There were multiple occasions following Jedi Outcast's release (and likely before) when the question of Massassi branching out to other Star Wars games, other games or just something else was brought up.

I think those ideas were buried for good in about 2012 (but any real effort had ended years before that), but here's the nikumuquestion for today.

Do you think this enlargement would have significantly improved the community?

Considering how all other gaming communities seem to have turned out, I'll say no.

As being someone who was running another Star Wars gaming community and watched the decline, I also vote no. Even with adding games up until the dry spell before TOR, it eventually got down to the core group and became a social setting instead of the group's main focus.

There was never a single solution for resolving Massassi's issues, so expanding into other games alone would've only prolonged the inevitable, had no other strategies been implemented. I think that there are a great number of things that could've been done to keep the place moving along but it's no use crying over spilled milk.

Expanding into other games may have worked in that we may have had more people, and thus, the snowball momentum could have been enough to carry us over certain hills. Beyond that, though, expanding in of itself would not have ultimately solved things as I see it. Also, Massassi has always been a turd, so I went with that joke option.

Sites like this one filled the narrow window between when such communities became possible and when they became important enough for companies to actively manage. Massassi can't just do the same thing but for games x y z, regardless of how many more people we had, because those games all have managed communities or other adequate engagement on Twitter and Facebook, mod hosting on Steam if it's even possible, and tutorial videos on YouTube if the tools aren't just 3dsmax.

Why mod games anymore when there are now tools to do stuff on your own. That's what I would ask, now.

The Workshop on Steam reminds me a lot of JK Hub in its usability and especially its flaws. Going into the future, can there be any way to prevent similar sites be filled with 95% crap? Just implement draconian barriers of entry for content? It's like the Google Play store of game mods.

It seems since Valve provides financial encouragement for making good content, the cream settles a bit more towards the top. Also Valve improved the game-to-Workshop implementation (content can be accessed in-game). Without those things, I see it as just a garbage heap.

plus, game modding requires a lot of reverse engineering to get going. A lot of the motivation is just... getting more. Capturing more consumer surplus. There isn't much of an incentive to do that work when there are, frankly, way too many interesting diversions already. Not to mention that UE4 has eternally destroyed any interest in reversing a game just to see how it works, because UE4 is probably doing it a lot better and it's fully open source.

So does that beg the question "Could Massassi/JK's lifespan have been expanded if the game's source code was released?" I mean, Outcast really didn't see an expansion, but at the same time the source code got pulled rather quickly, and the community was pretty much dead anyways by that point.

With all the time and resources spent modding JK, we could have easily made an updated version modding another game, but it probably would have still died anyways.

They're doing pretty well, though. http://jkhub.org/forum/51-openjk-discussion/

Mostly bickering on about rd-rend2 code, though, apparently.

Or we could have released a TC.

I did.

I knew you'd come back and say that. I'm not trying to undermine your accomplishment. But, I also want to see SF_Gold's TC.

I'm sure that your TC was great but it doesn't address the underlying issues that make the game terrible. There's still no dedicated server support, no way to change maps besides ENDLEVEL, & about a billion other issues that would've been resolved by creating a JK mod in an engine that isn't crap. Quake 2, which came out the exact same year & was superior in nearly every way, would've been a reasonable choice, & the source-code is available for those few ways in which it wasn't. I suspect that JKDF2 survived as long as it did because so many of the people that played after 1999 still didn't have broadband, & its joke of a netcode permitted them to play without being at a disadvantage.

Oh. Well, shows how much I know. I've rarely been to JK-Hub, actually. I didn't know anything Outcast related went on there. I thought it was JK/MotS only.

That's jkhub dot org. It's JO/JA.

Jkhub dot net is a different site, it's JK exclusive.

The color scheme on that message board is awful. Blue and grey text on slightly lighter grey text... seriously?

Massassi is clearly in its death throes; there are 13 threads on the main page, something not seen in months, if not years.

Ohhhhhh, that's right... Wow, I'm really out of touch with this stuff.

just to put this one to bed, by the way...

JK's sole advantage over Q2 is support for large, open levels. There's a deeper technical discussion here that I'm not terribly interested in getting into, but it basically comes down to the fact that Quake 2 was intentionally designed to render highly detailed environments, while JK on the other hand was scarcely designed at all. Rendering big empty worlds slowly with visible jitter and t-junctions isn't something to brag about.

Quake 2 also had a more original setting, dynamic world, better gameplay in general. Objectively, I mean. Subjectively I like JK more, but I'm not fooling myself. Quake 2 also had an official level editor and SDK, which JK never had, and official mod support. Eventually they even released the code. Quake 2 even had a better company behind it.

Quake 2 was objectively the better game in every single way.

That or the fact that it was the first action Star Wars multiplayer game you could play online. And to this day, I don't know of any other popular MP game where hacks could allow you to literally rebuild the environment. The whole mode felt like it was held by duct-tape, but at least it allowed us to swing lightsabers at each other. Fighting a player using Force Speed was pure guesswork (I do wonder after all these years, how often did the game update the player's position per second?).

Yeah, and then crash the ****ing game by spawning enough objects to break the engine.

It was amusing, though, to be playing a lovely MP match and then randomly get bombarded with n-gazillion Millennium Falcons.

(It was slightly less amusing when your opponent would transmute into an energy cell power-up.)

I would love to play a JK remix, but I would especially love it if they redid the cutscenes with live action again!

They could just make a sequel called 'The Dark Forces Awaken', featuring cameo roles of Jason Court and Angela Harry.

Kyle's children will have to fight a zombie stage 3 Dark Trooper, who died in the Arc Hammer, but now back from the dead, and with undead force powers.

Agreed. Quake 2 was the first PC game that I played & while I had a lot of fun with it, JKDF2 was the game that really sucked me in. However, while I loved playing JK, since I had started gaming with Q2, I couldn't help but be bothered by its shortcomings--things that Q2 did much better. I've always been more into MP than SP & while JKDF2 MP is a blast, the lack of dedicated servers, the rampant hacking, etc. just killed any chance of there being a decent competitive community. I was on dial-up back then, like nearly everyone that I knew who played, & this made JK very attractive for us, because the nature of the netcode permitted us to play effectively, whereas in Q2 we could only play with other HPBs.

I've heard the same thing about JK's support for large open levels. I guess that since my primary interest in JK is MP, I always think in those terms alone. I think that a JKDF2 MP mod in Q2 would've been quite doable. Maybe levels as large as Jawa Dwelling SE would've been a problem but that's a small price to pay for all of the advantages.

This certainly had something to do with its popularity (The Phantom Menace was obviously responsible for a resurgence as well), but I was speaking in terms of longevity, & once JO & JA were released, JK was no longer the only game in town, & while there are various reasons that the community had mostly withered at that point, there were certainly games older than JK that still had respectable-sized communities with quality content still being created. I don't think that the netcode was the only thing that kept people around, but it certainly was an equalizer of sorts, & I think that it was a factor, though I have no evidence to offer other than a few HPB clan-mates that also played well past its prime. It certainly had something to do with why I played for so many years. I was actually turned onto Star Wars through JK--I thought it was nerd-stuff growing up & was under the illusion that I was too cool for that sort of thing.


This was both a blessing & a curse though, & I would argue that it was mostly the latter. JK was plagued by "hackers" ruining games & it ruined any hope of a competitive community--something that thrived in Q2. Yes, there are aim-bots & things like that in other games, but JK is on an entirely different level when it comes to hacks, & since LEC gave 0 ****s about the community, no reliable form of cheating protection was ever created. The few attempts made were easily bypassed.


Nearly all of MP was about prediction. You had to swing your lightsaber or shoot Force Destruction at where you thought your opponent would be. The whole grunt vs. screech phenomenon with lightsabers was one of the most painful but important lessons for newbies (a grunt didn't mean your opponent was hit--a screech did). It's incredible, when you think about it, how proficient people came at making these predictions at the highest levels. JK's netcode, despite its shortcomings, truly offered an interesting & unique MP experience. The best players became experts at pattern recognition, prediction, etc. The most significant side-effect of all of this was the resulting learning curve. Expert players could literally beat newbies in a uniquely embarrassing fashion--the guy who trained me in FF sabers beat me 75--75 the first time we played. I find this to be one of the most interesting things about JK & it's rarely ever discussed.

This thread does not deliver.

I have something enlarging in my pants.

Should have bought bitcoin