code, and a lot of skins and some textures came from others modders. Being said, I made all the mod alone, including Mapping, Music (and not just editing them, I actually made two of them, as a musician), npcs, some gfx, voiceovers (helped by girlfriend and bestfriend), scripting, videos editing, texturing and skinning. So ECMIII took me officially one year and a half but If I count early developement (started during the finishing of ECMII), it took me almost two years.What took the most time was the Zone Of Trouble area (zone with portals), because South Plain is a central map, and I made every versions of this map and needed to compile a lot of them again and again (and this particular map was the one who takes the most time to compile...). I also needed to make every versions of the 7 levels you visit from South Plain (The Cave, Vinegar Sith HQ, North Plain, The Canyon, Glacier Cocktail, The Pyramid, The Factory), taking account of the progression of the mod, and updating Kyle capacities. End of the mod was the fastest thing to do. I took me 1 week to make the last 12 maps I think. Comparing to previous mods, because they are totally different mods with different goals and maps, it took me one more year. ECMI and II were basically "killing and finding secrets" challenges, but in ECMIII there is a little story progression, different scripts, videos and voiceovers, so the mod is a lot more complex (including new capacities, like the transforming-platforms). Did the mod turn out exactly like you had initially planned it to be, or did it end up being much different? Firstly, the mod was written to revisit a lot more places from ECMI from a new point of view. It would have started in the Sand Island from ECMI (third island), have the same main villain and would have ended in this villain castle, again. But during the developpement this idea started to bore me so I only kept the Castle Ending, because Castle in ECMIII is very different from the first one (and I prefer it a lot like this). Funny thing to notice, the mod would have been a lot shorter... Kyle was supposed to quit the Zone Of Trouble to Lawn's Land for 3 maps and enter the Castle. He was supposed to be helped by Lana and an old jedi (I used jeditrainer skin firstly) with a white lightsaber... But a this time, when I ended the Zone Of Trouble area, I got this special nostalgia about Toy Story 2 PC Game, when you was supposed to travel through all the city to find Woody who has been captured. I took this idea, and created Duncan (the character with the white lightsaber) and decided to make 15 maps about Duncan finding a way to the castle because Kyle has been captured. But after the first one, it appears to me that 15 maps would be boring, so I just made 6 maps and decided to make the ending not only playing Kyle but also Duncan (again) and Lana (for 3 maps). And the idea of the final map being the one you see in first when you launch the mod (the one with the cinematic) came at the very end, before making the last map. Are you satisfied with the end result? What would you do to improve it? I'm quite satisfied with the mod, because people seem to be satisfied about it. I would probably have fixed some boring bugs which would have took me hours and hours to fix (bugs in the South Plain), and I would have taken more time to do the videos and the voiceovers. And also textures. It's really not tiling in a lot of places. My girlfriend who study 3D told me it is learner's error. Such a shame, because little bugs can sometimes embarrass you more than huge plot holes. Are there any projects you will be working on now that this mod is finished? Yes. I'm actually working on Epic Challenge Mod IV: Temple Of Time. The mod will be Star Wars related and will be far more realistic in some aspects. We will play a bunch of characters (including Kyle) and see different eras of SW. After ECMIV I will do a last Epic Challenge Mod, the fifth one, which will be a lot more personal. Maybe I will one day do a Hogwarts Map, when I get the mapping skill. One last question. Who would win in a fight, Kyle Katarn or BB-8? Kyle Katarn, without a doubt. Alright, thanks for answering my questions! Looking forward to future projects! In summary This is less of a review article and more of a feature, however, I do recommend playing this mod. It’s a lot of fun if you like to be challenged. There’s a lot of content to go through, a variety of enemies, challenges, and maps. Thanks to RJA for taking the time to answer some questions, and good luck on future projects! You can check out one of the teasers that RJA made below, as well as the file page where you can download the mod. If you'd like your mod to be in an article like this in the future, please PM me or another staff member, and we can work with you on that. div.BBcodeButton button {background: #212121 url(https://jkhub.org/public/style_images/jkhub/topic_button.png) repeat-x top;border: 1px solid #212121;border-width: 1px 1px 0 1px;border-radius: 3px;box-shadow: inset 0 1px 0 0 #5c5c5c, 0px 2px 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2);color: #fff;text-shadow: 0 -1px 0 #191919;font: 300 14px/1.3 Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;line-height: 30px;height: 40px;padding: 0 10px;text-align: center;min-width: 125px;display: inline-block;cursor: pointer;} Download Epic Challenge Mod III Click here to view the article

I think they listened to the feedback on the first one and are working towards getting this one to how it should have been. I loved the first one, but obviously it didn't have as much content as it could have. Even EA said they weren't happy with how it turned out, despite it selling a lot of copies. They know the fans were upset with it, and are working to fix that with this one. So all in all, I'm extremely optimistic. Playing as a Clone Trooper again like the good ol' days is going to be amazing.

Gonna attempt to use this again. I like the new themes you guys made. I think I figured out how to use it on my hosting now. We'll see. One thing I had to do before uploading was remove the levelshots of games other than JKA. Too many excess things I didn't need. But also, I recommend putting your images through FileOptimizer or ImageOptim, so they are optimized for web properly and will load quicker in browsers. I ran all the images through ImageOptim and saved a decent chunk of space by doing so. http://nikkhokkho.sourceforge.net/static.php?page=FileOptimizer https://imageoptim.com/mac

What programs/plugins?

So a leak for the sequel to EA and DICE's Battlefront has gone out, showing what looks to be the trailer for the game. Figured a new thread should be made for it, instead of using the old one. It looks like we will be getting everything we wanted in this one. A story mode and all eras included. It looks great just from that teaser. I'm really excited. Now I have a goal to get to max level and unlock everything on Battlefront before this one comes out. The link will be updated to the official one when it's released.

Entity modding is kinda more trouble than it's worth in this case, in my opinion. How did you do add your NPCs initially?

Was about to ask what Noodle did. Did you just use MIDI or a keyboard for them? Would be great if you could record on a grand. What's your recording process and equipment, out of curiosity? As far as the pieces themselves, I think they're great. I love piano renditions of stuff. Nice work.

Probably not the right format. Looped files need to be mono WAV files, I believe.

You're saying that you can choose them by pressing the "next power" button and use them with the "use power" button but they don't actually work? Or they just aren't there at all? What about binding the powers to separate keys? Or have you made sure you set your powers in the Force Powers menu to include all powers?

.warnbox { background: #e3f6e5 url( images/icons/exclamation.png ) no-repeat 9px 10px; border: 1px solid #b4e3b9; color: #475949; } Topic moved to OpenJK Discussion forum.

Well the animation in question is the exact same in both games, so might be some kind of weird thing in the code that's causing.

Yep, a bit glitchy. There are a few things like that in JK2 as well. Like ent said, its due to the how the animations work. Since the top half of the body is using one animation and the lower half is doing another, it isn't the smoothest thing at times. Not even sure it can be fixed, but I'm no coder.

This is the one that has the most changes probably, for better or worse: https://jkhub.org/files/file/753-clone-wars-stances-and-effects-mod/

I mean, more public servers, the better. Preferably more base servers would be nice.

If you have force push level 3, they get knocked down. You can also throw enemies with grip level 3.

Regarding the images not loading: they are hosted with Discord, which you may need to view them. Use Imgur, people. Pretty sure anything hosted on Discord gets deleted after a time.