Launcher Testing Begins

Hey everybody, Darth Futuza here with some good news: after many long w̶e̶e̶k̶s̶ months of procrastination I’ve finally finished fixing the Jedi Knight Galaxies Launcher.  This represents a pretty cool milestone for JKG, as we now have a way to continually push new content to users and have a way of getting it updated automatically whenever we release a new patch.  It was a lot of fun learning more about the Qt C++ library, and a bit frustrating, but the result is very much worth it.
 
 
What is the JKG Launcher?
It is a small update program used to get new content and patch your game, as well as adjust several game settings before entering the game (such as your resolution settings).
 
Back in ye olden days (read: September 2011) it looked like this:
Ancient
 
 
Then Pande gave it a graphical update, and eezstreet and I started bugfixing it (unfortunately it didn’t get bug tested very much).  It then looked like this:
Old
 
 
Unfortunately a lot of things happened during 2012, the main one being the fact that we moved back to jkgalaxies.com from terrangaming.  This messed up a lot of things and the launcher needed to get updated to reflect the change.  I (and eezstreet) also saw this as an opportunity to fix more bugs, change it to support the openjk engine instead of traditional jka, add some features and in fine BREAK THE LIMITS!
 
So today you get a preview of the new launcher:
Young N Fresh
 
There’s just one last thing we need to do…  BREAK IT!  What do I mean?  This week we’ll be starting alpha testing of the launcher and next week we’ll beta test it.  If you’d like to participate in the alpha test, just hang out in our IRC channel ( http://jkgalaxies.com/irc/ ) and we’ll be passing out links.  Then just download and install JKG using the launcher, and try everything you can to make it break.  If you find a bug, report it and I’ll try to fix it before the beta test.  The following week we’ll begin open beta test and I’ll put a link up on the main site.  We hope especially to stress test our update server during this time, and ensure that everything will work as expected.  Once again everyone, thanks for your continued support of JKGalaxies and I look forward to seeing you in game.

Download available!

A release build is finally working! Note that this isn’t an official release, and there is still a lot of documentation to be written to go along with it.
Get it here.

To install, just extract to any folder (desktop/JKG/ for example), no ‘gamedata’ folder is needed any more. Add assets0-3.pk3 from your Jedi Academy install into the ‘base’ folder in the new JKG folder. That’s it – launch the .exe! If you have any issues running or understanding the above download, just drop by in IRC or shoot any of us a PM here on the forums – we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Being just a testing release at the moment, just bring down the console and use devmap to load maps. Check the server list to see if the development server is online. Currently the included maps are jkg_ctf_bespin, jkg_coruscant_lower, and jkg_taris. 

The following commands may be new to you if you haven’t used JKG or OpenJK before:

/r_mode -2 : sets screen size to native resolution of your monitor.
/printWeaponList : useful for devmap to test out the myriad guns available

If you find a bug, let us know on IRC or the forums and be as descriptive as possible. Thanks!