eezstreet

@ eezstreet

 

Some people may ask for money to work on mods, but that is their own thing and not mine. It would be great to teach people how to do things (which I do from time to time), but not everyone is able or wants to learn it and would rather ask others to do it for them.

Getting paid for models generally allows the behavior of the buyer to proliferate. People need to realize that this is wrong and it doesn't belong in a modding community. So yeah, I agree with what @ said. Paying for or accepting payment in this sort of environment is ethically wrong in all kinds of ways.

I'm just going to point out that the solution to the "mod policy" is to provide the mesh, take the money, and let the recipient get it in-game themselves. Moot workaround, since nobody'd have the patience to learn to rig a model if they don't have the patience to learn to make it.

 

Also, I take it you think artists should give away paintings and sculptures for the cost of the paint or clay, based upon your reasoning?

Artists make a living out of painting, sculpting or whatever. If you're getting paid to make something for a mod project, you're doing it wrong. Most mod communities frown upon those that make anything for cash. Not only does it unlevel the playing field, but it makes things morally questionable for no good reason. I'd hate to mod for cash. Money is a filthy invention.

I know of very few modelled that charge what I consider "decent amounts". Triple digits for a low poly model is way too much in my opinion, especially if you're dealing with mods and not indies. I've never seen a model that I've liked go for under $100.

I can't honestly understand the mindset of artists. It seems like you're all pretty much in agreement that people should be able to mod for cash. I for one find that completely unacceptable. If I were a modeler, I'd refuse to model for money because let's face it: if you're still hanging around this mod community and make models for your own enjoyment, why do you need money? You're modelling for experience, fun, to express your ideas. I can't speak on behalf of programmers here (@@spior, @@Astral Serpent, @@Didz, @, @@Xycaleth, @@ensiform, @@redsaurus, @@Scooper correct me if I'm wrong) but I don't see how something so rooted in the concept of creativity can be so money driven. What we should be focusing on, instead of paying people for models, is teaching them how to model. That way, we can have a more thriving community full of modelers and such, than having people become frustrated by the appearance of people being gifted or whatever. Think about it this way, >DT<, instead of getting money from a person, you could get one of the things which might be useful to you:

- More help for MB3

- Someone who can help you work on your own projects

- Feeling better about yourself

Society these days tends to lean towards being narcissistic. Why should things be like that? We ought to impose a system of paying things forward...learning a subject in this community ought to entitle people to teach that same subject to two people. Knowledge is power, wealth and worldly goods are illusions of power. That's why I think that JKG is beginning to thrive more and more. A lot of the team has spent lengthy amounts of time learning the engine, and reverse engineering portions of it. The main contributing devs for the most part know the engine up and down. But I think that honestly every single person on this forum has the capabilities to do things which we have done, MB2 has done, JA++ has done, and so on. I've been in that boat before. I had to realias two or three times before settling on this name. I found the coding community to be extremely open, extremely enjoyable, and generally a lot nicer than the majority of other fields that I've worked with (I started with maps, and ended in code). But paying for models? And this request system of models that seems to be common? It's crap to be honest...people sign up on the site just to make a request. For what? Someone to say no? And then the process repeats? No.

I'm ranting. I'm sorry. I'm just tired of the divide between modelers and coders and I'm sick of greed. It bears repeating: money is a filthy invention.

^Pretty sure this topic has been covered years ago, Almighty_gir I beleive got paid to make a model and there was nothing illegal about it at all.

 

If you want to catch someones interest you should at least post what you want made, you might find yourself discouraged if someone contacts you but is totally uninterested in making what you want even if money is involved.

That's right. Nothing's wrong or illegal with paying for a model, people do it all the time for short films, games, & some just upload them to places like turbosquid to sell. Alot of people make a living out of being a freelance artist, others (like me) just do it occasionally for some extra money.

 

Though it'd be stupid of someone to pay a freelance artist the complete payment upfront, or accept to pay them an outrageous amount for something to go into an old game such as JKA.

JKA and short films are two different beasts entirely. If you want to make models for cash, I have no problem with that. I support the art trade and I believe in the movement that art is making these days. However... I don't agree with selling anything for cash whenever a mod project is involved. I'm disappointed that people see the need to make money off of what I consider to be a hobby, when the most they're putting into it is software costs. Freelancing models is fine, but fact of the matter is that artists are overcharging for bloody models.

I get really red in the face over stuff like this.

Other mod communities feel the same way as I feel I'm sure.

EDIT: oh, and you know, the LucasArts mod policy...

http://jediknight3.filefront.com/info/LAModPolicy

Don't know why this was over here. Thought it was in the forums, but whatever.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/jkgalaxies/tutorials/hosting-a-phase-1-server

For whatever reason, my thread in TerranGaming on this randomly disappeared.
Anyway, the directions are fairly straightforward:
1. Install game using launcher on Homehosted Package (serverside package might be broken, see my note below if you want the slightly experimental way of fixing this and saving yourself a bit of bandwidth potentially). The game does NOT support Linux serverside! (simple lack of time/resources and unnecessary in the long run really to write *nix binaries) The serverside does NOT work on jamp.exe! (jampded.exe or jampdedmulti.exe ONLY! Aluigi jampded should be compatible)
2. Unzip the Glua .zip (something along the lines of jkg_svGlua.zip), so that there is a Glua folder in your JKG folder.
3. Change the filename of server.cfg to be something else, modify the contents, and run a .bat which execs that .cfg and runs jampded.exe with fs_game set to JKG.

NOTE: there is an experimental fix which may result in the Serverside package working. I don't remember if the PK3 is protected or not. I think it's one of the few that isn't protected. If you go this route:
1. open JKG_SVResources.pk3
2. delete ext_data/MP folder

Turns out that the size discrepancies are the fact that they did all the cinematics ingame as FMVs in JK2, while they were actually rendered ingame in JA.

One interesting thing to note though is that trip mines use a different shader than usual. The little blue bits on trip mines actually flash. JKG replicates this behavior quite well, which I assume was BlasTech's original idea. Do note though that I haven't actually been able to unpack the archives as they're protected with Doom 3 archive formatting. Just haven't figured out the exact hash to unlock the files and it isn't really worth it.

If all else fails, try a complete reinstall using the launcher. That should definitely fix it. If not, we're releasing a PTR version soon-ish. My xfire is the same as my username here.

No. You need code to change that unfortunately. I think JA+ has a cvar for it though.

Lack of information isn't what's frowned upon. Paying people for a model is.

What @@Stoiss said. Clean up your base folder, make sure you're running via launcher or .bat, etc.

"Not a JPG" occurs when the binaries for the game aren't loaded properly, and the game fails to properly read from a protected PK3 (or use an encrypted BSP).

Remove any JKG assets from your base folder (if any are there)

From what I've read from the SDK, that would involve assuming that the user knows how to use Softimage XSI. Obviously, this is not the case since Eclipse had to spend a long time asking for assistance rigging his Vincent Valentine model. And what did he give in return? A tutorial which detailed how to rig models using Softimage XSI.

That makes me realize that two things are wrong with what you just posted:

1. The SDK obviously didn't do him any good. Don't get me wrong, Eclipse strikes me as fairly intelligent, intelligent and patient enough to make a Vincent Valentine model. Course..we don't have his tut on this site either.

2. People don't just do stuff in exchange for knowledge. It shouldn't be that people should texture a model in order to get knowledge. That makes a modding society fairly broken. Relating my own experiences here: I did not just randomly decide to start coding. People like Xycaleth, Didz, Razish, BobaFett and Scooper helped me learn how to code. If someone were to walk onto #JACoders right now, I would probably help them. I've written as many coding tuts as time/whatnot allows. I didn't ask for something in exchange for those tuts.

What your saying about the saber droid would NEVER work, the reason being is the game calls animations by using a simple naming convention of the sequence. What do you think would happen if you wanted the droid to crouch and call the correct sequence? Let alone not have a name mismatch for a player model calling an animation that belongs to the droid that has different proportions and structure? It'd require I'm sure a ton of work coding wise to make it call the correct sequence while knowing that the player is using the droid and not any other model.

They already do this to some extent. They do it for Rancors too. They just don't do it in MP.

I think you missed the point of what I was trying to say here though. I was saying that Raven could have put the saber droid animations onto the _humanoid skeleton (sound familiar? probably because Raven did the exact same thing with Alora, which worked just fine there) and made the saber droid used the _humanoid skeleton. Keeps animations from being all over the freaking place. Especially in the case of the rockettrooper, which weirdly got a separate GLA despite being the same proportions as the player.

I think all this so far is a huge waste of time, if you want ragnos to work in MP it's retardedly simple, rig him to the _humanoid skeleton the way I proposed and compile, anyone can do it, it's easy.

Name five people in the JKHub community who can rig player models and I'll believe you when you say that anyone can do it. I don't think anyone can either, considering there isn't a decent tutorial at all on JKHub. I don't know how modellers operate, but we coders don't just slam a few generic C++ or C tutorials on people and then claim that doing everything is "retardedly simple" or that "anyone can do it". Frankly it irritates me when people do that, but I'll stop there before I get too agitated.

The saber droid can be done the same way but it'll likely look retarded since the skeleton doesn't fit, I still say the best shot is to get NPC files working in MP the way they do in SP. I don't know why anyone would want to fight an NPC or BOT anyway, a mediocre human is more of a challenge than the hardest AI from my experience but I did a whole lot of 1 on 1 no force dueling in my day.

it crashes on the engine

I believe I made this pretty clear as to why this doesn't already work.

Huh? o_o

If you make a "People" tab over a "Modders" tab, that might entice clan leaders and such to make up their own page. Thus, more clan/community-oriented over mod oriented

Good. Now the site will be more leaned towards clans and things of that nature, I hope.

Now then. I used a teleporter to visit Australia, and it's the 24th. Where's my news update, Cael?

 

They're obviously quite different, anyone with modview can see that. The problem is not the bones or heirarchy, bones can be named whatever you want and placed however you want, the thing that is limiting in the game is the NPC classes and the fact that everyone knows that you cannot play as something that does not use the _humanoid.gla in MP.

 

That's all well and good, but pretty irrelevant. The issue is raised on the client whenever it tries to draw the refEntity (the renderer version of the ent in a sense), and it crashes on the engine. So there's no real accurate way of determining where exactly it happens. However I'm like 90% certain that if you assigned Ragnos/Saber Droid a different GLA/GLM, they wouldn't crash at all. It's likely just another stupid inconsistency between SP and MP though.

 

Bots if I'm not mistaken are treated like players and must use the _humanoid.gla, what would make the saber droid usbale in MP would to be either rig it to the _humanoid skeleton and recompile or fix the problem MP has with NPC's. The latter of course still wouldn't let you play as them since the issue with the _humanoid skeleton still being there.

 

I frankly can't understand why the saber droids weren't on the humanoid skeleton to begin with. They could have been just fine on the humanoid skeleton with modified animations. But I digress.

Well FM3 made ragnos work and it's easy to do for someone like me, just rig him to the _humanoid skeleton and make fake legs that have transparent textures so that the bones down there have something weighed to them so you don't get errors.

 

The saber bot of course does not use the _humanoid skeleton either, if it fits decently enough it could be weighed and recompiled, I merely just meant getting the AI to behave properly as an NPC.

If that's how FM3 fixed it, that's not fixing the actual issue behind it, that's just dressing up the issue. I highly doubt that FM3 actually RE'd the game and fixed the issue itself, otherwise it would have been a pretty large headline.

Like I said, it might be worth checking to see if there's any key differences between the saber droid/ragnos and say a rancor in terms of hierarchy etc, bones aside. There's something in the skeleton of Ragnos (I think) that the game doesn't like.

Ragnos / saber droid are broken at an engine level, and nobody really has any idea as to why (my guess is that it's in the engine code handling GLAs - might want to look at their skeletons and see if anything is out-of-the-ordinary)

slaves illegal in murrca fgt

Old news.

@@eezstreet

While I do agree, that "fixing" is a wrong term. Something that doesn't really exist can't be broken, I have to disagree its just a leftover.

Don't know how bout the code, but strings point Jedi Academy direction :

 

 

REFERENCE           40MOM019

LANG_ENGLISH        "Ace award"

 

REFERENCE           40MOM020

LANG_ENGLISH        "First Strike award"

 

REFERENCE           40MOM021

LANG_ENGLISH        "Jedi Master award"

 

Anyways, you are probalby right that improving graphics would be enough for almost everyone, but if we are dreaming (creating new models and making them all compatible + everything else would require too much effort for any team to make)  we can always dream about more eh?

I'd ask Rich if I were you. He's always behind the scenes coding weird things into JA (SOF2's RMG port works, with a little bit of maintenance, Siege was in JK2, etc)

edit:

4) Fixing in game award system, 

wasn't ever "broken", it's just leftover code from Quake 3

give it better graphics, everyone will be none the wiser.

the mod team

>> implying that raz0r employs slaves to help him do work

I like JK2. But I don't know if a lot of people play it anymore outside of the "chat and duel" scene.

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