JKHub:About

Jedi Knight

The Jedi Knight series was launched in 1995 with the release of Dark Forces for MS-DOS, Apple Macintosh, and the Sony PlayStation. The game was generally well received, selling over 120.000 copies. A sequel Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II soon followed, as well as its expansion Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith.

Arguably, modern-day gameplay of the series was largely shaped by the next game Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, which featured Kyle Katarn as protagonist, much like the previous games. Like its predecessor, the latest game in the series - Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy - was developed by Raven Software. It was published by LucasArts and Activision, and featured smaller changes than previous versions, such as graphical improvements. It was also the first game in the series where the player did not take on the role of Kyle Katarn.

JKHub

The infographic used to advertise the launch of JKHub in 2012.

Since our launch, the Jedi Knight Hub has endeavored to be the number one place for all things related to Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, and its respective communities. We have provided a large number of services, including reliable mod hosting, DNS redirects, free webhosting, a forum to discuss the game, places for clans to advertise, and much more. Our focus lies with Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, but we support both games.

Founded by Caelum on the 24th of August 2012, JKHub has seen many changes over the years, including staff, features, and themes. Though Caelum has left and returned twice so far, he left the JKHub staff in 2022. JKHub is currently run by Circa.

History

Starting from the launch of Jedi Outcast in 2002 and Academy in 2003, the Jedi Knight modding scene was nearly reliant on the GameFront network, with JK3Files being the main provider of new mods and news related to the JK games. Previously known as FileFront, it provided a great service to the community but ran into many problems in its later years.

Around 2009-2010, JK3Files began suffering from long periods of downtime, sometimes for weeks, and when it was up it was unreliable and sometimes was missing images and latest pages. This is when Caleum, SiLink, and a few other members of the community had decided to work towards creating a new website that can take over the role that JK3Files had, and maybe even more.

Introducing: JKHub

Throughout 2011 and 2012, Caelum went to work on getting the site up and running, and enlisted help from SiLink and others to help contact as many mod authors as possible, asking for permission to host their mods on JKHub.org. Most prominent modders agreed to stop by to upload themselves or allow the staff to upload for them. However, since this was already 8 years after launch, many of the original modders of the game had already moved on and some were not contactable. Overall the effort was a success, albeit tedious. The team manually uploaded hundreds of mods with screenshots and descriptions, one by one.

JKHub in September 2012, shortly after launch.

The site was closed only to a select few beta testers in the "Area51" beta site prior to opening to the public. This lasted for a few months in 2012, until the public launch on the 24th of August 2012. After launch, the staff continued to reach out to past modders inviting them to join the forum and upload their mods. Word quickly spread, as JK3Files and GameFront were quickly declining and unusable.

Throughout the first couple of years of JKHub's life, the community grew fast, though with a growing community came challenges and risks such as being targets of continuous spam and attacks. Positives to activity outshone the negatives though, with events such as mod contests and holiday modding events like the Secret Santa and White Elephant being community favorites.

The wiki is born

On the 19th of February 2013, the Jedi Knight Wiki (this one!) was opened to the public. This was Caelum's last project before retiring a few days later.

Caelum Retires

On the 22nd of February 2013, Caleum retired for the first time to pursue a webhosting startup called Big Truck, leaving JKHub in the hands of Fighter, Circa, therfiles, and CrimsonStrife, with SiLink helping the background here and there. With the nature of Caelum's startup choice, he was still hosting JKHub as a client, and was still around to help when absolutely needed. Shortly after, Fighter and SiLink left, leaving Circa in charge with the others.

Source Code Release

On the 3rd of April 2013, Lucasfilm/Disney announced they had shut down LucasArts, a new months after Disney had purchased Lucasfilm, and in turn shutting down all currently developed projects being made by or licensed by Lucasarts or Lucasfilm. The very same day, April 3rd, the source code to both Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy were "leaked" online. This was covered by JKHub staff after being vetted by eezstreet and other coders in the community. It was unclear at the time who leaked the code or why, but the running rumor was it was a Ravensoft employee that released it. Shortly after it was made public, it was quickly taken down, as it was assumed that the move was not approved by Activision. The JACoders group including eeztreet, Raz0r, and others quickly began work on OpenJK, a community effort to implement fixes and features in the code for clients and servers.

JK3Files Shuts Down

On the 14th of July 2015, GameFront officially closed its doors, along with all of its network sites like JK3Files and their forum. Though it was expected to happen sooner than it did, the sites had become nearly unusable that a megathread was created on JKHub for obtaining files from it, since some regions were able to download and others were not.

Caleum returns

In 2016, Caleum returned to JKHub as a staff member, stating he had some ideas for how to revamp it into a new era, what he dubbed "JKHub 2.0". He created a Patreon that allowed him to "justify" spending time and effort on JKHub things, as long as people were open to paying him to do so, with certain rewards promised to donors to the patreon, essentially removing the previous donation system that was used before, instead all money went to Caelum with the understanding that he will be paying for the costs for JKHub out of pocket. Discussions on a new theme and software begun between him and Circa, as well as many web server changes. Although JKHub was running on IP.Board 3 since launch, debate on moving to XenForo 2 was heavily considered as Invision's 4.0 was not available yet. A couple years passed with these plans getting postponed. The decision was made in 2019 to ultimately upgrade from Invision 3 to Invision 4, and create a theme that closely resembled the old theme to avoid people getting too much of a design shock, as 4.0 ended up changing quite a bit of the layout and functions. Work on a brand new theme was shelved by Caelum until he had more of a motivation to do it.

Caleum retires (again)

After a long period of radio silence, Caelum left the Jedi Academy community as a whole again, with nearly no word to his current server hosting customers until the day of, notifying them that their servers will be shut down that week. JKHub was then left in the hands of Circa again, who also had no succession plans or preparation. Effort was made to transfer as much of JKHub's assets and infrastructure out of Caelum's ownership and into Circa's, with varying degrees of success. Shortly after Caelum notified his customers, he completely disappeared from the internet, deleting every single post and article he wrote on JKHub, his social accounts, and his email accounts.

2021 Redesign

The theme redesign of 2021 dubbed JKHub Next

After Caleum left, Circa decided to then move forward with his own redesign of JKHub in lieu of his predecessor's original plan. In August of 2021, when JKHub turned 9 years old, the new theme, dubbed "JKHub Next" was released, complete with a new color scheme and layout to look more modern and appealing to newcomers.

Video Interview with Raven

To celebrate Jedi Outcast turning 20 years old in March 2022, Circa contacted Mike Gummelt about doing a video call talking about his experience and memories making the game. Gummelt ended up reaching out to more members of that original team to join the call and ended up being over 2 hours of Circa asking them questions and them reminiscing together about how special the game was to them personally and professionally.

Jedi Academy turns 20

Unfortunately the release of Jedi Academy wasn't looked at as fondly by the developers, as it wasn't received well critically back in 2003, so they decided not to return for another video call to talk about it. However, in August 2023, Circa attempted to organize a handful of special events to have the community celebrate:

• a new theme inspired by the Jedi Academy cover art
• a special podcast with Circa and SiLink talking about the game, their experiences and memories, as well as early days of JKHub.
• a Jedi Academy themed mod contest, focused on using or being inspired by vanilla JKA content
• an all-day community server event, with help from people in the community like Makha, X, Artemis, and more

The staff

The Jedi Knight Hub is staffed exclusively by volunteers: players who contribute time and money to ensure the hub's continued existence. A full list of staff members can be found here.

Contact

If you have any questions about us, believe you can contribute in any manner, or would like to leave some feedback, please do not be afraid to contact us! We try our best to respond to everyone who does so.