mrwonko

We had an idea in IRC: Why not remake Hoth Wasteland CTF? That has the benefit of giving us a clear guideline and the result being usable in a free Jedi Academy asset replacement set. Personally, I'd be down. I'd still like to have some gruesome pulsing flesh some day, but until then a Hoth remake is fine. Very high-poly, preferably, so it could showcase dynamic lighting well. As I said, I have a DropBox account now and could just set up a shared folder. I just need to friend you on DropBox.

So it would be a matter of creating a new BSP version?

Sounds like you should look into revision control.

The code would surely benefit from some refactoring and doing that in C++ wouldn't hurt either, but it's just such a massive task that I don't know if anybody is going to do it. (And finish.) I'd like a nicer version of the code myself and I do like C++, but I'm not sure that even with my love for Jedi Academy I'd be able to do this. I may try though, but that won't be a part of OpenJK, it'd be my own project. If done properly it could hardly be done without breaking compatibility with existing mods though.

Scripting.

It's a Q3Map2 feature, not a JKA one. It's for manually editing lightmaps and then using -import to put them back in, as far as I know. No, it's just for manual editing besides scaling, as far as I can tell. Although I agree that an arbitrary lightmap size limit is no good. On the other hand, lightmaps already make up a major part of the level size, I'm not sure they need to be increased any further - realtime lighting would be better suited for the cases where you want crisp shadows.

I hadn't noticed that yet... It should be impossible. Maybe some trickery with using a different texture below it? Usually this sort of effect (refraction) requires a fragment shader, and JKA hardly supports them. (Except for the force push effect and the cloak in SP. And the shield? Something like that. Surely hardcoded, anyway.)

Maybe you could upload the model in its current state so we can take a look?

The easiest way to fit him to the Jedi Academy skeleton may be to create a custom skeleton so he can be posed and use that to pose him in a way that he fits the Jedi Academy skeleton.

Not enough pixels. Try this:

Also, don't use notepad.

Fun Fact: XBox 360 is almost 10 year old. Well, not quite, but yeah... not such a big compliment.

You'll need to hexedit the character's model.glm, changing the models/players/_humanoid/_humanoid path early in the file to something else (while making sure not to change the address of anything after it), then copy the _humanoid.gla to that location and do the changes there. Note that this only works in Singleplayer - Multiplayer player models must use models/players/_humanoid/_humanoid.gla

You could load the model into Blender with my plugin, duplicate it, create a new UV map for the original, then bake the old texture on the new one so you don't have to retexture it. Keeps the weighting intact, can just be re-exported once done. (I actually did that before for a badly UV-mapped but nicely textured model.)

If you discount some custom maps for the likes of Age of Empires 2 and Settlers 3, I really started modding with Jedi Outcast at some point prior to JKA's release. Only maps at first, custom shaders, scripts and textures later. Started modelling around 2005, which was also when I did some Oblivion modding (including custom models). Got into coding through JKA's MP SDK around the same time. Always had a knack for the technical stuff - i.e. "how do I do X?", so long as X is not "make it look good". Which makes coding a natural fit, so that's what I'm focussing on now. Naturally that makes JKA's source release the coolest thing ever to me.

Okay, I've set up a DropBox, what's everybody's name?

The amount of C++-ification that is possible is limited by having to keep the interface to mods the same. I'm not sure if it's something that should be done in OpenJK. Personally, I plan to start my own fork at some point, which will be mostly C++ and Lua and abandon mod compatibility in favor of modernization.

For the most parts it's just like any other kind of modelling in Blender. What experience do you have?

At least I think anything bigger could easily be too much work. Feel free to challenge that, but I'd rather stick to duel. I didn't have anything particular in mind when I proposed it, except lots of curves since that's traditionally hard to do with brushes (and even patchmeshes). And it could even be animated. So maybe the inside of some huge creature, like the Leviathan in Devil May Cry 3. Having a beating heart in there would be cool. Yeah, we should do that. I'll look into it later, don't have enough time today. I'd love it if all the details were actually modelled in high detail and then baked onto a lowpoly mesh, but that might be too much work? Agreed on whiteboxing, agreed on verticality. But it can easily be done using Blender and spawnflags 2 as well.

You were talking about vehicle and npc count limits, and that's changed in the source code.

And they included the source code. But even then you'll likely have to get their permission to relicense as GPL.

It could possibly be fixed for future mods that work differently from the previous ones, but existing mods can't be retroactively fixed by anyone but their author.

I suggest we get a better idea of what we're trying to achieve first. I'll be out of town for most of next week starting wednesday, by the way.

I very much doubt that patches net a better performance than brushes or models... And if they do, that's crazy. A proper LOD system is in order. I'll note that on my big list of cool features JKA lacks but doesn't have to anymore since we have the source now.

Maybe we should make a new VIS help thread where people can send me their maps and I can show them how to do proper VIS... Yes, having a PVS at all makes some things inherently worse, and adding an optional additional portal/antiportal system might help, especially for large outdoor stuff. But that would also benefit from some LOD'd terrain, for example. In general the lack of LOD on anything but playermodels makes huge levels impractical anyway... Yeah, there are a lot of things we could improve about Jedi Academy. But I don't see how manually doing the PVS work Q3Map2 usually does for you helps.