Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II

A Mod for Jedi Academy

What

You have stumbled upon the official homepage for the DF2 Mod for Jedi Academy! Here’s where you’ll find out all about the Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II mod.

It’s official because we’ve quit waiting for a Mr. Katarn to resurface—he’s the guy who took over from where Reaper and his team either gave up or left off (I really don’t have much info on the origins and demise of Reaper’s project, but if anyone knows and can fill me in, I’ll post the particulars here).

The mod team still needs texture artists most of all at the moment—there are approximately 2,000 textures that need to be recreated!

For those of you looking for periodic updates of what we’re doing, check out the News section.

Why

The main motivation for doing the mod, for me personally, is to bring the DF2 experience to the Jedi Outcast/Academy level. The graphic accelerator support for the game is incredibly lacking and the software rendering, while impressive, just doesn’t stack up next what a modern graphics accelerator card can do. The other reason is that the levels were huge and very well designed—take a look at the Nar Shadda maps, for example. You just don’t get that sense of sheer immense height and scale from any of the levels in JO or JA.

It’s also quite obvious that LucasArts won’t do it, and after examining the problem it’s easy to see why: The DF2 engine is a completely different animal from the Q3A engine—never mind the models, animation, texturing and scripting. The original DF2 engine allowed for rooms that were larger on the inside than they were on the outside and its skybox model didn’t render things that were behind sky textures. This allowed the original level designers to be somewhat sloppy with their geometry. ;-)

Since LucasArts in all likelihood wouldn’t touch it (after all, they would have to devote lots of people and resources to a project from which they would have very little hope of making any money), I figured that it would be up to the modding community to take care of the job. Is it a crazy, hopeless cause? Perhaps. But then again, maybe you should ask that question to the DF Mod team. ;-)

Who

At the moment, the team members of the official mod are Shamus (coding, texturing, mapping, modeling and Benevolent Dictator ;-), Vorec (texturing and modeling), Scythe (texturing and modeling), Gringlas (texturing), sariimi (texturing), DarkStarMojo (texturing), Guy_Gone_Weird (skinning, modeling), Zemmurk Trooper (mapping), Recon Trooper (skinning, 2D art), and Galvatron Trooper (skinning, modeling). If you’d like to participate, send a sample of your best work to df2modtryouts [at] yahoo [dot] com. Please keep in mind that we’re looking to make the mod to the highest possible quality standards. If you’ve got what it takes, we want you on the team!

What’s Been Done

What Needs To Be Done

Contact

At the moment, coordination of the mod is being done by the DF2Mod Cabal at an undisclosed location deep in the heart of the internet. Other than that, we can usually be found hanging out on #df2mod on Efnet; if you want to talk to us that’s probably going to be your best bet. Public discussion forums used to also exist at http://df2mod.freeforumhost.com, but freeforumhost lost them in their latest major crash—avoid them like the plague! New forums are up and being tested. Stay tuned!

Back to ShamusWorld…

Ye Olde Disclaimer: Dark Forces II, Jedi Knight, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy are trademarks of LucasArts Entertainment Company. All original content is © 2006 by the DF2 MOD team.