Loading of JKA Assets

[Daggolin]

In the future JK2MV could MAYBE be updated to automatically detect JKA installations and load the JKA assets. That would extend the amount of available textures, shaders, effects, models, maps, etc.

Might be a bit difficult to properly handle some assets, as for example some JKA shaders have the same name as JK2 shaders and they would override them. But one could add checks for those and maybe let the user decide via cvar, if they want JK2 or JKA versions of shaders.

This is just an idea and it needs more research, before anything clear could be said. Just wanted to document the idea and our thoughts on it.

[ouned]

isnt it better to just port whats interesting from jka to jk2?

[AlexCS1337]

@ouned, true but wouldn't this way save space on your hdd? Each of my games are like 20 or so gb each cus of mods xD

[TriForceX]

i like this idea, few years ago i attemped to include jka maps, so thats make me to including the proper textures and shaders (also i included weapon & player shaders, looks very nice). So ure right, some files have the same name but internally are different with some changes... maybe an idea would be a way to have assets0.pk3 and assets0_JKA.pk3 (for example) and with a cvar like mv_jkaassets "1" to get only the desired stuff (textures, shaders, effects, models, maps) because we dont want to override the menus or another thing... idk maybe is an option, or with the cvar in "1" will read a file with the specific content to get, like black/white list for downloads...

anyways, is interesting

[aufau]

ouned: Not really because you can't distribute it easily. No self-respecting site like jk2.info or jkhub.org will allow this. Also custom JKA maps usually use base JKA assets.

[ouned]

The problem is that it would lead the community into a situation where custom maps made for jk2 would work on one installation (one with jka assets) and on some not (people with jk2 only). I don't think that's a good idea. People can easily port the maps/skins etc. and even ship them via autodl there is no need to introduce something like DLL hell (pk3 hell) in jk2

[Daggolin]

The main idea is to support custom jka maps, models and skins. Unless configured otherwise Radiant is still going to only load content from the jk2 base and NOT offer jka content. So that's not really creating much of an issue, as mappers need to explicitly load the jka content in radiant before it's usable.

Ported jka assets on the other hand would give mappers the impression those are jk2 textures or models and lead to the issue you described, maps that only work on some installations. Not to forget that porting assets from one game to another is probably not something you are allowed to do.