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:video_game: A list of popular/awesome video games, add-ons, maps, etc. hosted on GitHub. Any genre. Any platform. Any engine.
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OpenJK (Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy) #201

Open dcki opened 8 years ago

dcki commented 8 years ago

I only just discovered OpenJK so I can't say from firsthand experience if it works out of the box, but it seems like a very important project being the top google search result for "Jedi Outcast source code", which was originally open sourced on Sourceforge by its creators in April 2013, and then taken down one week later.

https://github.com/JACoders/OpenJK

StevenGann commented 8 years ago

I've been following the OpenJK project since it started. It's very stable, perhaps more stable than the original version (still available on Steam). The OpenJK development team is made up of some impressive programmers with a lot of experience with other Id Tech III engine variants. It's worth noting here that Jedi Academy was built by modifying the Star Wars: Jedi Outcast II engine, which was a modification of Star Trek: Elite Force, which itself was a fork of Quake III's engine, which is hosted here on Github also!

To clarify about the "taken down" part, the original release of the source code contained proprietary libraries from RAD Game Tools. These libraries were just for playing the bik videos used for some cutscenes. When Raven Software noticed their mistake, they took down the download and re-released the source with the proprietary libraries removed.

Since then, OpenJK has been focused on cleaning up the messy production code, removing all the Xbox and Gamecube-related code, porting to Mac and Linux, rewriting sections to more modern C++ conventions, and fixing tons of obscure bugs.

One caveat, though. While the engine was released as open source, the game assets are still copyrighted. These assets are all packed in Quake III's PK3 format and are easy to obtain either by copying from the CD-ROM version of the game, the Steam version of the game, or other more dubious methods. There was an initiative early on to recreate all of the assets from scratch under a GPL license, but I don't believe it got very far.