Ramikad

It was developed specifically for JKG back in the day, and never released. Not sure if the devs still have the map or the source files.

I read something about collisions in Rust (old devblog, but still might offer some insight on how things could work):

That's one for a proper Force Throw!

Seems to be the effect of the lightsaber's dynamic lighting. So that's probably env / cube mapping.

No human word can describe that awesomeness.

Nothing odd about that, it's just a monster of geometry

Can easily be smoothed merging the vertexes: the model seen there is actually crude brushwork turned to .ase. The Sulon Star could use a better model anyway, with proper rails and structures.

Yep, several:

You can open up the .pk3 file, either with Pakscape or as a .rar file, and look up in the folder maps/. An alternative would be typing in the console dir maps *.bsp, which will list all of the available maps, unless they're too many to be showed completely, and find the one you think it is.

Yep. Open up the console (pressing Shift + ~, the key left to 1), then devmapall <mapname>, and once in-game, you can spawn whatever NPC you want typing in the console npc spawn <NPC name>, or if you feel epic enough, npc spawn vehicle <vehicle name>.

You need to install the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable, 2015, I think.

Being a total noob, env / cube maps? Reflection? Refraction? Two pounds of awesomeness?

I remember DT85 playing around with a robotic Terminator, but said that it was just too much for Jedi Academy with all the pipes, servos and details.

It seems indeed that all animations are managed by the model_hand.md3. Basically, it doesn't involve any bones, but simply Empty entities named after tags. Keyframe their positions accordingly to the original parts of the models. For example, the Repeater has three Empty, named tag_barrel, tag_flash, and tag_weapon. Only them, apparently. The animation is made of 15 frames where they move around, and probably the actual model parts moving is managed in-game. Now to coordinate all of that with the .md3 parts and those weird angles is another matter entirely... Also, I don't know if that's important, but always check that the tags are set with Quaternion angles. Those turbolasers are actually .glm models. And the entities in that map itself are misc_turret with turbo spawnflags - they work pretty well, but only after they've been assigned a target through scripting.

You should also increase your Data Rate. If the servers still won't show up, an alternative would be to pick their IP from here and /connect directly.

Good things come if you type it correctly.

What if I tricked it by getting the non-baked .glm exported, then imported in Blender, bake the normals there and export? Would the tangents mess up even more? Or it's something else you mean?

For what it's worth I've experimented with Blender hair / fur effect a while ago, and baking textures / AO / shadows / whatever. Might be tricky to do properly but seems to make decent results.

Doesn't r_shownormals 1 work? Or you meant something else? Every time I check this thread I feel like I'm visiting the Kennedy Space Center: you like everything you see, but you have no clue on what's going on or what people are talking about.