Hey there, I'm playing Jedi Knight Outcast for the first time. I like it a lot but one thing slightly annoys me: Whenever I got the sabre out and stand close to any wall or object it scorches the surface and produces a very loud sound. That's not very sneaky and this involuntary vandalism feels like I don't really have my sabre under control.
So is there a mod that preferably reduces sabre scorching to times when I actually slash at something?

Some information about me: Jedi Knight was my first PC game, I played through it many times, and again just lately. That's when it occured to me to look at the sequel.
I run a modificatons forum for another old game series (System Shock), quite similar to this forum. Feeling right at home here.

Bloody hell I thought I recognised your name - you helped me to get my copy of System Shock 2 working a few months back! Welcome along to our merry little forum - you'll fit right in here.

I'm no modder (hence why I came to your forum looking for a nudge in the right direction), but there are certainly a few chaps here who know their onions rather well.

[insert joke about Soul retention in Brian's/Matty's jar somewhere around here]

Involuntary vandalism?

But you are going around murdering Stormtroopers. Those slaughtered individuals could have a wife and kids.

Yes but that's not involuntary

It happens mostly when I want to use a door button and BRZZZZZRRRZAK Sorry about that! I just got my Jedi powers back and haven't learned the power of holding my sabre away a bit yet!

In many cases you can hear troopers through a door and plan for a surprise attack. It doesn't seem like they could hear me burning a hole through the wall, but it's a bit of an immersion breaker.

Anyway, it's really a small thing in an otherwise great game, so if there's no such mod then never mind.
Glad to meet you again Martyn.

Can you carry the saber with it off? That could get annoying turning it on and off, though.

That's what I've come to do most of the time, yeah. Bit inconvenient as you're wide open to any sudden attack that way.

I'm surprised you would consider the "immersion factor" when combined with the AI of the NPCs in JO. Did you ever noticed the NPCs, if they saw you, are able to track you through walls? Seriously, once they see you, they will not stop looking (unless mindtricked) even if you are behind something.

I remember there being a stealth portion in JO. Was it before getting on the Doomgiver, if I recall? Anyway, it was hardly stealth really, it was just killing that one NPC scripted to hit the alarm in any given room.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein had AI NPCs that could "lose you" if they lost sight of you. That makes sense since if you can't see the guy, you aren't particularly sure where he went. So they went to search toward a direction. But in JO, if the NPCs are alerted, they know where you are at all times, no matter what. If a NPC suddenly dies in a group of NPCs, the NPCs would come after you despite if that dead NPC just fell down a well on his accord.

One immersion breaker doesn't justify another though. Personally I find the sabre scorching more obvious.

Well, you can play this:
http://www.massassi.net/levels/files/2741.shtml

You would have to replace the scorch textures with something else, like this mod did (logic being swords can't burn through walls). But the game uses the same scorch textures if you swing the saber or if you are just budging it against a surface, soo...

It's a bizarre request because I don't think I ever seen anyone bothered by that element. I mean, if a lightsaber hits against a wall, what else would it do? It seems more of an "improper handling of equipment" than anything else.

You have to remember when JO was released. Back then, the mere idea of the saber scorching the wall was considered pretty cool. Extra cheats to make the saber more "realistic" improved the immersion too, in my opinion. With g_saberrealisticcombat set to 2 or higher, it'd make your lightsaber a true saber, that would cut people down simply by touching them.

Also, I imagine the code involved to stop it from scorching the walls in an immersive way would be significant back then. It was hard enough to track where the blade impacted the wall. If they wanted the character to be animated in a way that avoid cutting the wall when near one, that would require a lot more work.

RTCW had brilliant stealth missions in it. Sneaking around buildings, stabbing nazi officers in the back or blowing their head off with a stealth pistol.

Speaking of AI, JO was advertised as having smarter AI in relation to movement. They would move around, try to find cover more, and would run away to find others to group with elsewhere. It was limited, but it was better than JK.

It was definitely better than JK's. But unlike RTCW's system, JO's AI was heavily locked into waypoints. I actually don't recall the JO NPCs ever finding cover though. I mean, you can tell the NPCs to find a spot if their health reaches x amount or try locating a better shooting point, but there wasn't much for self-preservation, regrouping or getting the upper hand. They could follow you though, that's for sure.

I just wish there was some sort of FEAR when you approached an NPC with a lightsaber. I mean, just MOVING or running a bit away so the guy with the big, glowing stick won't just come up and hit you. This issue translated to JA where the bad guys just STAND there, waiting to be slaughtered. And this is a problem in many games these days too. Why???

It was significantly waypoint-based, but they had a certain degree of freedom based around those points. When I said cover, I more or less mean "run away until you can't see the player". It definitely didn't have the kind of cover system you see in games like Mass Effect today.

Also, the problem with fear is, if you do it too well, then every enemy would just run. Because seriously, would YOU want to take a Jedi on, no matter the number of stormtrooper buddies are behind you?

I never had this issue because I always killed the saber blade (You can still have your saber out, but off, then when you attack it comes out if I remember correctly, maybe this was JA) and ran around steathly.

Yes, all you had to do was press the 1 key (aka, the weapon switch key for the lightsaber). That will turn it on and off. And it was possible in JO, cause people did it in MP duels all the time when they did the silly bow gesture.

Yes, you can do that, but as I said, it leaves you open to attacks.



Exactly. That's why the best solution would be if Katarn held the sabre in a different way when standing close to a wall. Which is what one would do "realistically". You wouldn't just walk up to a wall and let your weapon burn through it, just because you wanted to push a button there. It feels clumsy.

I dont know, I always remember having fun trying to write stuff with it

Right, like I said before, that would probably take a lot of work to pull off, back then.

Considering the many varied motions of Katarn I'm not sure about that. But what might have been hard to implement then is a moot point by now. I went through the JKO mods and didn't find one that deals with sabre scorches. So my question is answered.

It would take a lot of work to pull off today. IK solvers are only so good... an arbitrary hand position still produces some n>1 solutions, n-1 of which look absolutely stupid. Then you also need some collision avoidance voodoo applied to every bone in the mesh (collision avoidance is a non-trivial problem for entire entities, let alone a highly-constrained system under human control) and some other algorithm to tie the results together into something that looks realistic. It's just not going to happen.

In addition to what Jon`C said, the varied animations are part of the reason WHY. You know what looks worse than sticking a saber into a wall on accident? Sticking a lightsaber through your skull on accident. You'd have to make it not only avoid walls, but also avoid your own body. Currently all the animations are pre-scripted, with some more fancy interpretations to smoothly go from one to the other (I forget the animation term). So all those animations are mostly fixed to ensure that the saber doesn't go through your own body.

That was a major problem in Jedi Knight. During the idle animation, while Kyle would scratch his face, he'd bring whatever weapon was in his hand up to his face as well. Which, sometimes, was the lightsaber. To his face. Yeah.

I always assumed that was just how real Jedi shave.

I dimly remember making a subconcious effort to not make a mess of the clean walls with the lightsaber. I think that was mild OCD though.

Interesting.

So if the wall marks stayed on for a really long time, computer's resources be damned, would that really significantly bother this small minority of players?

I just assumed more details, the merrier!

For me it's more about the noise, although it is kinda stupid to tag every other wall when trying to infiltrate an enemy facility.

*Kilroy was here*

If anything in that game should break immersion for you it should be the ****ty levels and their broken ass nonsense "design."

If I recall correctly, real jedi don't shave.

Tweening maybe? I'm no compu-nerd.

Tweening or interpolation.

Hmm, I just reinstalled JO because of this thread. I'm not seeing the marks on the wall. I'm sure you could hit the wall and it would glow for a bit and leave a trail? Or was that academy? Either way I'm not seeing it. Hmm.