We've been up to a lot lately, thought it would be a good time to share a bit in what we are doing! First though, do you have 3D skills you'd like to exercise? Check out this cool modeling contest we're having.
We've had 3 new members join us! Big warm welcome to them all, and we're hoping to see some really cool things from them.
What's new?
I've had lots of fun using mrwonko's .GLM import and export script for Blender, with the successful export of Psycho's Pyro armor as a test. It won't be making it's way into JKG quite yet, but it's rigged and ready to be textured for that day. Also able to be exported are sabers.. or saber parts (hint: customization?) to .glm.
I've also been busy getting some old untextured work closer to getting ingame. The recent texturing of Pyscho's Ion Blaster and EE-3, and the sculpting, reshaping, and retexturing of Karpman's Ithorian head have been the most complete so far. There are few more things to add texture-wise to the Ion Blaster and EE-3, then they are ready to get ingame.
Resuru also has some weapons that are nearing the texturing phase, and are next in line to be worked on:
DLT-20a | DL-44 | FC-1 Flechette | Floating mine | Plasma mine
Due to the recent motivation to work on player models (because of export ability) I've also been working on finishing up the Human/Zabrak/Rodian player base mesh, which has been finely made so that it will match up at certain places on the mesh for joining with clothing and armour pieces. In the next month, you can expect to see a write-up on how that system will work (much of it already exists, by the way!) and how assets will be made for it, as well as a release of the base mesh to facilitate the creation of third party clothing and armor.
On to the fun stuff, coding! eezstreet has been doing a -lot- of work. He's been merging of JKG's code onto the platform of OpenJK, the huge project that is cleaning up and enhancing all sorts of non-gameplay parts of Jedi Academy. We reap lots of good things from this, but it also has been a bit of a headache for him fixing mismatches and making JKG code work with OpenJK changes.
Although we had to let go of our post processing in this merge, we will likely soon have a much, much better replacement for it. eezstreet has been busy porting over a new renderer for use in OpenJK (and subsequently any mods thereof, like us!) by SmileTheory from the ioquake3 project.
It adds a ton of features (see here), the most notable being cascading real-time shadows, proper materials (GLSL shaders... normal maps supported!), and some post processing already included (such as tone-mapping, HDR, and bloom) with availability to add more features (Depth of Field or Motion Blur anyone?).
Here are some videos showing some of the features. Although the new materials system isn't showcased at all, you can still see lots of other cool things going on. Notice the crisp shadows being cast by the sun!
As far as JKG itself goes, there was also a slew of changes just after the OpenJK code merge, such as improvements to our LUA system to allow for changes to credits and ammo by scripts (think: ammo dispensers that you purchase from). The admin system also got a total overhaul. Fixes and changes to our mysterious saber system were also made.
Silverfang has been and still is making changes to the balancing of weapons in JKG as well, based on our experience with the now stable starting credits, bounties, and kill rewards. We look forward to testing it further with you!
Finally I'd like to say that although JKG may not be available at the moment, our close fans may appreciate the release of the Spaceport map to JKA, as it is now obsolete in JKG due to Mos Eisley. You can grab it here!
Biting his nails as much as you are,
Pande
What are those videos from?
The original game that gave birth to JKA and many others on the same engine - Quake 3. Those videos are from ioquake3, a project much like OpenJK which fixes things and requires only the Cd assets (no cd) to run.
It's really good to see you all are still working hard on this! Best of luck. ^^