Obi-Wan X Posted August 31, 2003 Share Posted August 31, 2003 I agree that JK was extremely easy to edit . I remember on my very FIRST day of JK in the trial room, I learned how to change my lightsaber color to black and gold, simply by changing 2 lines of a text file! Not to mention fly around in multiplayer, throw lightsabers and 1000 conc blasts in 3 seconds. Otherwise known as "cogs". It was somewhat of a downfall cheatwise, but was extremely amusing at times! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tyler_Durden Posted August 31, 2003 Share Posted August 31, 2003 Well i for one have been around since the beginning of this site. I have seen people do great things with this game and others do not so great. I think, and this goes for me as well, it is the fact that this engine is so damn hard to work with. It is one of the most technically challenging programs i have ever had to work with (radiant). I have made about 7 sp levels total, never one have i released and probably witll never release. Why? I think a lot of people are also turned off by criticism. When their levels are not grade A with cut scenes or don't include a text crawl at the beginning then their levels "suck". What people don't realise is that a lot of modders aren't as inclined as others in terms of architecture and scripting, and what have you. Others just don't know it's there. It took me 5 maps and many hours to realize you need area portals and no leaks for a half decent frame rate. I think the real heart of this game is the SP levels. You would get more people doing those if the engine weren't so difficult to use and if others were a bit less brutal and critical maybe there would be more. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kurgan Posted August 31, 2003 Share Posted August 31, 2003 Yeah, the so-called "hacks" were all we got for mods for quite awhile, until the first editor, Force Builder, was released. Then we got successive editing tools like Conman, JED (and its seemingly endless plugins), JKEdit, BMut, PuppetJedi, Matmaster, etc. and finally Kicker Helper to deal with the cheaters. The problem was that JK/MotS had no system for checking the files that clients used to connect to be sure they were the same (the "pure server" option in Q3 engine games). Instead it just matched the file names. MotS encrypted their MPC files, but that only stopped one commonly used cheat. Anyway... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andy867 Posted August 31, 2003 Share Posted August 31, 2003 Its funny you mention the text crawlers Tyler because I actually made several for some of the more popular Mods' and TC's coming out, like the Attack of the Clones TC as well as the Dark Forces 2 Enhanced Mod and helped Gohan123 get together a text crawler for his Episode 3: Fall of the Jedi mod. I mean really they weren't hard to do in terms of the text itself. you just open it up in a proggie like Adobe Photoshop, view the alpha layer of it, and then remove and edit text as necessary and then remember to save it as a 32-bit (NOT 16-bit) tga file and voila... all done. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gabrobot Posted August 31, 2003 Share Posted August 31, 2003 Originally posted by Tyler_Durden Well i for one have been around since the beginning of this site. I have seen people do great things with this game and others do not so great. I think, and this goes for me as well, it is the fact that this engine is so damn hard to work with. It is one of the most technically challenging programs i have ever had to work with (radiant). I have made about 7 sp levels total, never one have i released and probably witll never release. Why? I think a lot of people are also turned off by criticism. When their levels are not grade A with cut scenes or don't include a text crawl at the beginning then their levels "suck". What people don't realise is that a lot of modders aren't as inclined as others in terms of architecture and scripting, and what have you. Others just don't know it's there. It took me 5 maps and many hours to realize you need area portals and no leaks for a half decent frame rate. I think the real heart of this game is the SP levels. You would get more people doing those if the engine weren't so difficult to use and if others were a bit less brutal and critical maybe there would be more. I actually think editing JKII is great...much easier than Jedi Knight. While cogs were powerful, it got a bit tedious having to use one just to open a door (of course at the time I didn't know of anything easier, so I wasn't really complaining then). My main gripe about JKII editing is the bugs with the scripting, where you may have a script that should technically work, but don't because of a bug which they never bothered to take out, so I have to try and track down what it doesn't like. Otherwise though, Radiant is much easier to use than JED (it wasn't that JED was hard to use, it's just that Jedi Knight editing is based on deleting stuff to create it...it's hell trying to do even the most simple details)...and you don't have to use a cog every time you need a door to open. It's true that it's a lot of work to make a good level, but I start off coming up with a story, then coming up with about what the cutscenes are going to be and write all the dialog (as well as put down what the mp3 file names will be). Then I actually go about figuring out how I'll get it done...that way I'm not limiting the level by thinking about it from the technical view first. Even an experienced single player level editor, like Anthony Piggott, wasn't able to release his first level for JKII because of technical problems (something with the framerate, I think), but remember that every failure gives you that much more knowledge so that you don't make that mistake again. My first JKII level ended up having a terrible framerate also, but I learned many things about doing cool cutscenes (and also about the bugs) and that having a very open floating platform made up of many patches, and the brushes not being textured with caulk was not a recipe for high framerates. (Actually it was fine until I added the NPCs...the level was so open that most of them had to spawn at the same time, which just pushed the FPS into the trash can) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tyler_Durden Posted August 31, 2003 Share Posted August 31, 2003 I think we just need a definitive tutorial on how to modify ALL of the stuff that comes with this game, the best being rich diesal's tutorial, however it is incomplete so you either have to go to different sources and attempt to find what you're looking for. It really becomes cumbersome if you just don't have that kind of time. My point is there should be a site that pertains to this game exclusively with how to do everything whether it be mapping, modelling, etc. This way everyone has a central place to really learn how to make their own mods and release some quality stuff. But yeah i totally agree with you that you need to plan out the whole thing beforehand as it really helps you out in the long run. I myself have been working on a sp mod that has nothing to do with the movie continuity since i heard this game was coming. But it is definitely a star wars mod. I have to learn modelling/skinning, and scripting. I am also going to be doing story, dialogue, and original art for loading screens as well as for the startup screen (whoa). Might take a couple of years but it seems like it'll be worth it. Whether it is released or not, well..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gabrobot Posted August 31, 2003 Share Posted August 31, 2003 Ah, yes...that was one thing about Jedi Knight editing...I could just go to massassi.net and find a tutorial on how to do what ever I needed to do...so even if it was harder to do, it was easier to learn how to do it. It sure is great, though, that Raven released all the SP scripts...I don't think I could've hardly gotten anywhere without those. (That and the Kejim .map file...and that one space base level where you first meet the shadow troopers that came with for GTKRadiant) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JDKnite188 Posted August 31, 2003 Share Posted August 31, 2003 Good mods take a lot of time. That is the basis of the fact that things didn't start so fast. Also, people have to learn the modding tools. Next, proper resources have to be found and utilized. I have a WIP for Single player, and from my experience it takes a heck of a lot of time to work. I don't know about others though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
razorace Posted September 6, 2003 Share Posted September 6, 2003 Originally posted by Tyler_Durden I think we just need a definitive tutorial on how to modify ALL of the stuff that comes with this game, the best being rich diesal's tutorial, however it is incomplete so you either have to go to different sources and attempt to find what you're looking for. It really becomes cumbersome if you just don't have that kind of time. Nah, I think we just need people with enough drive to complete their projects. Yes, many people are put off by the learning curve, but that probably just weeds some of the crappy stuff. Besides, I suggested a JK2 documentation project a while ago, but noone was really interested. It's too much work to document stuff when you're not the developer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schattenelb Posted September 6, 2003 Share Posted September 6, 2003 I did some things for JK2 outcast but has never released anything cuz nothing was realy finished. That will change with jedi academy for sure. I have straigth plans on doing some endor stuff finally with the supported swoop flying stuff we know they have implemented...yay speeder bikes ROXS jojojojojojojojojo. Another reason imo is the condition of modders now a days which is by far weaker as it was where modding was a "scene thing". Dunno maybe it´s the "common thing to mod on somthing" which makes us believe all the announced things will see the lights of playable betas but thats just a fake and so they end up getting onto other projects or just drop the whole modthing. JEDI ACADEMY I`M COMING:) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NITEMARE Posted September 8, 2003 Share Posted September 8, 2003 ASK nailed it! we had a mod named duel_se. and ist realy had some neat features, i allways wanted to have as an admin and a player. multiplayer got realy ridiculous with all the stupidity and so on. but as we got the mod playable, the players wouldn't join our servers. it was to hard to convince the majority to play that way. it wasn't even a real mod on saber combat and forces as it was a mod for the most important things at that time: beeing able to duel without inteference by disturbing kids. my dream was a league with fair fights and no anonymous anarchy. all players had an "account" and so on. but it was to late for that to happen. my RL problems got in the way and the servers are not paying themselves. the worst part was, that Jaii left the "team" (he was the coder and me the guy who talked him into it). he went back to his sp mod, since the feedback was not realy great or even comming from the community. and we had emotes! and admin commands! some coders from other mods were interested in our features. like the noninteference duel and stuff like that. modders need positive feedback. they don't get any money... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
razorace Posted September 8, 2003 Share Posted September 8, 2003 I think it goes beyond simply positive feedback. Most modders need actual support from the community, meaning servers, players, and additional modders. I think a lot of it stems from everyone wanting something different from the game and therefore don't want to work together on anything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NITEMARE Posted September 9, 2003 Share Posted September 9, 2003 true, servers are essential. extra modders were not needed, since the mod, was only about the gameplay. so only codework actually. we had a php coder for the league site. it all worked out like i hoped. the players registered like on a forum and got a unique password. with it they could not only login to the site, but to the servers too! no renaming, no fakers, no cheaters no lamers, no anything. admins could just bann the idiots. it would take 30 minutes to get a new registration updated on the servers password list file, and then still wait until the next map loads. that way, we finaly could get real stats, and clean fights. but there were bugs in the saber combat. that and the drastic decreasing playernumbers on all servers in germany were the cause of total loss of interesst. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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