Syko

I just got on my computer now and I left the program on overnight and it didn't actually crash! I have 140 MB of mods saved ATM. The waiting is the only issue - and it's not going to be physically possible for me to leave the program running for 190 days, so it is probably still better if you upload all of the mods somewhere when they've finished downloading on your end. PM me your email and I'll send you a link for a free 50 GB Box account.

If you have all of the mods downloaded already yourself, you should upload them somewhere so I can download them without having to use your bot. I can give you a free 50 GB Box.com account if you register with my referral link. I don't think slow servers is the issue, since downloading the file takes a normal amount of time, and the file is there, it just sits there doing nothing. I calculated the amount of time it will take to download all of the files at this rate and I found it would take roughly 190 days!

Let me rub some salt in your wound: the program just crashed again. The folder renaming didn't fix it. I'll try your updated one now. EDIT: @@spior The new program is still waiting as well, although the KB fraction issue is fixed. I guess we'll have to wait and see if the crash issue was fixed...

OK, I renamed two folders which had spaces instead of underscores. Running now...maybe it will work now. EDIT: It still seems to be playing the waiting game, although the folder renaming will probably fix the crash issue. One other thing that's strange is that the downloaded KB / total KB is different when the file has finished downloading. The amount of downloaded KBs is higher than the total amount of KB in the file.

I checked the folder and I believe the last file downloaded was massive_box.zip. It was the last modified file in the Jedi_Knight_III folder. Also, based on looking at the files last modified time, the bot sits there for about 45 minutes to an hour after each download.

Thanks for your work on the bot @@spior, but it isn't really working for me. When the bot downloads a mod, when the mod finishes downloading the program just sits there for four times the amount of time it took to download the file. Eventually it does download another file, but after a while (I left it on overnight twice) Windows says its has stopped working and I have to close it. Only a few more mods were downloaded. To express my desire for a JK3 files backup and to prove I have no life I have begun manually downloading all of the JK2 mods (not JK3). At the moment I have all of the mods downloaded except for the three biggest folders; the mods folder (598 files), the maps folder (804 files) , and the skins folder (1493 files). Assuming that I finish downloading all of these files myself, I'm just going to say that I am not going to download and backup the JK3 mods as there are roughly twice the amount of JK3 mods as JK2, and I don't even play JK3. If that bot can be fixed so it can download the mods, someone please do so.

Are you going to have other people test it first or are you just going to release it? P.S. PM me a copy of the program. I need to fill up that 2TB drive space I have!

@@spior is it a command line program or does it have a GUI?

If it's really going to be that much work for a port then I agree that this can be put on hold for a while. Outcast/Academy on tablets is still a cool idea though and I would certainly like to see it in the future, especially as tablet technology gets better and better.

I guess that is an idea, although I really doubt Disney or Raven is going to do a port like that. We shouldn't run into problems with Raven though because the code is released into the public domain. As long as we port just the engine and don't include any assets there shouldn't be a problem. The ported engine would be free too, no one is going to sell it. Is that you afiNity by the way? Long time no see...

No, I'm talking about multiplayer Jedi Outcast. There's a saber-only option, but I want a guns-only option. It's so dumb that they didn't include an option like that. There's seriously no mod that has done this?

Eezstreet also said that it should probably be ported first before the speed of the game could be analyzed. I really don't think speed is going to be an issue at all. Like I've said before in my previous essays on this thread, I agree, the controls are the biggest issue for a potential port. Which brings me to my question, how much work would it be for a potential port? Would it require one guy with coffee on a Saturday evening to port the game or would it take an entire team weeks to months? If it isn't that much effort, couldn't someone just do it for the sake of JO and JA on a tablet being really cool? On the other hand, if it would be a ton of work, I realize a lot of other things are probably worth spending coding energy on.

I was just wondering if there was a mod that allows you to disable saber combat in JK2, so you can just play with guns. In the JK2 menu, there's an option to have saber only combat, but I want guns-only combat.

AWESOME! No more iojamp i suppose! Perhaps a tablet port might happen after all now. Would it make tablet porting any easier? Does this have anything to do with LucasArts closing down? Maybe they were the ones holding the grip on the source code all this time.

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.