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Do You Want the DF MOD ported over to Jedi Academy rather than JO?


The Count

Do you want the DF MOD ported to JA  

28 members have voted

  1. 1. Do you want the DF MOD ported to JA

    • Yes
      12
    • No (Give Reasons)
      16


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Originally posted by Reclaimer

Yes push it back to Jedi Academy.No one will probley play Outcast for a long time because every one will be with Academy.

 

Everyone said this of Jedi Knight witrh the release of JO. And yet the JK community is still going strong. Not as strong as before, but still strong. I think this mod should be released in JO. The engine JO is running on is already a few years old. in fact, a lot of the files in the pk3s there are simply modifications to one of Raven's other games, Elite Force. I cant count how many times the word borg showed up in there. If Raven uses the same engine, then JA should be more of an expansion pack than a full fledged game of its own.

 

I think you should stay on JO, if only to pass the time. If in fact you decide to make the switch over, release what you have as a public beta, go work on the mod over on JA, but just make sure you come back to JO to finish the job.

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with all the discussion about the JO patches and saber combat, one thought comes into my mind: we really have no idea what the sabers are going to be like. from what ive heard, some of the combos will be changed, so who knows about normal stance moves. and with the addition of more force powers, weapons, and dual and double-bladed lightsabers, who knows how the game will be affected. i know a major part of the game is saber combat, and that was an important part of the multiplayer; however, i for one will not be getting the game for MP at all. i think its just a waiting game until it or a demo is released.

 

anyway, i say Yes, based on the supposed improvements in JA SP editing (unless JO SP code is released...). but it really doesnt matter to me, as i will have both games.

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Except, the thing is, JO has a lot more advanced features for modders to take advantage of over Elite Force.

 

The thing with JK and JO is that JK was developed by LEC back in 1996 and 1997 on a totally different engine for JO. JA is the same engine with some heavy modifications, by the same developer only a year later. The chance that JA will replace the JO community entirely is rather high. Raven isn't stupid, and LEC is only marginally stupid at times, it's also unlikely that they will release another "screwup" like JO.

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It doesn't really both me whether the DFMod is released for JO or for JA. I will also have both games.

 

Judging by some of the feeling in this thread towards JA, though, some people might not get that game, and would be disappointed if the Mod was not released for JO.

 

Emon's right in that models and other things will be converted automatically to be playable in JA, which would obviously help in porting the Mod across. However, it's not clear about the changes on the coding side. I would have to assume at least some of the coding is different in JA. On the other hand, if Raven are taking an extra effort to improve support for modders on JA, it may very well turn out to be a better option.

 

If recent estimates of the release date are anything to go by, we won't have long to wait to find out. A September release seems likely for JA, and that's not too far away.

 

I just think the mod team needs to assess what's best for them to get the mod completed. :)

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Originally posted by StormHammer

I just think the mod team needs to assess what's best for them to get the mod completed. :)

 

Exact. We have to finish all the ceiling/floor/wall textures, the player/ennemy/NPC and other world models and the according model skins, and most especially the maps still need lot of effort. Not to count the parallel work of the coders to include the weapons and their special behavior.

 

I don't think this all can be done until september, but if JA really comes out that soon, the SDK will certainly take a few weeks more to be released, and the coders will have to analyse the code.

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JK2 Files just said...

 

"We have received confirmation from LucasArts that the release date for Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy (or JK3) is September 16th, 2003. "

 

http://www.jk2files.com/file.news?ID=5663

 

I'm not so sure it actually IS called JK3 in any way, shape or form, seems like its just been assumed thats what its called when it isn't...ah well, doesn't really matter anyway.

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No, my PC sucks big time and I can hardly run JO. I'm getting JA for XBOX and I can't get mods through Live!, only official content :(

 

So, port only AFTER you complete what you started.

 

And you're thinking, "wtf, I thought we lost this kid finally!"

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Originally posted by Fracman This was a reply to Emons post above where he claimed "JO was a test for JA", simply following his strange logic :D

I was joking, of course!!! Please read the posts more carefully, ok!? ;)

 

You miss out on the fact that Q3 is Q3A. There's only Quake III Arena and Quake III Team Arena, which is an expansion. Nothing else.

 

Oh, and I was saying that since some people think LEC screwed up on JO (had problems even though it's great overall), that they are attempting to "fix" it by doing JA. So far they seem pretty successful.

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Hi folks,

 

I'm new here, please bear with me. ;)

 

I would vote no, because, as others here have mentioned, JA is not announced for the Mac yet, and I wouldn't be able to play the Mod if it would be JA only.

 

Finish it for JKII, then port it over to JA. Besides, I don't see one reason why you should start all over again just to make it JA compatible.

 

People still will play JKII, no matter if JA comes out.

 

Just my two cents.

 

Greetings, Andreas.

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Originally posted by Ravensroke Ever tried "porting" something? Most of the time its easier to start anew than to "port" something over to anything.

 

Come back when you have some real experience on the matter.

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Actually I do have some experience as a programmer. (Not recent, but some).

 

And porting programs from pc to mac is a huge task. The mac and windows API's are not hugely different in concept, and the big break for games programmers is that openGL is really an open standard, but still, the work involved is tremendous.

 

I am very skeptical of the claim that you just put a JO model in the right folder, and bingo! it works perfect, I might be wrong, but there are frequentyl major headaches involved in making things work properly.

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Well, the DF stuff is ancient history but the types of problems Mac users had give some idea of the kinds of quirks that can crop up when mods cross platforms.

 

Out of the hundreds of DF levels (and I played almost all of them) I think only one or two would crash on the Mac and I suspect those could have been avoided with testing. There were some cosmetic glitches when designers failed to account for the fact that Mac DF ran at higher resolution than the PC DOS version but usually this only messed up custom "wait" screens while the mission was loading. Most frequently, Mac users had to do a lot of renaming of custom cutscene files and such because level authors settled on a convention of using DOS .bat files to rename files at runtime and that does nothing on a Mac. There was also a quirk in Mac DF that prevented custom opening cutscenes from loading because Mac DF would only run those cutscenes if the mission was started from the menu, and Mac DF would always just load the first mission rather than go to the menu first, so to see a custom opening cutscene Mac users would have to exit the mission and restart it from the menu.

 

There was, sadly, no Mac version of JK, but I imagine mod compatibility would have been similar to DF's because LucasArts' in-house ports in those days were very, very good.

 

JO and all Q3A-based games on the Mac seem to run mods fine, although I'm still wondering why I don't see the Crow at the end of the DF mod demo.

 

The main thing to remember is avoid designing or packaging mods in any kind of OS-specific executable, batch, or scripting file. Mods should be distributed and installable in a platform-neutral way. The other thing is to beta test on a Mac if possible because it's probably possible to create bugs that don't have symptoms on Windows but are bugs nonetheless.

 

Originally posted by Fracman

Perhaps the Mac users can give us words of their experience using DF, JK and JO with add-on levels and MODs,

and if there is a Mac-Modder, perhaps (s)he can show the crucial points to care of...

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Originally posted by Ravensroke

I am very skeptical of the claim that you just put a JO model in the right folder, and bingo! it works perfect, I might be wrong, but there are frequentyl major headaches involved in making things work properly.

 

I can assure you all the portability from JO to JA is exactly as it is planned. Someone even opened DeTRiTiC-iQ's Bespin Towers CTF JO map and played JA CTF with it using the leaked build.

 

I can, um, also assure you on such aspects... but this is not the place. PM if you're interested.

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I voted no for two reasons:

1) Selfishness. I probably won't be getting JA until Christmas, so I'll be playing JO until at least then. Although I'd like to say I'll be playing it after too, we'll have to see. I know plenty of people who still play JK.

2) As has been said, it'll push the release back further. By the time completion comes, Clone Commando could be almost upon us. It could be pushed back again then for CC (as there's no sabers in DF).

 

Respect for whatever you guys choose - it is your mod and your work after all - but for the record, I choose no.

 

B.

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