I think all of those things would be more irritating to do out of the editor rather than putting your CD in the drive.

I have a no cd crack for JED on http://narshaddaa.net I don't know who made it but I stuck it up there a few months back. I'll take it off if Alex wants me to.

Well if we have the Jed Soruce code, anyone who can get a delphi2 compiler could easily remove the CD check anyway.

I dunno if that would be against Alex's wishes though. I think maybe he should write up something small guidlining to what extent the JED source can be modified. Expecially if he decides to dissapear again(or lurk? hehe).

If I recall correctly, Alexei put the CD check in at the request of LEC. Now that LEC has basically abandoned this game I don't think it'll be a problem. I mean comon, Sige's patches have removed the thing limit, visible adjoin limit and added half a dozen new COG verbs. If that hasn't pissed off LEC, removing a CD check from JED certainly won't.

It's both funny and annoying how JED's cd check is more sophisticated than JK's.

I don't think at the time LEC cared about software piracy as much as they do now considering back in 1997 most users didn't own a CD burner and some didn't even have a computer powerful enough to run Jedi Knight.

Something that would be nice to add is an in-editor way to raise the thing limit (the one in the JKL) I find it tedious to have to manually go in an edit it for every single project that needs it.

People were correct, it was a request from LEC.



If LEC doesn't care, I sure don't. But I made a promise, so I can't remove it. Anybody else is welcome to.



That's easy. What do you want it set to?

I assume 640, because that's the maximum thing limit. But why bother these days? Sige's patch removes the thing limit.

You people misconstrue. I don't want the cd check and JK resources removed because PUTTING THE CD IN IS ANNOYING; I want to use JED as the editor for an entirely different engine. I don't want to have to tell people 'Hey, if you want to edit my game, you gotta go buy a copy of this decade-old POS...' I don't want to have to distribute a no-cd crack either. I don't want to have to convert all textures to MATs just to see them in the editor, and I especially don't want to use the out-dated nasty *** 3DO format. The only thing that is salvagable is the .jed level format, which I am already using anyway. The cog info in there is okay too - if I could change how JED figures out what variables to allow the editor to set.
If I could get Alexi to make changes that would be much prefferable to trying to figure out how to do them myself.

You don't understand that won't work because they're made differently. JED is a negative editor, where you carve your area out, whereas all other editors are brush or positive editors where you actually create your area.

You misunderstand, If I remember correctly, after using Sige's patch you still have to edit the number in the JKL. The patch removes the engine's hard limit, but the level actually imposes it's own limit.

No, radiant, quark, and hammer are 'positive' editors. UnrealED and SamEd are hybrid editors, and all proffesional modeling packages are usually used as CSG editors for level building. Jed just happens to be a hybrid editor too, though the mechanism for this - custom 3dos - is a bit clunky because the engine wasn't designed with that style in mind.
Furthermore, it is quite possible to compile JED created maps into quake3 BSPs. But I wasn't even thinking of that. JK isn't the only game that uses that style of sector-and-portal engine. In fact, the Quake engine and all dirivatives, right up to doom3, use a very specialized portal rendering technigue; except they calculate visibility before hand instead of at runtime. CrystalSpace desperatly needs a decent dedicated editor, I'm sure they would adore JED. The JED format could be converted to the descent format too, for use in descent3. A simple compiler could replace the BSP portion of the q3 compiling pipeline, and still utilize the visibility and lighting capabilities of q3map2.
Don't ever assume I don't know what I'm talking about. You will never be correct.

Did the makers of Descent ever release their editor? I remember having an editor icon on the disk that basically said that they planned to release it, but it wasn't finished in time and to check their website. I never bothered, but I was just wondering...

I'd kind of like to modify JED for using as the level editor for my fourth year university project. Basically, we're making a game of sorts and want to be able to make simple test levels quckly, we want to focus on other areas too, so we really don't want to waste time making our own editor from scratch.

Detty - that's exactly what I want. A general purpose JED. We should be able to write plugins to export to different formats, but we can't use plugins for supporting different image formats and model formats unless the scaffolding is added. Ideally, the JK specific formats would dissepear; replaced by plugins that support them. Also, things like the names of the flags, and maybe the actual types of flags would also be defined by data files, so you could for example remove the geomode flag field, or add a whole new type of flag.

I remember there being an editor for descent 1/2. I don't know if they released one for descent3.

Switching JED from JK to general resources means rewriting all resource management routines. That's quite a bit of work and it's not very likely that I'd have time for that. But we'll see.

One thing certain - if time is of importance, you're way better off doing it yourself. I have no idea when and if I get to it.

Any decent programmer could write a routine to load JKLs or even JED files with no problems. If you want more features than a JKL file supports, go in and make a customized version of JED. I don't really think Alexei came back to be a volunteer programmer for a bunch of side projects various people are working on. But that's just a guess, maybe that's why he came back after all

BTW, I just looked in JED sources - it appears it supports .PCX files as textures. At least the leftover code from LawMaker that loads them is there.

If that is I so totally call him.

Any decent programmer with a few thousand laying around to drop on Borland.

Go Detty Go!!

Don't forget I want to play your games when they're done!

Bender, Thanks for releasing the source code for Jed! I've been waiting awhile to look through it.

The version.81 src that I downloaded is missing all the forms (.dfm). Is there any chance of getting them so I can recompile?

I assume you mean Descent 3, since I know what you're talking about.

The editor was available a year or two ago, right after I got the game which couldn't have been long after it came out.

However I couldn't figure out how to use the editor. It confused the hell outta me... but then the only other editors I had used were WDFUSE and JED so :p

For all of these people who don't want to buy Delphi because of cost.. Kylix is a free Delphi compiler and IDE for Linux. I wonder if it can compile Windows programs on that platform.

But can kylix work with Borland's GUI forms stuff? I think that's the real problem. It would almost be easier to rewrite JED from scratch then to port the GUI to a non-propriety system.

That's the thing - I wondered if it would be possible to use all of the same resources with Kylix (is it only intended to be able to compile Linux-compatible sources?), including the GUI builder, and compile it to Windows binaries for free. I am just not sure, but I was just contemplating the possibility.

And there's the open source Lazarus Project:
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/

"So just what is Lazarus?

Lazarus is the class libraries for Free Pascal that emulate Delphi. Free Pascal is a GPL'ed compiler that runs on Linux, Win32, OS/2, 68K and more. Free Pascal is designed to be able to understand and compile Delphi syntax, which is of course OOP. Lazarus is the part of the missing puzzle that will allow you to develop Delphi like programs in all of the above platforms. Unlike Java which strives to be a write once run anywhere, Lazarus and Free Pascal strives for write once compile anywhere. Since the exact same compiler is available on all of the above platforms it means you don't need to do any recoding to produce identical products for different platforms. "

Kylix is not free of charge, but I do belive they have some sort of "open" edition which is free, but I think that edition is too limited to do any real work with.
I any case, Kylix does only compile to native Linux binaries.

Ahh, darn. But Lazarus looks like it may be a contender - but could it be compatible with Delphi 2.0?

i second this

Oops, did too much cleaning up. I'll add those.



Actually, you can get it significantly cheaper. For instance:

http://www.genesis-technologies.com/borland.asp
http://www.academicsuperstore.com/q/tname/f/item-index/v/Delphi/index.html?sourcecode=lcg&promocode=0D0X02XX

But of course it is still an expense.

Would be really nice if there was a place to get delphi 2 still

Indeed. =\

Actually..

http://www.shop.com/op/aprod-~%22Delphi+2%22-p16095262

http://rokland.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=34

Yay for you heeb. Now I have to decide if I actually want to bother. :/ It would be funner to try and write an editor like JED all by myself, but, JED is already finished. Hrm.

A program is never finished, you know. When Yves handed me WDFUSE source code I thought it was finished too. But out of it came LawMaker. And out of LawMaker came JED.

I can't imagine how much could have survived from wdfuse and lawmaker. Those were both 2.5d engines, right? And I don't remember JED0.1 having much in the way of 'features'.

I still want a general purpose JED. I'd be interested in knowing how you implemented the grid. I'm thinking you would have to project the mouse-positions from screen space to world space, then to grid space; snap them; then transform them back to world space before you could use them in the cleaving algorithm.