Holy s***....

You're the guy responsible for Jed? I (and every other editor here) owe you a hell of a lot. JED is the best damn editor that I've ever used, Radiant has NOTHING on it. I've always wondered if you ever posted here discreetly.

The only things I wish you had fixed is the fact that Jed doesn't automatically flag new surfaces as floors after you cleave them out and delete the appropriate sectors (when they are the appropriate angle, like < 45 degrees), and how sometimes a few adjoin surfaces become visible after you sector cleave and then undo the cleave, and you have to reset the GEO to zero.


Are you ever going to release the source code (as in making Jed fully GPL?)

Jed was written in delphi, right?

I always thought Jed was a very impressive editor. It's a shame you haven't been doing any programming for the past 4 years.

Wow, I'd just like to say that JED is my favorite program out there for modelling, it feels like another limb when I use it.

ProdigyOddigy - Try this: kthxtri. It'll break everything into triangles, but you'll get invalid surfaces if you have any collinear vertices.

I think the original poster just meant in 3D preview, which also lacks translucency support (not sure if that's what he meant).


I can't give you a straight answer as I don't remember, but someone who has been editing JK more recently could tell you I'm sure. I do remember texture coordinates getting thoroughly borked on imported 3DOs, though. And trying to fix it never seemed to work. Not even stitching. My first guess is that your stitching algorithm works based on the existing texture coordinates of the selected texture instead of completely generating new ones. But that's a complete and total guess without any kind of research to back it up.


Shrug - 0.80, 0.81 - I didn't start editing JK till around 0.92 at the earliest. Oh, by the way, people always told me that JED 0.93 didn't have the texture coordinate borkage bugs at all. SavageX used it a lot for his models in his SS3 mods I believe. It seems to be hard to find these days, version 0.93 that is. The JK editing hub might have it but I'm unsure.

Yes, 16-bit transparent in the 3d preview. The colors are messed up (possibly scaling, I don't remember). At the time, I think Bobo and UGG hadn't quite figured out the bit format for transparency, so even ingame things were off.

As for the texture coordinates, I don't know about others, but I've seen it mainly when dragging sectors.

There's honestly long lists of things people would like and whatnot. Though I think we'll survive without most of them. Probably the dragging texture thing is the big one. Not saying you should do it. Though if nothing else, you could give it to someone else (I'm sure there's a programmer or two on here with some free time, lol).

Zoink, the return of Alexei Novikov?

Man, all you guys are young. I remeber using JED v0.3 and posting on the old DarkJedi.com boards.

I found the source for JED 0.81 so far. How would I go about uploading it?



Then how about you make a full list? I'll do what I'll have time for.

Upload JED to the JK Editing Hub (but you would have to register, first). After registering and logging in, click on RTA Uploader, and upload JED source code as a Type:Tool, Subsection:General. (If you want an example of an upload, look here. You should find it familiar.)

OR

*I* could do it.

Yeah, I think you have the same version. Meanwhile I'll look for the newer one.

Upload complete.

Bender: I will try to get as many JK editors as I can to form a list for JED improvements. I will post what I find in the Jedi Knight Editing forum.

If you are up for a chat, find some of us on: irc.holonet.org #jkhub

Thanks (for a lot of stuff),

Alex you might have seen this already but Zeq and a few others made posts with ideas regarding possible improvments to JED if the source was available over the the Code Alliance forums.

Thread

Could you compile it in a comprehensive list?

I'm fairly certain Zeq is doing that right now, I didn't know if he remembered making that post or not though.

I'm so happy!

Just wanted to say, thanks Alex, JED truly is a wonderful editor, and I continue to enjoy using it. Although JK editing is getting very advanced in age now, these new projects, the release of JED source code, the JK editing hub, Sith 2 Engine, and many others advancements continue to revive and reinvent JK, making it something far more than what LEC originally conceived.

Thanks again, for all your hard work and devotion!

I'm curious though, what made you decide to sign up on these forums again just as I posted this thread? Was it a 1 in a million chance, or have you been lurking around for a long time now?

These are old suggestions, copied off CA forums.

- Fix the bug: texture alignment errors on 3dos when moving sectors.
- Make more modeling commands... like lathe, vertex resizing, surface
resizing.
- Create something more visual for bot-paths.
- Allow MDI window interface, or just a set of window placement commands so the various windows aren't scattered over the desktop.
(A similar suggestion is to allow the various parts (map settings and the general editor) to dock.
- Customizable keyboard shortcuts or at least provide keyboard shortcuts for commands that do not have one.
- Updating the various flag values.
- Revise the interface to make it easier and quicker to use.

Bugs:
Scaling: Texture alignment/UV screwups.
Other texture: Odd error where you only see a single color, and stitching from nearby surfaces may not fix it.
Invalid Normal errors: Jed manages to spontaneously create these things.

Possible features:
-3 or 4 window interface possibilty. Top, Left, Front, 3d Preview.

-Integrated cog editor. (Notepad-like with syntax recognition)

-Ability to import file resources from other directories. (Jed would move them into the appropriate project directory.

-Possible graphical representations of cogs/cog-links within Jed. (A stated feature of LEIA)

-A rotation feature. (Use a cleaving plane to get 2d version of what's to be rotated, a corridor for instance, and then specify number of segments, and degrees to be rotated through. For easy curved corners)

-"patch" function. Ability to create Radiant-style patches. Easily modifiable, expandable. Where appropriate, (curves on edge of level... some sort of test), cleave and delete automatically. Elsewhere, input 3do's automatically in place of patches with appropriate texturing (on export to JKL).

-An integration of FreeSector (2d sector creation then expanding 3rd dim) and GoRotate type functions (2d rotate about a centerline)

-Ability to choose specifically which resources to include into gob process

-More advanced lighting system.

-Automatic conversion of bmps into mats

-Better texturing capabilities. Superstitch... Automatically stitch and align a set of multiselected textures, using current selection as starting point. Depthsearch algorithm to determine order, perhaps? More alignment options, option to automatically fit texture by number wide to number tall to a surface. (Create a top, and left right bounds, and use calculations (based on DogSRooL's formula) to fit the texture that many times onto the surface)

-A vertice type UV mapper (ForceRemap/Milkshape type thing)

-Better error-checking: Checking flags for potential errors. -Better resource-checking: Looking for errors in cogs; geo errors in 3do's, other similar problems.

I'm sure there's ideas for even more than this, lol. But even these would take a lot to implement most likely.

I don't know if you knew, but there is at least a way to exclude resources from a gob that aren't used directly by your project:

Smart GOB-ing

Not quite what you were suggesting, but a step in that direction. :/

Alex, I think what most people are referring to is lack of texture coordinate locking. Textures distort during translation or during changes in the geometry, like dragging verticies around. The textures do not "stretch" and conform to the new geometry.

Seems like that could be an elusive bug. I'll see if I can track it down.



You can do those using Tools dialog. Not the best way perhaps, but it works. I doubt I'll have time to add something elaborate than that.



Bot-paths?



MDI interface would be a major rework... What kind of commands are you talking about here?



That is easy.



Spontaneously occuring things are the hardest to track down. It would be best if you could find a way to make this error occur more or less consistently. I could fix it if I could reproduce it.



I tried to do that at one point (there were requests). I just gave up - it screwed up too many things. Frankly, I could never find my way in this 3-window interface so I was at a loss as to how it should be done.

The closest you can do to that is quickly switch between left, right, top,down and side views - there are shortcuts for that.



That was something I started a bit, but never had time to develop. It turned out to be a lot harder than it seems. It's surprizingly difficult to do decent integration of syntax parsing and helpful editing operations when things can be changed at any minute.

I'd think the best solution would be a stand-alone COG editor that would use JED plugin functions to access level data. Anybody up for that? I can provide the source for COG syntax checker that I gave to Dave for use in COG writer.



That's easy.



I thought about it but never could figure out a good way to do that. And yeah, LEIA could do a lot with COGs. It had an "immediate" mode where you could see the COGs working in the level. The editing capabilities in this mode were somewhat limited, though.



Isn't it already there - in the Tools dialog? It isn't the most intuitive, but working nevertheless.



I'm sorry, you have to remember I wasn't here last 4 years. What are those?



Beyound SmartGOB? How would you specify the resources - manually?



Well, that's more of a request for JK programmers



You mean to keep them as BMPs in project directory? Or on import?



I'm not sure I'm following. It's not really that often that you can do things automatically.



That's an entire project in itself. Just imagine all the ways things can be screwed up I can add the easy checks - flags, etc. But checking 3DOs and COGs - that's a little beyound the scope.

BTW, I believe JED already checks inside 3DOs and COGs for resources used.



What exactly do you mean by "conforming". I actually tried quite the opposite - retain the texture regularity the best I could - so that no matter what you do (outside of texturing operations) the texture stays unchanged.

OK, I got those written down. Any more?

Let's keep the myths going

Paths for the RBots mod. Yeah, bots in JK, rather intelligent as well.


I'm not sure how to explain it without confusing you more, so I'll upload some screenshots in a bit.

So how do you do paths for them?



That should work.

Honestly I'm not sure. I never used them much. I think by placing ghost objects in a rather time consuming manner.


Alright, so here we have a popular technique for creating things like outdoor terrain. Well, what I'm showing is a more crude and ugly method but the idea is the same. These are screenshots of a design and modeling program called SketchUp, but the point is illustrated just as well.

Here we have a flat piece of land cut into sections in a way that we can raise verticies without getting nasty errors:


Now I've gone and raised some verticies to create some rudamentary terrain. The texturing is what it would look like in JED, texture coordinates unlocked:


Here's what it looks like with texture coordinates locked before moving the verticies:


Hopefully that will help. I'm a bit behind in my 3D programming knowledge so I can't explain it much better than that. It would also be nice to have some more advanced texturing tools for texturing an entire selection of surfaces at once. Like applying axial projections, stretch fits, etc, similar to what you can do in 3dsmax or other high end applications or newer game editors. ForceRemap can do this on 3DOs, which is great for character models but a major pain if you ever want to get the geometry back into sector form.

Also, patch meshes one of the above posters referred to are meshes described mathematically by bezier curves. The nice thing about these are that the engine can draw them at any level of detail and smoothness it chooses since the curves are described mathematically, which is excellent for level of detail/distance rendering. Obviously this is a problem for JK since well, JK does not support patches in any way shape or form. However it would be possible for JED to have bezier curve tools, allowing you to create all sorts of fun shapes - then just store the curve as a static mesh like a 3DO. But at that point you might as well use an external app like 3dsmax and just export to a 3DO. Which should be easy since there's at least one 3DO exporter for 3dsmax.

Only sector resizing is possible. Scaling of vertices/surfaces doesn't work. Same for rotation.



Was actually referring to the creation of sectors by rotating a 2d plane around a center point.



Well, the idea was to keep the curves in the editor, however, export to 3do for the level. The problem with making in another program is you have to carefully resize it, go through processes of import and export, and then if you want to make a change, you have to do all this again, and reload the file. If integrated with the editor, hopefully, you could adjust the texture within, making it easier to align with the things around it. Could move and resize quickly and not have to worry about going through all kinds of conversion processes.

ForceRemap does UV-mapping functions on 3dos. It basically allows you to move the texture coordinates around visually, on top of the texture, with 6 or so basic mappings. TOP, RIGHT, FRONT, BACK, BOTTOM, LEFT. It allows the smooth texturing of irregular surfaces. While stitching is nice for basic rooms and stuff, irregular surfaces like terrain type ones nearly impossible to texture smoothly. It's like taking the texture, and putting it onto cloth. You pin down the four corners around the surface, and that's how the texture appears on the surface. ForceRemap is open source, so it would be possible to look through it's code if you don't quite get it.

As for the cog editor, syntax recognition would be just more or less coloring it. As for parsing and checking for problems, SaberMaster and Jon`C should both have code capable of it. SaberMaster made Parsec, and Jon`C a Cog VM.

Texturing. Well, fitting onto a surface is possible, but it takes a decent bit of work by hand. There are some formulas for it. Looking at the texturing options of ther level editors might give some ideas (textures though themselves more complex, are still aligned in the same way generally, UV and texture coordinates)

Freesector is kinda like sector creation in WDFuse. It allows you to draw sectors in 2D into any shape, and then cuts it to make it convex. Or to create perfect polygon sectors with a certain number of vertices. (The more vertices, the more circular of course). GoRotate would create a convex sector by rotating a set of vertices around a center line. Similar to the rotate function listed above really. It's useful for creating domes, cylinders, cones.

Another useful feature would be the ability to place bitmaps into the background. (That's a thing for us modellers who use Jed to model... would be useful for getting things precise to a drawing)

Bots... I'm not sure how useful that would be... Not too many actually add bots. The bot paths are lists of ghosts. (Zeq's suggestion, I believe)

Right now the VM's error output is rather obscure. It's something I can fix easily enough, but it takes time and that's time I'd rather spend on finalizing resource loading and trying to get gameplay code to work. Another thing I still plan on adding to the COG VM is a rudimentary frame pointer so some editor can support step-through debugging (and even edit and continue).

Sorry to derail this thread, but what happened to the JK HUB?

I saw the JED source on it earlier, but I wasn't on my computer. When I got home to d-load it, the hub was gone. Just a redirect to massassi.

It will be back shortly, we're still trying to pinpoint where these attackers are hitting.

Why would anyone want to take the Hub down in the first place?!

Ok, back on topic.

Thank you forever for making JED, I love it.

Is there a way to fix the floorflags issue? Right now it only flags it as 'floor' when you make an extrude... It's bothersome having to check all the floorflags manually...

Also, sometimes surfaces are showing up when they shouldnt. (Geo flag) That happens sometimes when I drag the vertices or cleave up a sector, or merge several sectors...

There are plugins to fix both those problems, ORS_JoS. There's a floor flagger plugin that's been around forever. It flags all surfaces as floor according to an angle to specify. If the slope is greater than that angle it doesn't flag them. And just recently someone wrote an invisible wall killer plugin.

I use vinkel, but I think it would be great if the feature were built in to Jed.

as far as the paper-thin wall killer program goes, I had it once but I haven't been able to find it lately.

Of course, just pointing out that neither problems are really a big issue. There are other things that should be addressed first.

Awesome, thanks.

I suppose I'll be able to find those plugins in the 'JK editing resources' sticky that Daft_Vader made... what are they called exactly?

The floor flagger, at least one of them is called Vinkle as Page mentioned. Not sure about the geo 0 thing since that's much newer, within the past year maybe.

Vinkel is a tricky ***** though. It flags the ceilings as floors as well.

Well considering that you can't ever come close to walking on ceilings that shouldn't be a problem.

The version of vinkel I have asks for what angle to put in for surfaces to be flagged as floors. Like < 45

Anyway, with the texturing problem mentioned above. About the scale of the texture looked about 50,000 times smaller than it should be, even with it at 1, 1.. it almost looks like a solid color at time. I always had this problem on 3do's with really small surfaces.. if we're talking about that same problem here.

It's not a problem with walking on surfaces so much as when you open the overhead map it renders everything flagged as a floor.

KthxBye.

I assume this was due to the server change. The levels were originally submitted when they were made back when Massassi was on the Jedi Nights server. When the site got its own server (which probably would've been about 2000), everything had to be re-uploaded. Just a guess.

[edit: Brian pretty much already covered it.]

Holy crap, I saw you post here the other day but had no idea you were Alexei. I didn't even know you were actively involved in the community as such, at least not anymore.