User:Eezstreet

eezstreet is a modder and former JKHub administrator. One of the founding members of OpenJK, he is perhaps best known on JKHub for sharing lots of technical related knowledge about the game and is an advocate for open sourced software.

Early Works

Many of his early works were experimental in nature. Gunslinger's Academy attempted to bring SWAT 4 styled CO-OP to JKA, but later drew influence from John Woo action movies. It remains the only mod (in any game) to have incorporated dual-wielding, where both weapons are held independently and fire on independent button presses. While the mod focused primarily on first-person, modern gun action, elements of it were later incorporated into Jedi Knight Galaxies.

He implemented an IRC chat client using JKA's console, with raw Windows sockets.

QEffects Pro

QEffects Pro is a modification of QEffects which improves the framerate, improves the colorgrading effect, and adds motion blur. It's still prominently used in Moviebattles II, where a majority of the players use the JAMP client.

Jedi Knight Galaxies

In 2010, he joined the Jedi Knight Galaxies team. The team at the time was rife with internal dispute as to the direction the mod was taking, and not long afterwards, a majority of the team (including BobaFett, who left JKA entirely), quit. eezstreet assumed a leadership position on the project and was pivotal in breaking the project apart into a four-phase release cycle, as well as establishing the overall direction of the mod. He remains in charge of the project to this day.

Phase 1 Release

Phase 1 of Jedi Knight Galaxies was released in 2012. Very little beta testing was done, and the multitudes of downloaders broke the bandwidth limit for the launcher. Later, the launcher was removed entirely in favor of ZIP downloads. When players downloaded the files, some noticed that it was impossible to read the credit list, because the credits had been packed into protected PK3 files.

eezstreet oversaw migrating the codebase to OpenJK. As of this writing, 1.3.0 is currently in development.

Source Release

In April of 2013, LucasArts formally dissolved as a result of Disney's acquisition of LucasFilm. eezstreet contacted developers of Raven Software, and with some careful cooperation, helped to facilitate the release of the source code. He distributed the source code onto the JACoders IRC channel and helped set up contact between Kotaku and Micheal Gummelt, the designer behind Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy, for an interview.

Later it was discovered that the code labeled JediOutcast was actually the Xbox version of the Jedi Academy code. The Jedi Outcast code was recovered separately. Activision suspended the source release after it was later discovered that proprietary code (including Bink and the Xbox XDK) was packaged in the release. OpenJK removed these sections of the code in order to prevent copyright issues.

OpenJK

Several of the programmers on the JACoders IRC channel were key in creating OpenJK. eezstreet worked primarily on the singleplayer and JK2 singleplayer portions, which were previously unreleased sections of code. He advocated strongly for including the Jedi Knight 2 singleplayer code as part of OpenJK, on the basis that the engine was functionally identical.

He began the process of porting SmileTheory's rend2 renderer to Jedi Academy, which Xycaleth and SomaZ later built upon.

His digging in singleplayer code later became the basis of the Jedi Knight: Enhanced series, in collaboration with redsaurus.

As JKHub Administrator

In April 2014, eezstreet became a JKHub staff member under Circa's leadership. Circa retired in August 2015 and eezstreet became the main administrator for the site until Circa rejoined in 2016. As a member of the staff, eezstreet employed a laissez-faire approach to moderation. While taking an active approach in keeping the community alive through contests and news pieces, he relaxed the rules on ports, allowing for partially ported content to be on the files section, "as long as it can reasonably be called your own content." This relaxation of rules was later revoked by Caelum and eezstreet has called it a mistake in hindsight.

With Caelum's return, all staff members were unified under a single "Staff Member" handle. In September 2017, eezstreet retired from JKHub staff. Although an occasional poster, he is not very active in JKA anymore.

Other Works

Moviebattles II

eezstreet was a member of the Moviebattles II team on two separate occasions. The first, in 2011, was rather brief and ended with him being ejected out of the team over internal issues. He insists that his stubbornness against using Mercurial at this time was part of the reason the team switched to Git software, although this account is disputed. The second occasion, in 2017, lasted a bit longer; he "resigned" after a few months again due to internal conflicts with the team. He wrote a very public farewell memo in the forums outlining why he chose to resign, citing a lack of respect of the team towards the community and a lack of communication within the team. The team has denied most of these claims. While eezstreet claims to have resigned, the team claims that he was removed.

He has advocated very vocally for the mod going open source; it is perhaps what he is best known for within the Moviebattles community.

Independent Games

While he has attempted to foray into independent games, he has not had much success. He wrote several small Flash games for small sums of money, most of them earning less than $10 total.

His first standalone project, Rapture, used a from-scratch game engine and was to be an action RPG (ARPG) similar to Diablo. Without much experience in engine design, the project flopped, although he has later said that it was a great exercise.

He is the server owner of the official Ready or Not Discord server, suggesting a possible collaboration in the future.

SWAT: Elite Force

SWAT: Elite Force is a massive overhaul of SWAT 4: The Stetchkov Syndicate. It makes the game play more like a police simulator and less like an arcade CO-OP shooter. The mod is very successful and is what eezstreet is best known for outside of the JKA community. It has been featured on Moddb's Top 100 mods of 2017. The SWAT 4 Discord server he helped establish rivals the JKCommunity and Moviebattles Official Discord servers in size.

OpenD2

OpenD2 is a project to open-source Diablo 2's engine by rewriting it in C++. Currently it is not in a playable state; only the character creation screen works.