Ah. I based my "it doesn't even work Steam's JK" assumption on how I asked Kroko to install Steam MotS and try the injector with that one - and it didn't work so he had to get the CD version of JKM.exe to get it working. And it did!

As for JK's discs on archive.org, well, I'm still not sure how much of it is legal and how much of it is "Disney hasn't noticed this yet, or they don't care".

Aaah it looks so good. This is how JK looks in my mind when I remember it. Then I go play it and I'm like WTF.

I like how the devs didn't give two ****s about the texture stitching for half of the inner rooftop section. I had never noticed that before.

@FGR, I'll see what I can do. Here's one I did as an experiment for JKGR.

Yeah, now that's more like it!

In the 3rd person mode, anyway ;P

(Not that I've ever really liked the saber in 1st person mode, but the JK2013 is more or less the best I've seen in that regard)

YB once told... someone, Alexei maybe? that Leia didn’t have any texturing tools. They had to stitch textures by hand, often using a calculator. Needless to say most of the textures in the game are not stitched.

Other than the COG preview and engine integration, JED was a much better tool than Leia. Some people thought they used it for MotS because of how much better the texturing was, but YB insisted they didn’t.

Just some gossip from 21 years ago, y’all.

sweet

A quick test of the muzzle flash (based on darthbabe96's mod) looks reasonably okay...

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... until the muzzle flash is seen against a lighter surface, when all the "hidden by additive blending" edges of the surfaces have become visible.

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tbh I have no idea how these values work, so I just copied these ones from the red lightsaber:

Use alpha blending, dude.

Desaturate the texture, copy it into its own alpha channel. Assign that texture to albedo map and emissive map. Set albedo factor to [0,0,0,x] where X is a value to tweak to control opacity. Use the emissive factor to control both color and emissivity.

That texture wasn’t designed for alpha blending (nor did JK support it) but the expected effect is quite achievable.

Oh for--

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Man, seems like I didn't succeed at instantly jumping from 1997 texturing skills to, hm, late 1998 texturing skills tonight. This'll do 'til tomorrow.

I should add SSAO.

How about motion blur and visual treatment/color correction/control and bloom?? If these are feasible, it'd be very interesting to see JK looking like an early 2000s game rather than a late 90s

Although you'd probably need to capture camera speed for motion blurriness, I suppose.

Bloom is already in!

IMHO I hate tone mapping / automatic color grading. Even if I didn’t though, I’m not sure it would be useful - levels are limited to a narrow range of light levels (0-255) and there’s nothing that can be done to expand that. At minimum I’d say there would need to be some channel between level cogs and jkgfxmod before it’s worth considering, since this is something that can rather badly affect the character of a scene if it wasn’t designed for color grading.

Yeah, motion blur requires a velocity map. That ain’t possible.

There's nothing wrong with tone mapping. It's just that no one in the games industry has any idea how to do it properly, and it makes everything look like a ****ty instagram photo.

bUT NaUghTY doG uSEs HaBle

I was actually thinking of the original Need For Speed Most Wanted when I suggested that, so "****ty instagram photo" would probably be accurate enough. Granted, it might look horrid most times, but it'd be cool to be able to do something like that in JK. Maybe it could be useful for some projects (considering of course that there probably won't be any other JK project ever after I'm done with JKGR).

Considering the injector passes command lines into JK, would it be possible to load a color profile (or material pack or whatever) based on the "-path" value? Say, I have a color profile named "gunrunner.cpf" or something, then it would be loaded if I'm using a path with the same name (or something along those lines).

Regarding Cogs, there's some stuff I'd LOVE to have (and some I actually need), but I believe the only person that can mess with Cog verbs and the such is Xzero. More specifically, what I need is a way of storing and loading info to a file so that you can save/load games in JKGR (as there's no way JK's saving system can handle it). IIRC someone once made an "interceptor" that would keep track of an inventory bin value and do stuff based on it (like store all inv bin values if said bin is set to 1, load all bin values if said bin is set to 2 etc) but I never had any luck with this tool. Plus I also need to store some much more complex info, like heaps and the such. Cog verbs for writing and reading would certainly be the easy way out, but I'll have to figure out some other way.

Jon, are you trying to be featured on PCGamer.com?

Now that I think about it, it's incredible how I've practically never played anything after 2005 or so (except for some NFS titles) and ever since then the only game I still care about is one that's old enough to drink

Anyone got copies/scans/screenshots of the times Massassi was featured on PCGamer?

As for my time, well https://www.pcgamer.com/deus-ex-nihilum-mod-released-offering-10-hours-of-cyberpunk-adventure/

In any case, someone will be able to make a new saber + muzzle flash mod for JK - utilizing the injector - but it won't be me:

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Aside from that muzzle flash, here's a matpack with Jon's original sample textures, SMLiberator's fixed saber textures and my bloom textures:

[DELETED!]

And I mean really, for some reason the muzzle flash above works pretty well whereas this one has pretty blatant failed transparency going on (as for the flash itself, well, I guess a new texture and some re-alignment is needed):

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The first cel in the original texture is just a plain black one, I tried both that one as well as a fully transparent one for the compiler.

So it's got 9 cels and I'm trying to get it in the game like this

Come to think of it, it doesn't even let me include the 9th cel because then (and only then) it crashes with:

[Unable to find specified attachment]

Removing the 9th cel gets the script to compile (but still leads into the graphical shenanigans shown above)

cels are zero-indexed

that solved it thx

I have a couple original magazines, I think PC Gamer and another one called PC Games where Massassi was mentioned. Not sure if it's the issue you are talking about though. I thought I had screenshots up in /etc/ but I can't see them there. I'll try to dig them up and take photos and upload them soon.

I've remade my saber material pack. I think this one looks close enough to JK13's. Also included mats for fixing black edges around the saber core.



Maybe I could do some cog work so that saber tips don't look thinner than the base. The fact they are like that also causes some distortion around the saber body, which is pretty evident in level 11. Now that I think about it, I wonder what 3do glowsabers (maybe without the glow layers?) would look like with emissive materials.

Also, I think that muzzle flash looks neat.

That'd be sweet! Also, I vaguely remember other Massassians (Thrawn[numbarz] maybe?) getting coverage by PC Gamer, maybe there could be enough material for a new "Massassians on PC Gamer" type section.

Hot damn, now that's the stuff! I've got to try that as soon as I get home.

The muzzle flash textures do need some tweaking (remaking? wink wink), though. Funny how a 128x128 muzzle flash looks pretty okay in JK2013 with additive blending, but kinda weird with emissive textures - granted that the muzzle flash is really close to the screen.

This was a lot more painful than I expected.

I cranked it up so people can see what I'm talking about. Usually you don't even notice AO.

Took me a long time to notice the difference because I couldn't stop looking at the misaligned lights at the top. Looks neat though. How does it look in more crowded scenes? Does it hurt performance in any noticeable way? Also, emissive textures actually lighting stuff is it possible?

@FGR could you send me what you have regarding muzzle flashes? I want to give it a try.


By the way Jon, I managed to contact Quib and told him you could use his help with jk.exe.

Here's what I've got so far:
[DELETED!]

I tested out your sabers, they look pretty good! I wonder if it's indeed possible to get rid of their "cone"-like appearance...

Also, thanks to my weird JK-and-FGR-specific issue, I didn't get your sabers to work in JK but succeeded with MotS... except for the green saber (the tip of that one appears as it should, but the main body appears as the regular JK one).

Nice, I'll check it out when I get home.

About the cone sabers, it's doable but not doable at the same time. That's because the only cog verb that can change the saber's width (without modifying the exe like JK13 did) also asks for the saber side/tip mats. However, the only way of knowing the saber mat is through a cog verb that is only present in MotS (or in JK13). We could safely guess the saber colors in SP, but without this cog verb, sabers would still be cone-like in MP. I could still make those cogs and for the most part they'd work as expected, but sabers would only look right in MP if you're running JK13 (or MotS).

About my sabers not working: did you use the fixed mats? And if so, did you compile the materials before or after putting the mats in place?

At first I used the fixed MATs on MotS, they worked, then I recompiled your script and the sabers stopped working (even on MotS), so I removed the MATs and incorporated your sabers into my compile script and... they seem to work now. Even on JK.

*shrug*

And yeah, I always forget that Xzero did other stuff with JK13 than just enabling additive blending, some new COG commands and the 32-bit mode. I wouldn't mind a fix for the cone sabers (so they'd look even more like the JK13 ones) for SP, though.

who you callin a cone saber

... then again, now that I look at it, the ones I compiled with my other ones (with your fixed MATs removed) have thick edges, and the ones extracted from your ZIP (with the fixed MATs put under JK\Resource) don't.

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dammit

Goddammit, nevermind, I forgot to put the new MATs and stuff in the JK\Resource directory used in the compile.exe command line.

CARRY ON

hah what a kroko

Do you mean this in an academic sense, like as a general computer graphics question?

JK doesn’t give me enough data to do it. I was only just barely able to do SSAO, and I was very close to giving up a bunch of times. I don’t know if nobody can do it, but I won’t be doing it. At least not without a lot more data.

Oh yeah, the SSAO screenshot looks pretty ballin' when compared to the other one.

Also, the injector version of the conc muzzle flash looks nice enough, but I can't get over how blatantly "128x128" it looks 'round the edges.

[DELETED!]

(Not gonna update the zip above with this one - for now anyway)

An attempt has been made.


From what I gathered, the secret is to keep as little "glow" as possible in the texture for the emissive channel, so it's mostly just the "core" or white part, and leave the bloom and glow to the renderer. That way the glow looks more natural and you get rid of the oversaturated pixels around it. Most times you only need to darken the original image enough (via soft light or curves tweaking) so that only the white part is left. That's also what I did for the sabers.


@Jon

I meant in JK, but I figured you'd need camera position/vertex and surface normals and the such. I thought you also needed that kind of thing for SSAO so I figured you had solved that issue somehow. Anyways, the SSAO is a really nice extra, it's a very subtle change but makes the scene look a lot more "modern" somehow.

SSAO only requires depth. I made it a bit nicer with some normals I wringed out of the vertex data/rhw but there are severe numerical precision and stability problems. Particularly around JK’s bespoke artisanal triangle clipping. Holy **** I don’t know why they did that themselves.

The normals aren’t good enough to do anything else with. And I don’t have camera position.