therfiles

@@Langerd:

Thank you for the praise! I'll look into that moment. Fine tuning their facial expressions has been difficult, so that moment may have slipped by.

@@Lancelot

Great analysis of the scene, and I'm glad you see it similarly. My goal has been trying to remove some of the more gimmicky JA/JO saber mechanics that turn duels into a mash button fest: by limited the use of Katas (the right and left click button) and building the player's force powers and saber abilities throughout the duel. But I agree - I think a defense against Vader, with Vader going bezerk could be sweet.

@@Noodle

I like the Dark Side option there. I've also added the ability to kill the Emperor throughout the duel: doing so allows you to either join Vader or continue the fight against him with renewed Dark Side abilities. I think giving Vader something like 50/30ish health, so that a fluke strike won't turn you to the dark side: rather, a pattern of intense aggression will. I'll need to figure out what happens when you strike Vader down: do you then fight the Emperor? Or, perhaps more story-like would be having Luke kneel before the Emperor, accepting his dark side apprenticeship.

I think this portion will force me to use OpenJK (not a bad thing lol) because then I can put a 1:30 or so timer on the HUD (with CVARS) so that the player knows how long to resist.

Quick question for y'all:

After studying the scene from Return of the Jedi closely, I noticed something quite dang obvious. Something I totally overlooked somehow. For the first part of the duel, Luke and Vader fight until Luke kicks Vader down the stairs. After this portion, however, Luke ONLY uses his lightsaber in self defense. Then, Vader brings the bridge down and taunts his anger, and Luke attacks again. Forgive me if this is obvious, but I never quite picked up on the "self-defense" nature of the middle portion of the duel.

So my question is this: would is be more accurate and (more importantly) FUN to have the middle portion of the duel be a "defend yourself against Vader" and you need to survive a set time against him? Perhaps a 1:30 time limit? Or would this be boring, tedious gameplay? Vader would be invincible during this portion, or he could have a set amount of health that, if you killed him, you'd turn to the dark side for fighting in anger...

Any opinions are welcome!

Incredible work! Super visceral stuff, and it's super impressive what you could get out of a game from 2003 haha!

Hmmm...This is a rough guess but I would say no less than about 35-40? I've been a bit non-stop this last week. What really takes up the most time is having to make such minor tweaks (cameras, nav_goals) almost entirely on guess work, and then rebuild the entire map to see if it worked at all. That, and working around Windows 10 nonsense It's just a lot of check, repeat, check, repeat, etc over and over to see what works and what doesn't.

Edit: that number also includes the mapping process, too lol

The only thing that bothers me at the moment is how fast Vader and Luke walk at the beginning.

Haha...Yeah, you caught me! The timing of nav_goals can be super tricky, so instead of messing with those, I've been changing the walkspeed parameter instead. And yeah, I think I may have pushed it a bit too far. I'll keep messing with that.

@@Lancelot: Thanks! It's funny, I work with video for a living (I hesitate to call it "film" at the moment) so these new angles and moments are really the things that keep me going and excite me! And excellent suggestion! That moment did feel a bit strange to me, but I didn't try and fix it for some reason. I'll see if I can get a more suitable angle that maybe shows more of his face haha.

The angle is so severe at the moment because it's hiding the cluster-f rotation of the Emperor happening in the background ...but I'm sure there are more artsy ways to fix that! Thanks again for all the support, y'all!

Alright! So here’s the full first cutscene (build 2): (also, sorry about the weird aspect ratio. Had some trouble getting this to run on my Mac for whatever reason)
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QebOk2n8v2U&feature=youtu.be

Fixed up a few of those janky animations (though the Emperor rotating with his chair and Luke’s handcuffs still need work). Some look a bit stiff, but I’m satisfied, especially with Dragon (a program from the dark ages apparently). I added a few more animated moments (@@Langerd, that little hand motion you love so much is in there!). Also, let me know if you guys dig the way I cut down the already super long scene!

You’ll see in this version that I’ve started to depart from the 1:1 approach. Some moments look really good recreated exactly (camera position, etc) like the film, but others required a bit of tweaking. I took a few artistic liberties to add a bit more cinematic flare to the scene. Hope it’s not too annoying!

Yeah I'm using Dragon right now...which is not my favorite program to say the least. All the animations could use some refining, that's for sure!

@@DT85 - Will do! Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

@@Noodle - I remember that...was it this one on Moddb called "Jedi Fighter"?

@@Lancelot: Totally dug Star Wars Infinities line! Love the imagination and alternate story threads it set up. Great stuff, and I'll have to mine that for inspiration. And yeah, my thought is to take this one mission/level at a time, but really infuse as much gameplay and features as I can.

@@Alvar007: I know! You should totally send me your work in a PM or something! I just love what people can do with this game! But you are right on the money - placing cameras and waypoints can be the most tedious process EVER.

@@Noodle: oooh! I didn't think of that. I'm totally gonna have to try that! Good call. I wonder if that would work. Definitely worth a try. I'll have to get back to you.

Thank you all for your continued support!

Hey friends. So I've recently been on a huge modding kick, and I've really always wanted to accomplish some OT single player missions. They are so tricky because finding good source maps for the mission is difficult - as many mappers who've created great OT maps have gone inactive over the years. The Throne Room duel was a no brainer for me because (1) the duel is simply amazing and deeply cinematic, and (2) JKO has a pretty nifty Deathstar map (you may remember ffa_deathstar from JKO). So I decompiled Raven's map, retextured it, gave it a facelift, and added some details. Now, it still needs a bunch of work, but I'm not a mapper at heart, so I'm satisfied for the moment. Anyway, here is my progress:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vktCsZ1oeak
 
As you can tell there are a few...janky moments: the Emperor rotating with his chair (such a headache), the Emperor's spaghetti hands (yeah...I'll need to reanimate that), and the simply bizzare saber hand off between Vader and Emperor (you have no idea how hard it is to convincingly fake this. Sorry for the terrible camera angle). My goal here is to be as 1:1 with the film as possible, but the scene is simply too long. I'm going to have to cut a LOT of filler lines, and distill it to the important part. The cutscene is already 2 minutes long, and I wouldn't want to go super long!
 
Anyway, the gist of the gameplay will obviously be the duel between Luke and Vader, but I have some ideas how to make it a bit more special than that. I'll be manipulating the player's force powers, to reflect their current skill set (over the duel, you'll get new abilities, saber and powers, as you get into the force). I'm trying to make dueling A LOT harder than base JA makes it. I'm not a huge fan of how JA dueling in SP descends into just hack, slash, repeat. My goal is to give the player as many choices in the duel as possible. As Luke, you'll constantly be battling against the dark side, and will be able to turn at any point. There will be a bunch of neat "alternate endings" because of this.
 
Hope you guys dig this! No idea when this will be anywhere near finished...but I hope to have more updates soon. Let me know your thoughts and how I can make this better!

Credits:

Good stuff man! Best of luck with that. If I remember correctly, there was a sweet little cvar called "tier_storyinfo" or "tierstoryinfo" that popped up a BUNCH in those mission selection menus. And the best part was: it could be changed by entities in Radient. I was looking through a source SP map and saw that one of the entities could change that CVAR. That means you could use that as your cvar test, and just have one, massive menu! But, I don't remember the specifics. I'm sure you'll figure it out. Shout if you need help

Try this:

Next time, when saving a game, try and do something like "save BLAH; writeconfig BLAH". Then, when you load the game, also make sure you exec BLAH (BLAH being the CFG file): "load BLAH;wait 30;exec BLAH". The "writeconfig" will save all your juicy CVAR information so it will be saved and reloaded. However, it only saves CVARS that are set with "seta" and not "set". For example, it would record "seta bob 1" but NOT "set bob 1". Now, using this technique will only give you a set amount of pre-existing save "slots," but you are a clever person and I'm sure you can figure out a way to spin that.

Let me know if that works for you.

And excellent work with the conversation menu! Really slick stuff. Love the animation on the NPC model. Out of curiosity (sorry if I'm being annoying haha), do you make a menu for each conversation? Or are you doing a set CVAR test to tell the menu which conversation to load? I only ask because JA has a stupid silly .menu limit, so making a bunch of menus will eventually crash the game. It's possible your coding wizardry could have fixed this error however!

Excellent stuff as always, @@Noodle! I love how you are trying to adapt the classic JA menu style to your mod to make the experience as seamless as possible with the normal stuff. It just looks really pleasing!

Also - I don't know how I'm just now seeing some of your SP and RPG work. Truly amazing stuff, man. You are really taking the SP game to it's full potential! Love all the gameplay elements you've added. You've done an excellent blend of CVARS and script stuff. Out of curiosity, will you need to write a CFG file for saved games? Since a lot of the skills (I'm guessing) are determined by UI cvars, do those need to be saved along with the saved game to make the game load alright on multiple playings? Or are you using some sort of set command (seta?) that keeps all of them in saved games? Thanks for letting me pick your brain!

Woah. That was just so fun and accurate to the campaign. I think there's something really fun with LEGO stuff - it takes only the most important bits of the story and makes the emotions even more poignant. Really dug this dude's work! Nice find, @@Circa!

Welcome dude! Hope you are able to do some of those awesome projects!

I've actually done a few of those myself! I made a mod called NpcSP which lets you spawn base npcs in game. Also, CamSp lets you play with camera angles in real time. Hope you can get inspired by some of what I've done and make it better!

Incredible work, @@Noodle! I've been really impressed by some of your UI/Icarus wizardry lately. It's really neat stuff!

Sadly, I can't think of a fool-proof way to make the NPC's target what you are looking at with your cross-hair. Back in my Harry Potter mod, what I did to get around this was to give NPCs custom mind trick scripts that would be executed. So, perhaps you could use MT as a "trigger" for your commands. Each script could run on the NPC depending on which command you've selected from the menu. However, I may have forgotten if MT even affects allies, so that would bust the entire thing.

Anyway, keep up the excellent work!

@@NumberWan: Yeah, I get that. I was watching the Theed gameplay and they had Maul (epic), but also Rey, Boba, and Han...which is pretty odd. Why not Qui-Gon, Padme, Jango, etc? Kind of a head-scratcher.

But the game-play looks utterly phenomenal. All that prequel stuff looks so good with the updated, modern graphics.

Hey dude. Just a word of advice - what you are proposing is insanely difficult. Many modders over that past years have attempted to do what you are doing (including myself) and we've all failed. Not because it's super hard, but because the sheer amount of work is staggering. This is such a huge, labor-intensive project. It's important that you realize that this will not be easy, especially with little to no experience. I apologize if that's too harsh.

Instead - why don't you start with just making one duel from the OT that you like? Start the project small and start it realistically. That way, you can learn about how difficult creating several missions will be and if you decide not to do the rest, you still have one playable mission. Just some advice.

Absolutely wonderful. Fantastic work! Perhaps a list of "shown" and "hidden" itemdefs? Sometimes, a lot of elements could be hidden and not accessible immediately. In addition, some action/mouse-overs draw itemdefs to a set point of coordinates (think the "glow" that draws on the Base JA menus). Would this be changeable?

Perhaps there could be easy-to-use templates available for these kind of threads? In addition, maybe there would be some easy way to categorize the WIPs for easy access (skins, mods, SP, etc). Something along the "tagging" system used in the file section.

Hi @@Tompa9,

My mods don't add any NPCs, code, or anything else that would compete with any other mods. As long as we can make sure that the .menu file definitions don't overlap (since it loads the ingame menus from only one file) there should be no problem.

I try my best to make my mods as clean, and as compatible with other mods as possible. Thanks! If you want, you can test the current version of NpcSP with that mod to see if there are any problems.

Bored over spring break! Added a "respawn" feature so your epic NPC battles can go on literally forever.

@ I believe this statement was later debunked/clarified.

I mean let's look at character motivations from TFA:

 

Rey:

Her newly found mentor and father figure, who told her about the Jedi was killed, and she fought the killer hand to hand, scarring him, saving her friend, and narrowly escaping. Does she have any reason to face the villain again? Not really. In her position, and with her experience, I would take the ship, and get as far away from the enemy as possible. Her only motivation, as far as I can see, is her curiosity for her newly discovered powers, and the Jedi -- that led her to Luke.

 

Finn:

Revenge against Kylo Ren for what he did to him? Would Finn even consider versing Kylo again? o.O I guess Finn does have a good reason to seek Jedi training if he plans to face Kylo again. Apart from that, he cares for what happens to Rey as a friend, sort of.

 

Poe:

To fight for freedom? Does he have any meaningful motivations?

 

Kylo:

To take revenge on Rey and to eliminate the Jedi and prove himself worthy. He will very likely become obsessed with Rey's whereabouts, and try to track her down to finish the job and settle the score.

I think these are a bit less paper-thin than you make them out to be.

Rey: Discover who she is. Discover her backstory (why was she abandoned). Discover her abilities. Discover who her parents are. Discover who Luke Skywalker is. Defeat Kylo Ren and the First Order. Discover if she even wants to be a part of the bigger picture battle between good or evil, or would it be easier to just go home? Why did the saber call to her? Where did her powers come from?

Finn: Revenge against Kylo for besting him. Revenge against the First Order for their evilness and brainwashing. Discover what it means to be a hero. In 7, he ran from the fight and was brought into it when his friend was in trouble. Does he have the courage to fight for a larger cause? Will he pursue a relationship with Rey? How will he deal with his injuries?

Ren: What does his training look like? How does he deal with the inner turmoil within himself (the good and the evil)? Does he feel remorse over his choice to kill his father? How does he deal with the shame of being beaten by a lowly scavenger? What does his relationship with Snoke look like? How will he "strike back" against the Resistance? Will he try and find Luke? What is his relationship with Luke and how exactly did he turn to the dark side? What about his Knights of Ren? How did he find them and lead them? What's next for the First Order? Why is killing Luke so important?

Poe: I really don't care for this character. He likes to fly. Uh...

Episode 7 was all about people running away from their roles. Finn abandoned the First Order. Han runs away from the Resistance to escape his failure with his son. Rey runs away from her powers. Luke runs from the galaxy. Ren runs from his parents and the Jedi Order. They all confront their choices in the film. So 8 is about what they do next. So I'm excited.