Boothand

Well, Kyle only exists in a video game where he's clearly the best Jedi ever, so it's impossible to match up Star Wars-Luke with a video game character. You'd have to match up game Luke with game Katarn, in which case just spawn two NPCs and do the statistics!

Are you hoping to use this normal map on a modded renderer (rend2 or WarZone), or in vanilla JKA? In the last case, you can't use it as a normal map. You might make the diffuse look more the way you want by overlaying some of the normal map channels over the diffuse texture and tweaking it around though.

That was really well done! Loved it, the music didn't fit too well, but otherwise very impressive.

Join the discord in the last post of that thread gandowlf posted if you want to keep up. The thread is mostly abandoned in favour of communication on the discord.

I think JK2 1.02 CTF would be excellent cyber sports material. It's truly unique, as there's no other game with this pace where you use only melee (and mines) to kill each other instead of ranged weapons. Watching these captain's matches could be really entertaining with the right presentation. The gameplay has everything - incredibly high speed and fast reaction chases, cool saber combat, set roles within each team with plenty of interesting tactics, you have stuff like team boosts (you can slash your teammate to make them go really fast and soar through the air), "DBS dooms" (making someone die from fall damage due to the impact of the special move) and community banter.

Example of a cpts match, though not the best presentation/commentary/stream/stuff:

https://youtu.be/r0C-HTX3kas?t=675

I could make the case that we then should make 4 different versions of the game. One with the mechanics the developers want, one with JKA mechanics, one with JK2 1.04 mechanics and one with JK2 1.02 mechanics. They are all vastly different and each have their own player bases who remain separate largely because they don't prefer the gameplay of the others. All the Jedi Knight communities have been split for 15 years, maybe we shouldn't let that happen again when we try to revive it.

With a remake such as this, we're targeting new players as well. The majority of old players may be in JKA, but it's not such a significant difference that making an alternate version to not disappoint that group should be necessary.

We're not talking about completely overhauling the mechanics. Old players would have a significant advantage if the game became popular, just like how the longtime players of Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket Powered Battle Cars went on to become the elite in Rocket League. A lot of the behaviour was changed, but they adapted.

Why make two separate versions of the game? Rather make one game with confidence and make frequent showcases and get feedback from the community. Making two games, or two versions, will scatter our efforts and scatter (and confuse) a potential player base.

I'm not sure it would be required to map the Q3 pmove functions so directly to UE4. If we wanted to make a 1:1 copy of the gameplay, I could understand, but simulating/appoximating how velocity is built, sliding, collision and ground checks etc should be quite doable from an intuitive approach And if not, then yeah we always have the JKA source code for reference.

I think those are good suggestions. What could work too (and what is pretty similar to your idea I think) is "clashing" or "chambering" which is part of the combat mechanics in Mordhau (and I think also in M&B).

It works with mimicking the opponents attack.

For example if your opponent strikes from left to right and you strike almost at the same time from right to left both attacks get interrupted. However it only works if you have exactly the right timing and the right angle.

I think adding blocking without having an actual blocking key would be a good approach.

Yeah, it would essentially be chambering just that the physical position/orientation of the sabers would decide if it works.

In M&B you do it by attacking to the correct side right before the hit lands, and it doesn't stop your attack, so it's like a really fast counter.

Sounds like great progress already!

 

Personally I don't think manual blocking would benefit the combat. It takes away a lot of the movement aspects. In Jedi Academy and Jedi Outcast movement and footwork is so important because you can't rely on blocking. If there is blocking it shouldn't be implemented in a way that it takes away the importance of footwork, jumping, crouching etc, aka dodging the enemy saber manually by movement mechanics.

If you add manual blocking you also have to add some kind of stamina system and then you do pretty much the same thing that games like Chivalry are doing and it wouldn't have much to do with JK anymore.

Combat in Jedi Academy would work completely fine if there was no blocking at all.

 

For me one of the core aspects of the combat in Jedi Academy is how you can avoid the enemy saber completely, just by good footwork. So I would definitely suggest automatic blocking or manual blocking that is really hard to pull off and is very risky to perform.

 

As for special attacks... In Jedi Knight high level play they are at best unnecessary, at worst annoying. I think if you give the player a big amount of possibilites in movement, acrobatics and saber attacks and the possibility for players to combine them the way they can in Jedi Knight, then special attacks are not needed. Acrobatics could also be expanded a lot compared to what you have in JK. But I wouldn't want manual dodging, I don't think it's a good mechanic in any game, it makes the movement clunky and predictable.

I agree, I think movement is an essential part of Jedi Knight combat and it already works well in the JK series. And I'm saying this as one of the people who have done manual blocking mods and stuff. Manual blocking and cancelling out your attacks are cool and realistic things, but they do change the balance of a combat system that is already balanced and make for quite new combat strategies. I'm not strongly for or against either, but for now I have a preference towards avoiding attacks with movement as a base.

I do however shudder at the thought of a combat system with swords where you cannot block attacks at all. I agree that blocking is something that should be done skillfully, and here's an idea: You know how in JK2 and JKA (I think?) you can block attacks with your saber when swinging it, even at the start of the wind up? If we made the animations so that they would 'cover' a side in the start of the attack, it could be used for blocking. It's risky because you commit yourself to an attack if you miss the block aim/timing. For example, swinging from left to right: Move right, attack - saber goes left to wind up the attack and is oriented in such a way that it would smash away any attack from waist-to-shoulder before reaching the leftmost point where the strike begins.

Here's a completely other approach with automatic blocking as a base: You block by facing the attack when not attacking, like in JK2, but for every block your defense gets diminished and skillful combos can break through it. This is where I'd suggest taking JK2 1.02's red combos which I adore. Example of red comboing vs someone blocking. This could work with some careful balancing, and could also be made to look very Star Warsy by letting the characters do smooth blocking animations, using additional IK to properly overlap the attacks.

With all that said, I do also believe that there are functional ways to implement manual blocking with a JA-style movement system but in my experience it becomes too hard vs the fast attacks and too easy vs the slow attacks. Anyway, these are just.. three, of several options!

Yea I can totally see this happen. In the worst case the SW mod gets stopped but not the whole project.

 

About the engine: Obviously it would be technically better making it in UT4 but also way more work since you would have to start at zero. I wonder how many of the people here who demand to make this in UT4 are actually willing to commit and contribute. Personally I'm not familiar with UT4 so the work that I personally could do would be quite limited. I'm not against it but if there are not at least a couple of people who want to contribute and know what they are doing in UT4 then I don't see this happening.

What kind of work could you see yourself doing if it was based on the JKA engine? I'm sure you could learn working with UE4.

I can't promise how much time I can dedicate to it, but I'd be willing to try to set up a starting point given some basic UE4 compatible animations, and start building the saber combat system.

More like JAWS' scale:

With mysterious glow thing:

PSD file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/litpmamd3bf8yy8/yavinthing.psd?dl=0

Uhh. I don't know. I don't know Star Wars... Not sure what size, or if realistic enough. I'm sure this is freaking huge compared to what it should be. Tried to make it sort of obscured by atmosphere, and clouds.

I've also got $30 USD credit for the UE4 marketplace that I'm willing to donate for something decent, if this ever gets started and the purchase is of a dire need.

Hmm, if it's supposed to be entirely open source, might be tricky to include something bought.

I just mean like.. doing the very easiest things in the start is nice because it feels good to get them done. But if you decide to make a game that has JK-like sabering as a core feature, you should really start at once, don't leave this to the end. This is when you'll find out what it takes, if you or your team can do it and you will get your game built to support that feature completely instead of ending up with a robust system for a shooter, only to find you need to change a lot for the sabering to make sense (or that you cannot do it after all). I do agree that using a shooter template like linked above would be reasonable for a community project though.

My suggestion right would be to see if someone could transfer JK's movement, jump and sabering animations (yellow only) onto a new skeleton, and export FBX files, retarget them onto the template mesh and just replace the template's animations, then prototype with a placeholder stick.

If you intend to make a game like Jedi Knight that has sabering, I'd say do that from the start. Get the prototype up with the important features immediately. I think projects easily come to a halt if you say "we'll add that later when this part is good", if it's actually part of the core, even if a MP shooter is easier.

But I guess it's more about what the community wants in such a game. Personally I'd focus on saber combat, as this is the unique part that warrants a remake, since there is no other combat system like it outside of JK series.

So something where you can jump high and have this movement based directional attack system with a sword with various slow/fast styles? How would blocking/staggering work? Stuff like wall-jumps/climbs? Strafe jumps? What about various bugs and stuff people use from JKA like backflip delayed swings and stuff that is important to JKA duels?

Some time ago I did some live streams where I put Kyle and his anims in Unity and started playing around with the movement and combat system. Unreal would probably be better suited. I wanted to change up the combat a bit, but I'd rather try out my ideas some more before I try pitching it to someone.

I think an ideal combat system for something with the Jedi Knight-series movement style would be some hybrid between JKA and JK2 1.04 and 1.02. No matter the implementation, I have some ideas on how to make stuff like blocking look good and got a ton of experience in Unity and some experience with Unreal. If your/the community's ideas get developed enough, I'm sure I could help coding/blueprinting.

I think the most important thing to discuss is what kind of game you want to end up with? If it's not star wars, what weapons, what context is it placed in? What elements from the combat do you want to keep and change?

Just a nightly update. Some work being done on the swimming pool. Anoek worked her ass off too tonight. She's working on the training sections and trial sections of the map. She's learning allot as she goes along. At times I feel bad as I expect her quality to match up to mine and she sufferes the stress of it. But she is progressing amazingly. I really hope that by the time she is ready to show you all her section that you will all show her some love! She works her ass off to learn everything much quicker then most of us did. Any ways here is a pic... Gonna do some caustics and other cool effects.

Public Swimming Pool!

Hmm, for me I had to look at this picture a while before I could see that it was a reflection, and not a room where the floor was shaped like the ceiling and a floating surface in the middle. Maybe it could be toned down or somehow made to seem a bit more rough, less like a pure mirror. Perhaps it will feel different in game though, of course, than on a 2D picture

Very strange. I got EffectsEd along with the JA SDK, and they were included.

It's possible I never got the JA SDK then

Always got EffectsEd through JK2 Editing Tools 2.0

cg_thirdPersonCameraDamp [0.0 - 1.0] controls the damping of the camera movement. Setting it to 1 should make it completely rigid. 0.3 is default.

Hm, are you sure you have brick.jpg, clamp.jpg, dirt.jpg, none.jpg and stucco.jpg in your EffectsEd folder? I think they're used when a texture or shader isn't found. Speaking of which, make sure you have your whole shaders, effects and gfx folders unpacked in GameData/Base for EffectsEd to work properly.

I have always been spammed that those images are missing (they are used for some built-in textures in EffectsEd I think), they don't seem to be included anywhere until I make them myself.

What exactly are you trying to import? A vehicle? JK2 model? Anything that doesn't use the vanilla JKA skeleton?

I've imported plenty of JK2 models, that should be fine.

Holy hand grenade! You're so good that I want to take a backflip through a wall and grow potatoes though the hole.

On a less serious note, I would really love to know more about your workflow. Do you sculpt it in one piece, or every part separately, then glue it together? Sculpt -> Retopo -> More sculpt, or Modeling -> Sculpt, orrr?

I'm guessing we'd need some kind of physics joint/constraint system to do that properly? Attaching rigidbodies and colliders to the bodyparts would probably result in some hilariously stretched models if they started sliding too far

Again, superbly excellently goodly good! Hope we get to see even more recreated weapons from you