Jedi Knight 2 And 3 Source Code Released | Hacker News Reader

Jedi Knight 2 And 3 Source Code Released

rockpapershotgun.com

68 pointsSkippyZA30 comments

There is some interesting code in this release:

  void FuckingWellSetTheDocumentNameAndDontBloodyIgnoreMeYouCunt(LPCSTR psDocName)
  {
          if (gpLastOpenedModViewDoc)
          { // make absolutely fucking sure this bastard does as it's told... //
                  gpLastOpenedModViewDoc->SetPathName(psDocName,false);
                  gpLastOpenedModViewDoc->SetTitle   (psDocName);
          }
  }

My heart goes out to whatever programmer had to meet that deadline. There are a lot more gems in the source tree if you just run:

  egrep -R -i "fuck" *

Preferring sourceforge over github seems like an unusual choice, I didn't realise anyone still used it. It's a git repo too, I wonder why they did that?

Well, I don't think they'll accept any pull request, I think hosting these files on sourceforge won't make any difference.

I reckon they just wanted to publish a tarball and Github is really bad at handling those.

I really don't understand the notion that SourceForge is dead and no one uses it anymore.

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/vlc
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/emule/
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla/
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/npppluginmgr/
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/azureus/
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/fceultra/ (Shameless plug)

Just to name a few. As a project admin of fceultra I cannot say that I'm 100% pleased with the UI of the bugtracker and the sf does have its quirks, but sourceforge has had a much better track record than github in respect to uptime. My question to you is "Why not?"

yea but how old are those projects? I recognise some of those from the 90s

If you were starting new today you wouldnt choose it. It is a clusterfuck. How the owners can't see the writing on the wall and change is beyond me.

For all I know maybe they are

Tbh, I was speaking from a position of ignorance. The last time I used sourceforge properly must have been circa 2006/7 and it was an abomination then - clearly that is not the case now.

It definitely felt cleaner from a UI perspective today (albeit not github-clean) and the sluggish document load times that I remember were also not in evidence.

The open-source ecosystem is definitely richer for every hosting solution that exists, sf included, so if my comment seemed sneery I apologise. It just surprised me at the time is all.

Jedi Knight 2 and 3? No.

The two games are:

Dark Forces 3: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast

Dark Forces 4: Jedi Knight 3: Jedi Outcast 2: Jedi Academy

Get it right, people.

Even with your reasoning "Jedi Knight 2" and "Jedi Knight 3" were the games that were open sourced (Outcast and Academy). I would love to see Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight get open sourced by LucasArts however :)

I know this is terribly pedantic, but seeing the name of the blog like that in the HN title rubs me the wrong way.

It's not pedantic at all, I thought the same.

I have no idea why it's necessary at all. In fact why not get rid of the blog spam altogether and link straight to the code. Yes, I realise RPS isn't exactly a small site and has quite the following (which seems to extend to HN as well, apparently), but their article adds nothing of real value apart from a quote that was pulled from another article on Kotaku.

How would someone go about compiling this? (More looking for resource/tutorial, running Ubuntu).

Judging from the `.dsw` file at the base of the code directory, it looks like you need to build it in MS Visual Studio.

There is also the matter of missing assets.

The source code for the engine should compile without the assets. Or at least with some minor modification to the source tree. Take a look at these other commercial games who have released the source code of the engine but kept the assets proprietary:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_3D
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_%28series%29 (1, 2, and 3)
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_%28series%29 (1, 2, 3, and 4)

I'm confident that there are others but I can't think of any off-hand. These open source contributions are a gift that allows the open source community to create ports to initially unsupported platforms and to enhance the engine. Have you checked out any of the enhanced doom ports? (http://dengine.net/). There are even user-contributed HD assets for Duke Nukem 3d (http://hrp.duke4.net/download.php).

I'd imagine those can't be open sourced: the game studio owns the code, but licenses the likeness in the images.

Searching 1897 files for "goto " ... 603 matches across 121 files

cocks gun, blows brains out

(Yes I know the evil goto supposedly has its time and place, blah blah blah)

What's the most popular "proper" use of goto in the code? The implementations of finite state machines?

I would guess error handing (freeing memory, closing fd's). A goto lets you avoid deeply nested if statements.

If you are going to write functions like this [1], gotos are not your worst problem. :)

[1]: http://sourceforge.net/p/jediacademy/code/ci/4bebb8ec23200ee...

I was also surprised to see these huge functions with multiple nested layers. Is it common for game development? Or it was just a quick hack on top of Quake engine?

Yes, it's very common in player / vehicle controller code.

People start with a clean model of how the player should move, using minimal physics, then add layer upon layer of special case code for various environmental / state / networking edge-cases.

It's usually what makes the game actually feel good to play.

I've heard looking at the first person movement code for Valve's games will make you wish for your own death, but stripping out the weird stuff which looks ideologically wrong just makes the game play worse.

What exactly is wrong about that?

The nesting is too deep imho, but apart from that it looks ok. This looks more like a design problem, because there are lots of special cases, but the code style is ok.

Look at the size of that thing

That function is almost 1500 lines long, full of complex nested if conditions and commented out blocks. I understand how code (especially game character control code) grows to become like that, and I've probably been guilty of some similar horrors myself, but the most I can do with such code style is excuse it.

Sometimes the program logic consists of hundreds of cases and putting it all into one function is a good solution, since you see the complexity.

I know that object-oriented best practice would suggest a lot of different classes and using dynamic dispatch for switching. That might even be faster. However, I dislike the fact that this scatters the logic across hundreds of files.

The best solution would be to simplify the logic, but this is also the most costly/time consuming variant.

I think you agree with the parent poster. By "code style" I assume they meant what you're calling "design problem".

I'm equally repulsed by huge, highly nested functions. However, I'd have to say that the game play provided by this function was one of my favorite parts of Jedi Outcast.

Skimming through the academy source, some are fine, some are not.

For example, codemp/game/g_saga.c uses goto just fine. Three "goto failure" jump to the end of the function to handle the error case differently than a normal return. Not a very good example for proper goto use, but ok.

In contrast, codemp/cgame/cg_players.c should be refactored. It seems to be model loading code. If the loading fails, some gotos jump to the start of the function and using a flag variable a default model "kyle" is used instead of the arguments. If the default model is broken, this becomes an infinite loop. My style suggestion:

  if (loadModel(foo)) return;
  if (loadModel(default)) return;
  assert (false && "fallback/default model broken");

Use of "structured gotos" for error handling is perfectly reasonable. Internal returns are far, far worse sources of error (mostly resource leaks, in my experience). Having functions with single exit points and avoiding contortions that involve extra control variables is better than the mindless avoidance of 'goto'.

Goto is just fine if it is used responsibly.

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