Warlock

Post updated April 15, 2017 to reflect over a year of progress with this community and what we're looking at next.

Greetings to all in JK land! I'm here to announce that after a little over a year or so, we're going PUBLIC with our new Star Wars RP community Shattered Worlds! So what the heck is Shattered Worlds? Well first and foremost we are a community of Star Wars fans, writers and role-players, storytellers, and people who love to play the Jedi Knight series and train our skills with a lightsaber. We love to socialize and enjoy many facets of the game from full Force fighting to dueling to siege, and so we try to incorporate elements of all of it into what we do, because above all else we love collaborating together to tell stories and develop our own characters in the Star Wars Legends universe. The main daily server RP is based around a new Jedi Praxeum in which Jedi and their Force Allies train and set out on missions against the newly risen Galactic Sith Empire. Anyone is welcome to join this RP as a Jedi Hopeful (can be any age, we don't condone infant students in this era) and train in lightsaber combat. Many of us have been training lightsaber combat and philosophy (both Jedi and Sith) in this game for quite some time (my first students were in 2004) and we have heavily tweaked our JA+ server configuration to be as clean and accurate as possible; and we have developed a few special sabers that change up the animations to make things a bit more interesting, attempting to emulate the various styles of combat seen in the movies and television serials; but we are sticking to changes from the base game animations so not much of anything breaks without our server resources if you just want to test things out before committing to downloading our content. As a group that is interested in building a larger community and reaching out to areas of our larger JK community that often don't intermingle, we welcome members of all clans and teams and communities to come and participate. I will be approaching some of the long-time clans in the near future to offer them a chance to honor their clan by creating an NPC character that sits on one of the councils - in doing so, members from those clans can join the RP without establishing a Hopeful. Instead they can simply establish themselves as a knight from another temple and come and go into the RP as they please. Finally, if you ever wanted to play in a more serious kind of RPG story, something more like pen-and-paper tabletop gaming, we offer that as well! Once you are established as a regular in the community by reaching member status on our forum (it takes a few days of being active) and shown that you're going to be active on our server, you can create a character bio page in our wiki. Our story campaign features characters across the entire Galaxy, and player characters can participate in campaign missions with a narrator using our unique homebrew RPG system called the Action Point System™. We've spent over a year to create this rules system in order to create a simple and balanced way to generate player characters (PC) and non-player story characters (NPC) and resolve conflicts organically. We use Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy as the interface for this, spawning custom npcs and taking control of the story. PCs are able to interact with the larger Galaxy in this way on the hundreds of maps available for the game, and actions that take place in these campaign missions influence the bigger story that is the backdrop for the freestyle RP that anyone can participate in. So if any of this sounds interesting to you, head on over to drop us a line at official website at http://shattered-worlds.org Our server and website are hosted by Caelum and we've put a lot of time and energy into making sure everything is top notch. We hope you come check us out, soon! Note that we have players from all over the world so our activity is odd and usually our prime hours are on weekends. Thanks for having a look!

Ah....thank you much. That's why I couldn't find it. I was expecting it to be in the game's hierarchy. Sorry for being a bother about it, as I said. I tried finding info but I'm kinda new to using OpenJK and couldn't find the documentation because I'm lazy.

Right, so I hate to be a bother again, but where exactly is this openjk.cfg located? I can't find it anywhere. Also, the ALT+tilde trick doesn't work from chatbox at all. SInce we're a RPing clan we kinda need our Euro members to be able to type colored text into the chat box. I tried it myself on the newest build and all I can do is when I'm already in the console, I can hold ALT + tilde and nothing happens, rather than it closing the console. This is not ideal. Is perhaps maybe the reason that they chose to force you to use shift+tilde for the fact that some Euro keyboards have the ^ key on tilde which is used for colored text? Maybe this wasn't a good change for the sake of making it "consistent" with certain other games? It's making it difficult for one of our most active members to actually run his game through Steam with the benefits of all of OpenJK's bug fixes like the rest of us simply because he can't do a standard game function that he needs to properly participate in our community. I'm sure if we could locate this openjk.cfg and change the bind that'd be swell. Doing it from console doesn't work and I can't locate this file anywhere?

Ah! Alt key, perfect. That's the easiest answer. Thanks! Also, yeah I am aware that things in OpenJK mod are not in jampconfig but rather in openjk.cfg, but the server is running japlus, so I assumed the japlus folder's jampconfig binds would override it once he loaded the mod with fs_game. Guess not. I'll mention both solutions to him. Thanks!

So I've got a friend from Germany, he's also having and issue related to this... ensiform, your response is helpful but we're having problems removing the cl_consoleKeys bind. When he sets it to...well anything, it retains the default value as well. We also tried going into jampconfig (the one for japlus because we're running japlus) and removing the binds for "toggleconsole" as well so that he could just use shift+esc, but this also failed. The problem is that the `~ key on his German keyboard has the ^ key. With the bind no longer requiring shift using OpenJK, this ^ key is now opening the console, which makes it impossible to enter color codes in the profile fields or chat. Any ideas? He's using Windows7, and something about SDL2 and Windows was mentioned in your response, so idk if that has anything to do with it or not. I don't see any other Euros posting about this, so maybe it's specific to the German keyboard layout? In any event, any way to remove the bind entirely?

Some good points made by P!ng and aFinity here. For clarity I was mistaken and yes the default value is 350. I'm not sure if raising it to 400 or 500 does a lot, it's probably a combination of that and other things we're doing. No the claim wasn't based simply on our 2004 server, but on the one I'm testing now, and with people who know how to poke/wiggle (I had Earth on the server earlier, and granted he ain't the best of the best, he knows what he's doing) and yes his wiggles and pokes were getting through some of the collision but there was never extra damage aside from some burn it seemed. I assumed it was the idle delay cvar, maybe it's a combination of factors, maybe I'm just delusional. Who knows. Also I was never claiming that people who poke/wiggle can't play the game. Obviously that isn't the case then nor now. But it is the case that when new players who barely understand game mechanics see someone doing crazy poke and wiggle, they try to mimic them and look like fools and don't learn how to aim and end up weaker in the process, and then get frustrated and quit because they get sick of being one-hit since no one explains stuff to them. I poke and I wiggle and always have to some degree, because my style is technical so of course I'm going to twist and turn my model around people's shots and poke back in for mine and such. That isn't the exploitation. The exploitation is generally created by the missing saber hitbox that can make it easy to avoid saber collision entirely by using velocity to spin the saber through that box. Most of that is fixed in JA+ MP anyway, but people goof up other stuff with their configs and it gets equally silly. It is ultimately a preference like is said, and I'm not here to fight against the world. I was simply trying to tell the OP that there are ways to configure a server to mitigate a large amount of the exploitation of game flaws and perhaps some of my examples were a bit inaccurate I'm finding as I do further testing, but the fact remains there are ways to configure things that make people happy that there isn't goofy stuff going on. Maybe that lowers the skill ceiling as you said, personally I think it just changes the skill set a little on how you get the job done. I do understand the points about staff and such, that is a huge issue with base if there were no poke and wiggle to break their rush.

Well, it's a fact that prior to the existence of ESL there was a large amount of the JK community that saw these "skills" as exploitation of flaws in the game's weak hit detection system and strange errors produced by the physics. Basically everyone that came to JA from JK2 felt these moves were silly and broke the mood they wanted. The g_saberdmgdelay_idle cvar I assure you does "fix" the brokenness of the extra hits. If you want better collision that will require a mod, because there is a missing hit zone on the lightsaber in the base MP game that will always result in being able to fast-spin through it and do a hit somewhere else that should have been stopped by the saber. So you are quite correct about the best option for good gameplay being mods. I'm simply stating that this cvar in conjunction with mods (the most popular still being JA+ 2.4 with MP damage settings which is what I tested) resolves the wiggle hits pretty effectively, and this is something we knew back in 2004 as it was used by virtually every JA+ community from that time period. I can also give you a vivid explanation as to why it works if you'd like. I think it's pretty self-explanatory though. It's a value in ms that the system delays before registering a hit from the idle portion of a swing. At the default value of 0, idle hits are calculated every time they hit, so a single swing can hit any number of times. With the delay of say 350ms (a value many were using in 2004) it only calculates damage on idle hits every 350ms meaning at most you will get 2-3 hits from a single swing relegating the ramping of damage from poke or wiggle to mostly burn damage. I chose to up the value to 400 because we were still getting some idle hits at 350 that I didn't like with the improved collision we were using. However, I assure you this cvar mitigates the DAMAGE exploitation of wiggle and poke to a large degree (again I can't speak for the collision exploitation because that requires modding and/or a lot of complicated cvar play to remedy, so I never claimed this to be some "magic" cvar that fixes the entire game). So I stand by what I said. This cvar has been around forever, I'm fairly sure it's a standard Q3 cvar used to mitigate issues with OP splash damage and the like (and to facilitate a way to tweak the creation of things like flamethrowers and swords and such on their engine without breaking everything) and it does what I say it does (did extensive testing with many people using those moves and they don't do any real noticeable extra damage). So to say it's an "easy fix" to one of the biggest problems (at least I think it's a problem as does the OP) in the game is a sound conclusion to draw imo considering we were using this cvar in the {O} clan back in 2004 because it stopped the whirlybird fighters from scoring cheap wins on people who had been training how to fight in JK since DF2. When we took away this "skill" it turned out they couldn't even aim and would usually die relatively fast to a simple 3-hit red combo. Surprise. *eyeroll*

I found the old cvar I'd forgotten about that pretty much fixes all the wiggle and poke exploiting, it's called g_saberdmgdelay_idle I set it to 400 and it seems that if the idle damage is delayed 400ms it reduces almost all the silliness of the exploitation of multiple hits with a single swing. Just saying...it's quite easy to fix and has been known about since at least 2004 but no one uses it anymore because they like exploiting the broken game.

I have to say that back in the olden times before we knew much about this stuff and were trying to fix the bugs with JA's horribly bad saber collision, we found sv_fps 30 to be the best setting for JA+ mod MP settings...our logic then was that since JA was developed with the XBox360 in mind and XBox 360 had a max fps of around 30, it made sense. Obviously Raz0r's explanation makes far more sense.....but I have tested both settings for years, and it seems as though when set to sv_fps 40 there are a lot of unexpected extra collisions when the ghoul saber trace cvar is turned on when running JA+ with the MP damages, whereas 30 seems to eliminate the ghosting and the false hits. Maybe this has to do with the increased saber radius used when the MP damage cvar is set? I imagine what is more likely actually happening is that the hits aren't false, but that the client is correcting a frame that was predicted wrong...how does ping factor into sv_fps and snaps? Obviously at near 0 ping, I think the likelihood is that sv_fps of 40 would be the most accurate means of boosting the hit detection without sacrificing consistency; however, in practice, if sv_fps 40 generates far more inconsistency as far as JA+ mod is concerned (for base, sv_fps 40 does indeed seem perfect) would that have something to do with the networking? I also don't want to be thought crazy, but I did once find that when messing with higher sv_fps on one version of JA+ that the speed did indeed increase as I raised the values (although I don't think that happens anymore in build 7, I think it was beta 1 or build 4)...no this wasn't psychosomatic, because when I raised it up to 100 it was like a Roadrunner cartoon. I couldn't tell you why any of this is, because JA+ is shrouded in mystery that only Slider and his team understood and was developed without access to the source code and with I imagine somewhat limited knowledge of all the secrets buried in Q3 (though I could be wrong, for all I know he could have been a Q3 modder as well). Also, I've had people debate com_maxfps of 100 and 125 as being "best" in particular for strafe jumping. I honestly don't know which makes any sense, though on my laptop with OpenJK and the openGL replacer running I cap at about 30 like I'm on Xbox360 so I wouldn't know the difference. Edit: Also, yes I know this is an old post that I'm resurrecting. But it's because I have always really been curious about this whole sv_fps thing.

I definitely understand and agree with a lot of your sentiments, having begun in JK2 with the {O}rder of the Jedi clan myself (you'll remember one of our masters, Jedi Master Griffenclaw who developed the JediCouncilGC maps). 1 and 2 - Basically the laming rule came about back in JK2 as it was said, because FFA became more than just a place to do FFA. It was the only game mode where you could have multiple saber duels and FF fights and weapons fighting all going on at the same time with ease, so larger clans of duelists who didn't want to have to sit around and wait and wait and wait to duel, or didn't want to CTF just to FF and so forth opted for this game mode because it was the most versatile. There was also a heavy amount of "Jedi" clan movements that focused a lot on one-on-one Padawan/Master training and so it was important to not have classes or Trials or such disrupted and so rules were put into place to keep people from just jumping right onto a server and attacking everything that moved in order to have an ordered atmosphere during non FFA times. The easiest solution was to basically ask people not to lame (i.e. attacking someone who was lame - no weapon) and other honor rules came into being such as bowing before duels, not striking someone who was knocked down (in JK2 you really couldn't defend at all once flipkick grounded), etc. But the level to which it has become applied and the complete intolerance of many admins over the years when it comes to the interpretation and enforcement of these honor rules has reached absurdity, to the point of becoming parody. I generally laugh any time I enter a server and start seeing admins spamming messages and sleeps on about 1/3 of the people on server. 3 - The problem here is that all the old timers like me stopped running servers. We solves the exploit issues long ago with JA+ mod. It's really quite simple, but the ESL community built their entire competitive "pro" style around the base game and all its collision issues. If you run JA+ mod with MP damages (which increases the saber radius to close the missing hitbox area allowing for passive blocks and minimizing ghost sings through the opponent's saber) in conjunction with sv_fps 30 or higher and remove location based damage, you can tweak the altDMG settings to effectively eliminate all the wiggle exploits and effectively have the core sabering the game was originally intended to have without compromising the ability to deal solid damage with multiple hits on extremely well placed strikes that hit multiple zones with proper force and prolonged poking. There were no one-hit headshots going on, but at the same time you could generally off someone in 2-3 hits if you were talented. This is how servers like {O} and {TO} and many others ran for years and they had some of the largest communities in JA during the 2004-2005 era (upwards of 100 members and usually 40-50 were active players at any given time). No one ever complained that the game wasn't enough like base. No one ever complained that these clans viewed the exploits as a form of cheating and everyone in those communities cheered with glee when we figured out how to effectively eliminate wiggle. But today, every JA+ server will have a "basetroll" on a daily basis extolling the praises of how superior base is and exploiting the hell out of everyone on the server, and even the best JA+ players use exploits now. It's become acceptable and people laugh when you call them exploits. Apparently they don't realize that Ravensoft never patched the bugs and exploits, not because it was "perfect" on release but rather because they were angry over a beta leak and never really completed the game because of it...you can see that it's an unfinished game just by the fact there are custom skins that were never finished that just got hidden away among other things like the fact the server.cfg for base was basically just the JK2 config without any of the added ghoul cvars or anything...MP was obviously still in beta so we got a crap MP experience because of it never being finished. Also, in regard to your comment about new players, with so few clans who actively welcome new players, train them, etc. you are bound to have new player beatdown fests. Oddly enough, that whole "laming" rule thing and such you decry was how most new players back in the old days were able to find a welcome place to sit back and learn the game from some experienced players who weren't just running around FFAing the whole time. Maybe you learned another way, through trial and error, but the vast majority of vets who left the game years ago (fed up with all the exploiters, hackers, trolls, and the admins who fought them to the point of becoming abusers to their own members) all had masters or at least communities that actively trained new players rather than just letting them to the wolves. 4 - No one runs custom maps anymore because the JA community is so small that they are all fighting over every single new player that comes their way from a Steam bundle sale or the like. Not to mention, as beautiful as many of the custom maps are, they're entirely impractical or have huge memory leaks and are only good for standing around RPing or exploring. People threw away game functionality or the ability to quickly get from point a to point b on a map to stay in the fight a long time ago it seems when developing maps for this game...likely because the RP clans are the only ones who ever use custom maps anymore because they can always find new players somehow through word of mouth. So yeah, basically, I sympathize with a lot of what you say. The JK community isn't what it once was, but it hasn't been for 10 years. There's a few clans like KR that are still around because they try to run a clean server but at the same time, they have their abusive admins as well. There's no real places left like there were, and the majority of the problems with the game have been left to the wayside. Thankfully the OpenJK team picked up and did a LOT to fix the major issues, but nothing has (or likely ever will) be done to fix the saber exploits that make all the active servers unbearable. It's just the sad reality, and it can't much be helped.

Did not have callvote enabled, but good to know.

Ah, that makes sense. Yeah we're running JA+ but we're also running OpenJKded. We may consider moving to JA++ though simply since it'll be more updated. Also had OpenJKded and JASS both working fine with JA+ after some headaches on a couple other servers, but idk if we're still doing that with this one or just OpenJK. Also, no, autodownload is off and our RCON is highly secure. I imagine it was the NPC bug.

Had a curious event tonight on our server beyond the standard junk. We were running an SP map (which that might have something to do with it) and someone managed to hack our config somehow. We ended up flooded with bots and our tag protection password changed. We're running OpenJK and I believe JASS as well. Anyone else ever see this? Do we need to just stay off the SP maps?

I love the addition of the credits section. Is there a way to go into files already submitted and add that content, or is that something we would have to submit to staff? Also, in regard to the ripped content, the example of the ripped sounds from the movies is quite illustrative of the policy, I think. Considering there was a huge rip dump made public by LucasArts when they folded, they should be ok to include in models, reskins, maps, etc. But, who is to say that Disney won't step in and claim that LA had no right to dump it? That's why there's policies in place for removal, I imagine, cases like that.

I have always used Audacity, but it was Audacity that failed me this time around. Goldwave let me batch convert them all to wav at least. I generally have always trusted Audacity. Maybe I just screwed something up.

I never have either, until this time around...

But the filesizes! How will they fit on our 100MB hard drives?! xD

I see a lot of people talking about the mono channel thing. These files WERE in mono (I wasn't using Audacity for the very reason Circa discussed, they kept reverting to stereo - that's why I was using Goldwave) and they were 44.1KHz and they still were not working. This is an issue with compression. As I said, I fear that the compression agency used by the more recent versions of LAME is no longer compatible with JA. I suppose we can start using older converters or something, or we're going to be stuck going back to WAV files, which means not really any compression at all!

Well I think my Old Ben Kenobi skin and a certain other thread that will remain nameless were good enough introductions to me perhaps. However, I'd just like to say hello to JKHub and thanks for keeping the modding legacy going after all these years! The Watchmen are grateful for all you have done, and I, the Warden of the Watchtower, salute you from our new site. Feel free to drop by and give us a shout. We should be getting a public server up and running soon to use some of these wonderful custom maps that no one seems to be using! Shame on all of you! }W{Knight Warden

Is there any way we can do something to allow for modern mp3 compression agents? I ran into a huge issue with my OldBen skin trying to add sounds from the Lucasflm sounds that Circa posted up. The reason wasn't simply because they needed to be made mono-channel 44.1KHz files. The issue seems more to be that even using Goldwave to convert them, JA just doesn't want to recognize the LAME compression anymore. My fear is that mp3 compression has reached a point that it is no longer recognizable by the JA software. Is there something we can do in OpenJK to add support for newer compression? The reason I ask this, isn't because I think texture artists and modelers should not try to make their sounds support the base game. However, it WOULD remove TONS of skin errors when people add unsupported sounds (which you know they will continue to do) to their models/skins. I think this would just be a blessing for players who are plagued by constant red-line unsupported sound messages when their friends connect with their broken skins...not to mention it would benefit the amateurs in that their sounds might actually play. Edit: Though I guess to be fair, to remove the redline messages you'd have to support other sizes entirely than 44.1, because I had no error messages, just no sound playing at all. Though when I loaded the NPC the error became apparent that JA felt the 44.1KHz mono files were "unsupported" sound types.