Syko

I agree. I think the biggest issue with this port would be the problem with the controls. I think the crappiness of the controls would depend on what you would use the game for though. When I play (or played) JO/JA, I always played offline with bots with guns - no sabers. So it was pretty much a multiplayer FPS game. As ibonek stated above, FPS games actually work quite well on iPad provided you get used to the controls. I felt like I was trying to pick a lock with a baseball bat when I first tried playing Quake 3 on iPad. Over time though I got used to the controls and fragged quite a few bots. Saber combat and online play is the main issue with the controls. Honestly I found saber combat to be kind of stupid when I played JO/JA, which is why I don't use it. All you had to do was spam kick and Crouch + Uppercut and your enemy was toast. I think with some good UI design though saber combat on a tablet could work fairly well. Quake 3 on iPad has separate buttons you can tap for different functions like reloading your gun. This screenshot illustrates: The arrow key movement on Q3 by the way was terrible, so they've since switched it to a circle pad which works much, much better. There could be a saber style change button, a force power use button, and the saber swing button could just be the same as the shoot button. After all, minus all the fancy footwork you can do in saber dueling, when it's boiled down to its core it's just mashing the attack button. There could also be an extra button or two on the screen that you could bind using the console. Another button could cause the console window do drop down and you would use the on-screen keyboard to type commands. Overall that's 4 buttons (plus an extra two if you want two bindable buttons) plus a circle pad. A setting might also be added to online play so that you could join a server only with other tablet players so PC players wouldn't have an advantage.

This is what the Jedi Academy recommended system requirements are (the minimum requirements are even lower): CPU: Pentium III or Athlon Class 450 MHz or faster CPU required RAM: 256MB VGA: 32 MB OpenGL compatable PCI or AGP Hardware Accelerator required DX: 100% DirectX 9.0a compatable computer required OS: Windows 98 or higher Sound: 16 bit DirectX 9.0a compatable sound card required. from http://gamesystemrequirements.com/games.php?id=514 I'd like to point out that iPad mini has 512 MB of RAM (twice the amount recommended) as well as the A5 processor which is dual core and runs at 1Ghz on iPad mini (800 Mhz on iPhone) and a 450 Mhz processor is recommended. I realize moar Mhz doesn't necessarily mean faster but in general it is a good gauge of how fast a processor is, plus the mini's processor is dual core. Also, I actually have an iPod Touch 3rd Gen and I've found my mini to be a lot more stable than that thing. I really don't think running the game will be a problem. I think the biggest problem with a tablet port would be the issue of controls.

Again, I don't know that much about game graphics, but I think you are underestimating the power of some of the tablets out there. They aren't PCs obviously, but a version of Unreal Engine 3 was ported to iPad. Check out this video of Infinity Blade II. I assume there are more than 9000 tris in there... EDIT: Also Dead Trigger

Like you said before, I think the engine should be ported to see exactly how it runs. Personally, I think it would run OK. Besides, even if it does lag, tablet technology is improving more and more. Android tablets made a few years in the future I'm sure will be able to handle it. Even if it does lag when ported, as better tech comes out, it will be able to be ran smoothly on eventually. I still think that it should be ported first to see how it actually behaves. I think it would be worth it.

JK2/JKA models have different levels of detail, right? What if you just lowered the model quality setting to very low in-game? I remember setting the polycount really low in JK2 and the player models almost looked like N64 models. I still think a high framerate could at least be achieved if the graphics settings were set to very low quality. I stated above that the assets would not be distributed with the engine.

I agree that a significant portion of tablet "gamers" are more into casual games than 'hardcore,' but I think you are stereotyping the entire tablet community as casual game players. I'm a 'hardcore' gamer yet I've found a great deal of popular hardcore titles on the iPad that I actually have really enjoyed. Right now I'm mainly thinking of Square Enix's apps. I have Final Fantasy I-V, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Chaos Rings, etc on there and all of them are great titles that I've enjoyed as a 'hardcore' gamer. The point is, I don't think all tablet gamers are exclusively interested in casual games. Many of them are, yes, but I think just as many are into the hardcore titles. Square Enix's titles have prooved to be very successful on tablets. If Quake 3 for iPad didn't reinvigorate the community, (I don't know if it did for sure or not, I don't know where you read that), it was probably because it required a jailbreak to install. If iojamp was released on Google Play, no one should have to hack anything. Google Play sells emulators on it's store. I'm sure it would allow a ported open source engine. It would be completely open to people. Plus, since the source of iojamp is available, JA could be reworked to add community elements to it. It could even be linked to JKHub somehow. An easy way of downloading mods right to the tablet from JKHub would definitely give the JKCommunity that spike it deserves. This is probably the strongest part of your argument and the weakest part of mine. Yes, you can just play JA on the PC with a bigger screen with a Wiimote and keyboard. The iPad does have portability though. Also, the screen size in my opinion is OK on the iPad. On my mini, Quake 3 runs at 1024 x 768 which is the resolution I play Jedi Academy on my PC. Plus, if you played it on an iPad 4 with retina display (which has a resolution of 2000 something by 1500 something) screen size would not be an issue at all. It might even look better on iPad with that crisp, sexy retina display. I'm sure you know a lot more about JK2's engine than I do, but you say the polygon limit has been doubled from Q3 to JK2. Does that mean JK2 and all of its models and geometry have twice as many polygons? The limit may be higher, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's twice as much geometry in JK2. Even if performance is slow on iPad, things could be optimized to increase FPS, right? Even if it was too slow to run on iPad, like you said, it could probably run on Android well enough.

We don't have the engine exactly, but we have iojamp. I think it might technically be legal to port the iojamp to Google Play because the code of iojamp is entirely free and open source (correct me if I'm wrong there). The assets of the game would be the only copyrighted material, but they wouldn't be released on Google Play with the engine. The way Quake 3 on iPad works is you download the game engine which is included in the app, and you have to copy over PK3 files from the game you (hopefully) bought into a folder on the iPad and then you can play the game. It doesn't come with the assets. iojamp could work the same. As for processing power, I know almost for sure that the game could run on iPad. I have played Quake 3 on my iPad (it's actually an iPad mini) and it ran almost perfectly. I just detected slight chopiness here and there. Overall it was very playable. Maybe dynamic glow and all the extra stuff could be overlooked if it causes a slowdown on the device. Plus, the iPad 4 has an A6 processing chip which is even faster. My iPad mini has an A5 processor chip. As for the Nexus 7, I don't really know how well the engine would run. I think the iPad actually runs games better, even though the Nexus 7 seems to have somewhat better specs. (1Ghz Quad core Tegra processor, 1GB of ram compared with iPad mini's 512MB ram, A5 processor) Also, I admit the lightsaber combat controls would suck, but I think the touch controls could work decently when playing it with guns after you got used to it. And, like I said before, a Wiimote or keyboard could be used for play. Heck, maybe you could even swing a Wiimote to swing your lightsaber in game. Plus, there are practical benefits to porting the game to tablets. Tablets are what the kids play these days. JA and JO could very likely regain some popularity if it was successfully ported. Everything I just said is pretty much a summary of the entire thread so far.

Bump This is probably a dumb question, but would porting a game engine to iPad/Android require very extensive coding knowledge/experience? I'm thinking of getting a Google Nexus 7 to start learning how to code Android apps (yes, I do have an iPad and I'd rather code for that but I have no Mac. The cheapest one is $600) and I would be interested in porting iojamp to Android. Obviously I need to be reasonably comfortable with the coding languages before I would start working on it, but even then would porting require me to be a code wiz? I guess if anyone could do it though, porting would be a lot more common.

Glad to see some progress! In several years the JK community will thank all of us for doing this. Also, If you don't mind, after the bot is finished I'd like to have a look at the source code (unless you want to release the source anyway.) I think it would be a good learning experience for me in programming.

Ahhhh, nostalgia...I played JK2 on the Gamecube long before I played it on the PC.

@@spior Is the program/bot in a usable state yet? If so, I'd like to test it a bit. Also, are the mods organized by folder or are they all thrown into one folder? It would be cool if they could be added to work with the site mirror so if you click on It actually 'downloads' the file directly right there (effectively copying the file from the user's local mirror folder to their Downloads folder). It might be better that way because the user could read the review and screenshots right there instead of having to find the corresponding file in some folder they downloaded from the bot. I'm not sure how that would be possible though. Your bot would have to scan through the mirror's entire folder and edit the HTML files, editing the links and also would have to move the previously downloaded mods into their corresponding folders in the mirror folder.

Sorry, was gone all day today. Just saw your message now. It should be OK if it downloads all of the files over again. It should be a "one-runner" like you said.

So after rebrowsing the JK3files mirror I had created, I found that I actually only had about 80% of all the pages. I took the liberty to redownload the entire website again and this time 99.9% of the pages are saved. I'm going to reupload everything on Box again as a zip file. I'm also going to see about uploading the HTML files themselves, so you can browse the site mirror in your browser directly. The new download when extracted will total 4.9 GB (as opposed to 3.53 or whatever the previous one was)

Erm...any progress on that bot? It's been 5 days now. I'm getting a 3 TB external hard drive at the end of the month. A complete JK3Files mirror will be the perfect thing to put on it.

I added a mirror to the site download on the first post. I'm going to add one or two more eventually. EDIT: Everything that was there before is now a mirror now. The main download link is going to be the whole thing in one file on Dropbox.

Not by that much I don't think. A lot of the games with really good looking graphics only have good graphics in the screenshots on App Store. When you actually have them on your device they look like a Nintendo 64 game. The small number of ones that actually have good graphics don't surpass JO/JA by that much anyway, at least I don't think so. Besides, if you use iojamp which the source is available for, the graphics would probably be able to be improved significantly.

I just realized, JK2/JKA might get a large spike of popularity if it was successfully ported to iPad. The mobile gaming scene is really popular these days, so it would probably draw in a lot of new players. A crop of online n00bs with rudimentary controls would be ready for harvesting too.

Don't know if anyone already knew about this, but from this link, if you select Sort by A-Z it gives you the list of all mods in alphabetical order on the JK3 Files site. For JK2: http://www.gamefront.com/files/listing/gamingfiles/Jedi_Knight_II For JKA: http://www.gamefront.com/files/listing/gamingfiles/Jedi_Knight_III I don't know if that will make bot coding any easier.

Maybe instead of distributing the entire mod database, spior could distribute his bot script so we could all download the mod database ourselves. I don't think we'd need authors' permissions because the mods themselves would not be publicly distributed.

Wouldn't it be possible to use console commands/text chat with an iPad or bluetooth keyboard? You would probably only need the keyboard for MP anyway. SP shouldn't need one unless you use a lot of console commands in it. EDIT: couldn't you just use the touchscreen keyboard for that? If it could be implemented that is.

We still need to figure out hosting though. Perhaps it could be uploaded to JKHub? I could create a mirror on another Box account. I don't think that should be the main download source though.

I certainly agree that the mods are of greater importance, but again, I'm not going to manually download 9500 files. Maybe three to four different people including myself can download certain types of mods and upload them. One guy could download all the skins/models for example, then one guy all the maps, etc. and then we could all upload them to the same source. Of course, some script may be able to be used but I have no idea how to create one. We could organize them into folders, etc. Well, in my opinion JK3Files itself represents a large part of the community, or what remains of the community. Losing it would be like loosing everything the JK modding culture had/has. I enjoyed browsing through the site as much as I did playing with the mods (and making them for that matter).

I am actually thinking about that. All of the mods total about 55GB if I remember correctly and I could easily store that on one of my computers. The only issue is that there are about 9500 mods on JKfiles and there is no way I'm going to manually download each one of those. I'm sure a script could be written to do that somehow, except I would have no idea how to write one. Plus, I don't know where I could upload 50>GB of data for free. My Box account now has a max of 50GB and I wouldn't want to use all of that up anyway. I do have a thing where if I invite other people to Box though, they get 50 GB of data for free as well. Maybe I could do that and upload all of the files there. Anyone else want 50GB of free storage on Box.com?

That iojamp looks really interesting. So, from what I understand it's basically the JK3 MP engine effectively rewritten so we have the source, right? I guess a JA/JO iPad version would really just depend on if anyone felt like porting that to Objective-C then.

The controls actually worked relatively well for me on the iPad (for an iPad FPS game). They worked about as well as NOVA (Gameloft's Halo clone). That game was trash but the controls actually weren't bad once you got used to them. You could always implement Wiimote support and play the game with a Wiimote. I've used Wiimotes with the iPad before with emulators and it works really well.