minilogoguy18

I like the combat system, it's neat, so many of the newer mods these days are gun focused like gunslinger and JKG where as I <3 saber combat.

I don't like the shader, gives it a metallic shine rather than plastic. You should play around with that some.

Well a 512gb could be enough if I only installed what I use regularly which is why I'm curious about the cache drive. The PC itself has it's own cache for quick loading of thigs, the SSD will replace it and a program is installed to tell the PC to use the SSD rather than the conventional cache that is stored on a HDD. So hard to choose, SSD for top speed or cache for a balance of speed and storage space since the 1TB HDD will stay as the primary drive.

Yeah, I'm really looking for someone who's used both. I mainly mod JA but I've fondled a few other games, one other though that sometimes get caught up in when I'm feeling it is SW Battlefront 2, proud to say with that game I got the first animated anything in it included characters and even caught the attention of the developers to work on mod projects but that's another story. Modding that game requires quite a bit of storage since it doesn't have the great system that JA has where you can drag/drop small things like characters and weapons into a base folder. Everything that you add is only usable with the map that it is compiled with, so you essentially release your asseets to be used in peoples maps or learn to map yourself although the mapping is much easier since everything but the terrain is modeled in Softimage. By the terrain I mean the actual ground, plains, hills and bodies of water, eveyrthing else is a 3d object like buildings and such. I could see the cache drive possibly being overworked and another thing that was pointed out by my GF's cousin is that write speed may not be increased with it. At the moment I'm leaning toward buying a 512gb SSD and of course keeping the HDD as the secondary backup, will keep it so that if needed I can boot from it.

You'd be suprised at just how big of a speed increase a SSD can make. Also judging by what I've seen you may not feel the need for it but if you had Softimage, Photoshop and going in and out of a game that you're modding you find yourself being slowed down by load times. Right now even with the scene that I've been compiling of all of the _huamnoid animations the save load times are getting long with thousands of frames of animation and there isn't even any 3d information in the scene yet since I haven't taken the time to rig a model to the animated skeleton.

Anyone out there rocking either solution? The chache drive is far cheaper than the actual permanate drive but with not as fast performance but still blows HDD's out of the water. SSD's seem to only come in 512GB currently which could easily be maxed out if I installed everything I had onto it (have 2 HDD's laying around from old PC that I randomly raid for files) and they currently are over $400 USD where as the cache drive is only $89 USD. The cache drive though is only 50GB and does what is sounds like it does, caches regularly used files so that load times are increased with limit since 50 GB is only a fraction of my 1 TB HDD. Thoughts? Seems to be one of the biggest performance enhancers for a PC only limited by processing speed, data access seems instant, boot times on newer PC's like mine is in like the 10 second range.

No one said the acting in DF2 was good, just cool to have real faces on game characters, made the story much more interesting and I thought the story despite the acting was good. I honestly never read the books other than Shadows of the Empire, just thought that there's so much established 'cannon' that if they strayed away from it no matter what the opinions of some are would be a bad thing. I agree though that if they did anything considering it was episode VII that it should be focused on Luke rebuilding the Jedi order on Yavin IV, Mon Mothma re-establishing the senate and Leia discovering the force.

If they base if off of the books/comics and don't stray away from what is already laid out as the story that goes past the movies it might be good. They're gonna have to do one hell of a job on look a likes since the original cast is far too old to relive thier roles. Maybe we'll get to see Kyle and Jan in the future? As long as they forget the horrid part of the DF series: Jedi Academy.

I just added it to the thread on animation I recently posted, did the math on how many sequences I've processed versus the total to get a percentage.

^Yeah it'd be quite simple to do that. This file also wouldn't be restricted to the version of Softimage I'm using since I can just export the mixer that contains the animation sources and just export the skeleton file as a dotXSI 3 file then someone with an older version could just import everything and it would be just as good as my scene file. That has been actually one of the main reasons of doing this, an editable _humanoid file that anyone could dabble with in say something like Mod Tool that's freeware. I guess the blender plugin could import the _humanoid.gla but it wouldn't have all the sequences labeled with character rigged to it, which will probably be Kyle.

^I just googled it. =p I'm totally gonna use this btw, think it's a great idea for some WIP projects if you really know where they're at.

Yeah, the color part is what I didn't get since I don't know the hex codes and didn't even know it required a hex code color since I don't dabble in such things so I kinda looked at the example that it shows and was like "uhhhhhhhhmmmmm???".

Oh I see, rather than reweighing them to all the added bones you just ran the compiler say with the source player model files to spit out a new glm? That doesn't seem like too much trouble considering we have all the base models in .xsi format. Someone could though redo the weights if they wanted though of course, it's not really hard, the fact that all the base models share nearly identical proportions and the GATOR tool in Softimage makes weight transferring pretty flawless as long as the shapes are somewhat similar but doesn't have to be perfect. What I'm doing now is importing each sequence and storing it's action as a source and copying clips over to an un animated skeleton that has all the bones with the proper left hand naming so there shouldn't be any errors on compile since it will be one massive file. I have a connection mapping template set up to overcome the naming problems that come from most of those files actually being JO animations that are recycled, I also have another file that I use as a shadow rig for the sequences that use a IK skeleton setup since the heirarchy in those files are VERY different. The final result will contain a null object skeleton with all animations with the IK roots and effectors no longer present, hierarchy will match what is seen in modiview just with the added bones that shouldn't interferre since all the missing bones are children to what normally exists in JA. I could see though if say I added a bone to the spine, now that would cause problems with the weights but not something that is at the end of the chain.

I tried googling it but all I really got were results on how to implement it into a forum but not on it's actual usage. Help?

^When I tried that I got errors because of the lhand_tag_bone/lhang_tag_bone name mismatch and some animations had the tail bones and some did not, I couldn't even get a new GLA file. In some it kept trying to reference the roots and effectors on the IK chains since some files have IK bone chains where some are just simple null hierarchies. I figured it should work considering the community skeletons out there being used are missing some things that are in the base model files, like the mentioned tail bones that are present say if you load up Kyle in Modview, seems they're there just to get better deformation of the buttocks rather than something like capes but I could be wrong. The annoying thing about the base skeleton that only uses 50 something bones is it's annoying to get a good foot control when there is no toe bone. So the models would load but some didn't work quite right? What areas were distorted? Sounds like a hierarchy problem, if it was the arms and legs then I may know why.

Somehow missed this thread, the model looks great, just the hands seem like they could be a bit bigger.

^Did you just add the bones to 1 model or did you go through all the animations and recompile to get a new _humanoid.gla like I'm doing? I'm asking because just about every custom model out there is missing bones and they don't get errors, granted it's only missing 2 but they are still missing. The 2 tail bones are not in all the skeleton files out there being used by modelers but they are in the games skeleton, open a base model in modview to see that they are there.

Thanks, hit a snag about a week ago which halted it to pretty much where it is now but found a work around, hopefully it'll be done in a couple of weeks. I'll also release the Softimage file for anyone who wants it, I'll have to rig Kyle up to it so it's a little more aesthetically pleasing. It'll be a big file since it'll have 21376 frames of animation, each sequenced is labeled in the animation mixer but you'll notice a good deal are missing since there are many sequences that reference frames of longer sequences, an example would be one of the death animations, there will be another sequence that uses the final frame for the body laying dead, those such sequences wont be labeled.

44%44% I'll let the video show what I've been up to lately http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF5bMWtH2fI You may be wondering why I'm doing this, simple, JK2 had way more bones, most notably, all finger joints, toe bones (which can lead to better foot roll setups for animators) and more facial bones. Every single source file has all the bones that were removed AND they are all animated. Why they cut them out from the game I'll never know since it would have given the game better looking animations. Another huge reason why I did this is because animating the JA skeleton is annoying, the skeleton files out there are nothing like what the games developers used and does not animate well, mostly cause of the lack of toe bones making a proper foot rig impossible. This way I can use the rig I made to it's full potential. The real test will be in the end seeing if all the games existing models get along with having more bones, existing models wont be able to make use of all the bones without being reweighed to it but I already have a handful of the base models weighed in XSI, tranferring weights can easily be done since 80% of the games models all share nearly identical proportions (they were all probably made from 1 basic "base" mesh with deatails added later) so that's not too big of a deal. I figure at least some of the large scale mods could make use of this, maybe JKG since the rig I made can so easily be animated unlike all the other FK skeletons out there where you have to go though and rotate each bone to pose a limb rather than have 1 Ik controller that can in seconds pose an arm or leg. Just thought I'd share this, even if no one uses it I'd still find a lot of use from it.

Holy F the void is still going?! I can even still log in there surprisingly, Hapslash was a good texture artist.

UV mapping is UV mapping, doesn't have to be aimed at JA specifically to get the same result and 3ds max has probably the most tutorials out there of all the 3d software. You should cut back some of the detail on the ring or get rid of it completely, looks like it makes up most of the polygons on the entire model.

^I still have a copy of Max 5 from WAY back in the day but don't really feel the need to install it but I do have Keshires character studio biped with a skeleton made of dummy objects constrained to it for ease of animation if anybody wants it. It'd be best though if you max users can find someone who is skilled enough to just make a plugin that works for the newer versions since file exchange between programs is annoying and can break things.

Nice to see another Lugormod server pop up. I'll have to check it out.

^The SP campaign in JO was 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 times better than JA. If only JO had the 2 extra 2 handed styles it would be hands down a better game.