NumberWan

4 hours ago, Basil Bonehead said:

Made it to the library, still got time before reinforcements arrive. I've searched the whole library top to bottom, hitting the interact key on everything and can't find what i'm suppose to do. what do i do? what do i interact with to progress through the level?

If you look carefully through the shelves, you'll notice one part of holobooks protruding in the wall. Use the Force then.

On 1/29/2020 at 11:01 AM, dg1995 said:

I have a question, is finding secrets useful other than getting some HP and weapons ?

Is finding secrets award you with force points ?(I hated this idea in JK 1)

Secrets aren't necessary for HP. At later stages either secret areas or subquests allow you to acquire weapons, which can't be obtained via other options in the level. At least one secret would open sort of "Shop" for you.
Some locations offer bacta tanks and references to Star Wars EU. Your Force powers grow as you progress through the story, it's not affected by secrets.
If we could, I would have added more items, weapons and other new things to JA, but that would require more of a coder, and I am more of an artist and designer 

4 hours ago, Apprentice said:

OK, first impressions based on the first mission:

 

1) Installation process is a bit tedious, why unzipping two more additional files when they are already in the right folder and could've been included within the main ZIP file ??

2) No widescreen (16:9, 16:10) support natively ??

3) The Russian language in the Star Wars universe ??

4) Difficulty settings are either too simple or too hard, there are no middle ground here.

 

Will write more when I have more.

1) Packs are separated in case some people are unfamiliar with OpenJK, etc. I would have preferred making an exe file for installation, but it would also require time to make

2) Do you mean some icons and images are "deformed" as a result of current resolution? Most testers had no problem with widescreen.

3) We had Russian-speaking actors only. It was quite difficult to bring them all together even for one voice recording... It would be even harder to do with English speaking people, living in different countries. 

4) The Difficulty settings are coded in the JA engine. We didn't change this in DP, and for the most part the difficulty depends upon using the Force or lack of weapons in certain areas. 

I would say, that the intensity of battles isn't equal to the Jedi Academy pace. It's more or less happens with the direction towards Character's growth as a Jedi. Here Kyle Katarn is already a Jedi master, so we had to cut his position as a notable hero from Jedi Outcast. You could say, that he is restoring his strength after Ord Mantell.

@Numfast

Thanks for the review. Never expected someone to mention and notice so many things at once! It's indeed full of spoilers , but I'm glad most secrets were unveiled in such a manner. 

There is a glitch, which I adressed in the ReadMe file. Currently we are looking into this problem and perhaps we've found a solution.

So I'll update the pack soon. 

My guess, the review system was changed.

In the past you could simply post 1-5 stars, now you'll have to add your opinion on the file. At least I can't add stars the way it was previously possible by simply clicking the right amount above the file.

31 minutes ago, GPChannel said:

Cool,update moddb page too pls for more views  

Yes, I've already added the news there. It's awaiting authorisation.

So we're done polishing most of the things and Chapter I of The Dark Pastime mod is here to download.

Sorry for being so long in fixing the whole pack.
I must say this was probably the most difficult thing, also because this was the first time it was run on a new machine of a completely new User. I would like to thank everyone for helping us to make all this possible – both those, who contributed a lot to making maps, scripts, voice-acting, etc. and the ones, who were patient enough to play through all the missions and tell us about their opinions on the mod.

I hope this Chapter would be of some fun for you. Just remember, that this was a project made by fans and in most cases we had no professional experience in making the locations, missions, voice-acting and sound, as well as making the story itself (which was created by Wuhan and me back in 2004!). I would like again to add, that we made a great step forward thanks to Olgo, who added a lot to the very many aspects of The Dark Pastime.

So here is the download link below.

Download The Dark Pastime Chapter I

Important note: The link contains several files, follow the Installation Instructions from DP_Install_guide.txt via the link to set the mod correctly (!!!).

Important note 2: The mod still has a few minor bugs, which due to JA specifics can't be fixed at the moment (despite all our efforts). Check ReadMe files for information and possible solutions.

Important note 3: We might change the link and update the files during these days, should we find any new bugs in the mod.

All of them had, as far as I remember. Including Episodes VIII, Rogue One and Solo. Still Rogue One remains to be one of the best in the new generation of stories, if not the only one.

And Episode IV and I had terrible storms in Tunisia, which also posed a problem for production. During Episode V they got into a most vicious blizzard in Norway. In any case I do believe that's not the real reason for a problematic cinematic experience. My personal opinion is that 2 years isn't enough to make a Star Wars movie. In most cases. CGI and practical effects could be made, but choreography requires discipline and necessary preparations a little longer.

Still I enjoyed Episode IX, despite the flaws of the last story of Skywalkers, mentioned above. It was different for me with Episode VII, as I don't like it at all. The first one was the film, that collapsed all the consistency in Star Wars, thus most of the issues have their roots from the VII in the new trilogy. 

The second reason is that the audience changed drastically over the course of recent years. It's quite difficult to make a surprise or shock someone with entirely new content. Almost everyone has a chance to watch the movie as many times as he wants – via apps and mobiles several times per week + watch immediate reactions from others, use STOP to analyse certain scenes or glitches of the film.

There is a 'condition', as far as I remember. The menu checks a certain 'state'.

For example, if it's = 10 or less only a single hilt is available. If it's 11 or more, than new hilt types are activated in the menu.
The only problem is that you have to search for this particular line of text in the MENU file of the Saber Menu and most likely simply remove it.

If you are making your own map, then you can make a script, which "declares state". For instance, if the Player checks upon certain area, the state is = 11, and after that a saber menu can be opened (via script) and all the sabers would be available. You can't change the condition, it's in the code. But you can change the "state" via scripting and even make, so that certain colors appear after state=20, while double bladed hilt appears after 10.

It’s been very quite in here, I guess, mostly because a lot of people are either disappointed with the previous films or simply tired of Star Wars.

I personally wanted to see Episode IX and feel the end of the main story, even though I was most displeased with The Force Awakens. I believe this was my last time I were gathering lots of people and friends to watch Star Wars together at cinema. Simply because that's how I see it (not because the movies were bad). I had very low expectations for The Rise of Skywalker, but well, today I watched the film and somehow feel relieved for now.

In general without spoilers, I would say...

And for the spoilers:

Read some things (rumours) about Episode IX, and some of them are interesting, while others might be infuriating at best.

Be careful, potential plot leaks below.

The beginning (I dislike this one):

Luke, Leia and others

Kylo Ren and Dark Siders

Dark Rey

C-3PO

Death Star and ships

It was said, that the scene with Dark Rey is something like this (spoilers!):

I read some articles and rumours about Episode IX, and they are more contradicting than what was known about VII and VIII at some similar time before the premiere. Back then there was some hope, that The Force Awakens would be an awesome film, and that the Last Jedi would fix some of the weaker sides – nothing of this happened however. With The Rise of Skywalker the scenario might bring even more damage to the Saga, but this time by diminishing what was made by characters in ROTJ.

I've already voiced my opinion on the Fallen Order in this topic. But I would say, we'll have to wait.

In any case thanks for the kind words about DP. Our project is merely a mod, an addition to the game. But I think Jedi Academy stands out among many other Star Wars projects, as it is still remembered by many. And has its own loyal fans.

Meanwhile I completed the cutscene – now the mod has an intro. It would be most likely included into the pack. It needs a small fix, but it's not serious.

Still waiting for all the primary testers to complete the pack. Then I'll send the pack to a few other people to check it one last time.

I don't want any haste.

But the pack is indeed complete, and I've uploaded it and send to two people to try. I'll send the pack for playing to a few more people until Sunday. That would be sort of a testing

My goal now is to make an exe file. And perhaps a minor mini-addition, if I'm lucky enough.

I'll give this one a try. We haven't seen decent Star Wars games in years, so playing a new story would be nice.

I do hope, that this won't be a "just Star Wats look-alike", but they would actually contribute something of their own, which would be in liaison with SW traditions – that's what Dark Forces and KOTOR did and still hold a mark in this regard.

The gameplay doesn't reveal much for now, imho, though as I said I am more concerned about the details – we need not just peculiar canyons of Pilio and green forests of Kashyyk, but vivid cities, full of aliens, citizens, smuggles and traders like Tatooine. I would gladly browse the streets of some sort of Coruscant-like cities, with thugs awaiting around the corner, or stealing a swoop while on a run from a criminal cartel in the Lower City or something like that.

I've come across the so-called collection of rumours and leaked information about Episode IX, as well as photos, concepts, theories.

I don't expect much from the new film, and I would say whatever is in the plot there, changing the errors from previous movies would be quite a challenge even with a very good script.

Personally I'm looking forward to seeing Ian McDiarmid, Dominic Monaghan's character, some new planets, alleged rumours about prequels references, and that's it.

I can remember one such "dying" of a Russian JK community back in 2000s, and the worst thing was that since then I've lost contact with most of the Star Wars fans of that era. Thankfully some of them managed to find me and it's possible to communicate with them via Social Media and emails. But I'm glad we have JKHub, which sometimes boosts the interest of the people in JK again.

Compiling, compiling. 

This is the thing that I really hate about modding JA. Interestingly the process also takes place when you finish making a big and detailed map, and also depends on the machine you are using to do it.

The second aspect is that after the compile some bugs still come up and you have to fix them and then – compile the map again.

While this is the problem, indeed, there were other things, which we tried to change - menus, HUD and icons for instance, Being a vivid fan of Dark Forces II, I replaced the Force icons back with the original ones from DF2, where these abilities appeared for the first time in Star Wars games. The first versions were quite pixelated, but I recreated them from scratch in a vector form.

There are multiple discussion on this regard. For instance, Star Wars are known to be able to show visions to various characters. Perhaps that one is too.

And so, the trailer is here.

https://youtu.be/adzYW5DZoWs

The most two interesting things:

And

Well, you might have noticed my status question about native languages. It's not big secret, that it would be nice to have subtitles in different languages. So I guess someone would eventually translate them into other languages, well, if it's worth doing that

For the last 2-3 weeks I've been trying to check, how DP works with pure Jedi Academy and with other mods installed. The mod features would require OJP pre-installed, as we used some of JA engine specifics to the maximum. So with the original JA the mod would crash on certain levels. 

For now everything runs smoothly, and I am forming a pk3. Yes, it also takes time, becauce such a pack would include not just scripts, maps and textures, but also new models, sounds, additional shaders, effects (and gfx textures for them), as well as several other things. I had to run through it several times in order not to miss something important.

Yesterday I fixed the menu files: those who made *.MENU files by themselves,do know that in could be quite a mess, given that there are dozens of files (and we changed all the menus for the game in DP).

So there isn't any information on the film as of yet. We might see a trailer in May, and get even more details on the Episode during the Celebration Chicago.

But as most already know, a poster (at least a rough version of it) made it into the net, so a few details from the story are already known from it...

There were other rumours about the film, which came up to makingstarwars from various sources. Some of these were discussed on reddit, but surely these could big fake news. All of them.

I can't remember, how I ended up on JKHub, but there were certainly many reasons.

One is familiar to all – I simply like the JK series, which introduced Kyle Katarn and his adventures to us. And this site came in just at the right time, when many other sources started to collapse.

For a long time jk3files, moddb and few others were the main hub to find news about JK. For me jediknight.ru was the predecessor to JKHub, as it introduced modding into my life.

I'm glad we have JKHub and some kind of facebook fan-group or other social media. It's good that we have our own wiki, dedicated to JK series and mods. We must also be proud, that our base of models as well as talented modders it quite large. I would even dare to say (again), that thanks to JKHub our beloved game is in sort of Renaissance state. 

It wasn't much of a rumour before TLJ. But after Episode VIII got a lot of critics, they postponed all the activity regarding any trilogies. They are putting a lot of efforts into Mandalorian now.

It seems they finished filming, so the Episode is in late production. I guess even at this point we might say, that Star Wars as we know it ends now. I mean, Episode IX is the last SW film, which would keep most of the original Star Wars traditions under its wing:
 
-The starting crawl with a yellow font
-A space scene being ALWAYS the first one to appear in a film
-Someone with a lightsaber would always pop up and be in the centre of the plot
-Skywalkers playing at least a major background role
-R2-D2 and C-3PO duo (not a cameo)
-No actors replacing major parts in the plot
-John Williams score
 
Meanwhile I read some leaks from Episode IX, but most can be called fake. Most of the rumours are about:
(Careful, SPOILERS ahead)