using an open engine?
 

a few weeks ago I posted that it might be a good idea to start using an open engine to keep going with JA.


It seems to be that it would be perfectly doable to use one of the quake2 or quake3 open engine projects to keep going with it, specifically i had in mind using ioquake3 as a basis to create a useable engine for the existing JA sdk.


This would give the advantage of being able to create our own engine fixes and get fixes from the ioquake3 project.

so are any other programmers interested in doing this? I would see this as being part of OJP so anyone could use it as part of their mods.

leave comments please.

i heard that you uninstalled

and with the amount of modifications you'd need to make to get q3 engine to work with jka it'd get hard to keep changes to the main project in synchronization

So far we have this for a todo list:

diff/merge :rolleyes:

doesn't always work if you change the code

I don't see this being worth the effort since it would take a VERY long time to simply get the system working with the JKA SDK.

not rly, the only thing i see having difficult doing is actually making fx, terrain/rmg, weather, and ambient sounds work. the rest should be fairly doable if Wudan wants to give out MyGhoul. to just get it running the simplest thing you can do is just make the syscalls in the engine return 0 to do nothing for now.

it's called "MyGhoul" for a reason V._.V

ROFL, no it's a GPL project. There aren't any binary releases or source releases at this point. I've given some access to a few developers working on similar projects.

At this point MyGhoul is a much more Q3 friendly way of handling GLM meshes, since I've re-written Q3 tag queries and whatnot to work identically with GLM meshes. I've only recently looked at the JKA SDK and the interface with G2 through a bunch of poorly explained trap calls and void * variables makes me gag.

I had Raven's support in my unravelling of the format, so I owe them my gratitude, and a heavy dose of good will. I wouldn't like to see any harm brought to them, so I'm curious if people would purchase JKA and run the assets on the free engine, or if people think it would encourage rampant piracy.

Well legally you cannot distribute any of the assets, only code when under GPL. at least not without permission.

Yeah basically it's possible to just make an EXE that can sit in the Gamedata directory next to jamp.exe, that's all anyone's talking about distributing (at least, that's all I'd distribute), I'd be concerned if unscrupulous folks were sharing copyright(ed!) assets illicitly.

theres nothing to stop that anyway, it's not our concern

Well how icculus does it (because it is legal to do this) isnt the last asset file from the patch? That can be distributed if you wish but the others must be used from your installation of the game. Anyway, Icculus installs it into a seperate directory and asks you if you wish to copy the point release pk3s and then you must copy your pak0. My engine mod however runs along in the q3 directory where q3.exe is.

yea, if we did this just list jka 1.01 as one of the requirements

we are not forced to recode a completly jamp.exe or a jasp.exe based on icculus source...

we could for example start with simply recode a dedicated jampded.exe and linuxjampded just to be able to fix all server related problems...

then if it works we could think in going farther and do a complete jamp.exe...


for just some Multiplayer needs of the dedicated server, there would be less work...
i mean we would just have to do the replacement of ghoul2 things...and fix the code in order to let it use the DLL based of the JKA SDK (a few trap call)....

are there other things to implements?


So you really think that would take a lot of time?
ghoul2 would be surely the biggest thing...

are there any changes in the protocol client/server between quake3 and JKA ?

Playerstate and entitystate transmission.

Quake 3 does that as well no?

Yes but hes wondering what needs to be changed. JKA has several different things that get transmitted and we do not know the size of them.

Couldn't we figure that out by examining the playerState and entityState definitions?

Not the bitsize transmissions no. And the files in the pk3 for overrides that are disabled with ; are out of date (hard-coded default values got changed since 1.00).

Is that really a problem? Would it matter as long as the relivent data was transmitted over the network? It's not like it would need to be 100% compatible with the basejka build.

You wouldn't want to waste bandwidth when the game already does waste enough as it is would you?

i am sure that's not hard to be compliant with the commentaray symbol ";" behind the lines and only send over the network those data which are not commented....

So in reality it looks like the biggest thing to do is to emulate a ghoul2 thing and be able to implement all the trap things (whose ghoul2 collision and trace things...)

Also don't you think we could ask raven to release as a compiled .lib , .a and .dll all related to ghoul2 things...

we could say that quak3 sources are released ,and they too much remote exploits in the jamp.exe and dedicated things.. and above all, they are not fixing those things as it is not supported...

So it is not as if they would give the source but only a compiled part of them...

moreover it would also be usefull for all raven games like SoF2 or other that also use ghoul2...

well just a thought

Good luck getting in contact with Raven or Lucas.

Send mail on behalf of us all xD.

And if they somehow do let us work with it etc, we should prob set up a git or subversion and like slider, myself, and possibly razor and stu can read/write to.

I think we would want some kind of standard version, no? Not just each of us working on separate. Lol...

I'd probably do the bigger chunks of the porting since i have pretty decent knowledge of the ioq3 src and ive seen how Raven sloppily codes in C++ (jagamex86.dll partial src) so...

i really dont want to wake up the death but i would like to know if there are any news regarding this topic.

using an open engine would definity be great so i just want the discussion to go on :)

i'm willing to help (C++/C) if someone starts a project, but first there are a lot of things and problems to clarify.

Nope no news. Not that this game itself isn't dead anyway.

Try not to revive again though :)

Did anyone attempt to contact LA or Raven about this?

Did you really have to re-revive this thread?

Its not going to happen, period.

the game isn't dead... if u think 2,000 people on JKA 1.01 is dead then open your eyes

tido: ravensoft are full of dummies, they wont pull any 'favors'
lucas arts doesn't give out codes for any of their games developed or published

it could if some one is actually willing to put a whole lot of effort into it... but a lot of effort, too much than necessary perhaps. no need to be negative, it's possible.

Ofcourse its possible, but its probably not possible and legal, unless an alien army invades and makes it legal.

Sorry, I don't consider saber only honor servers anything of real data to tell me the game is "alive". I see the one CTF and one siege server that are rarely full on day to day basis as being damn near dead.

My eyes are plenty open m8. Seems more of you have your eyes closed or are clouded by the lameness that is JA-.

tinny, it doesn't mean it's illegal... and yeah it's possible but it would be easier to walk through lava then do it.

it's not dead, ensiform.
jk2 is near dead, in comparison between JK3 and JK2, jk2 has about 100 people on v1.04, about 1,000 active total, while on jk3 theres about 5,000 active on both versions. it isn't dead.
if u consider "not dead" games like CSS, CoD4 or CoD2 (xfire.com ranks), i would consider them over-populated games instead of a normal game.

Using any code elements or resources from JA, equals commercial exploitation.

Utilising any factors of Star Wars intellectual property, equals copyright infringement, plagiarism (the kind you can get sued for), and theft of intellectual property.

Both require rather expensive licenses in order for them to become legal.

Said it before, will probably say it again: Welcome to the era of red tape, where you can't even take a crap without having a judicial summons shoved through your mailbox. -_-'

Actually, I think JKA is more alive than you estimate - by MB2 ;)

MB2Forums have 4,673 members atm, and most of players dont even come there. I'd estimate that occassionally maybe even 8,000 players play MB2 alone.

I'm working on creating a Star Wars game on Valve's Source engine :)
Linked below

ooh, when is it planned on releasing? :P
or atleast having a beta?

It's already in beta. We plan for a summer release.

However, this will be just the base for later, fully-SW game.

In first release there is CTF/TDM with gunners only (no saber system or forces yet, you can imagine the ammount of work involved solely into those two).

eh i ment public beta.. for people to download and try out...
if u are referring to that i cannot find it on the website of where to download o_o

It's in private beta at the moment I believe. He meant public beta's coming in the summer ^^

Indeed, public beta is coming along soon :p