Has anyone ever bought anything from here ? Any opinions on cloth/design quality? I bought recently from redbubble and cloth quality was awful..

Good Morning, Gladius lovers,

Recently, I and some colleagues have begun working on a Gladius Successor. It would be an identical game with a different look, characters, and storyline. This will take us some time as we all have full-time jobs with families, but we love the game and are passionate about making it a reality. We want this game to feel like a Gladius 2 when it comes out. We recently concluded that no Gladius 2 would ever come out, so we will do it ourselves or try our best to make one. When we have a small demo ready, we will share it here for you all to try. I will give updates on how the game is progressing. Rest assured, I have played this game since I was a child, have replayed it at least 20 times, and have a good feeling about it.

If you know anyone or would want to help with this project, please feel free to reach out. We could use any help available.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask away, and I will do my best to answer them.

FOR THE GLORY OF IMPERIA!

Hello LucasArts could you please make a VR Version of StarWars Episode I Racer

I'll try to keep this brief, but I miss those days and feel it should be archived here.

The MSN Gaming Zone was a matchmaking service with software allowing direct messaging and access to large lobbies, which had individual game tiles where you could host or join someone else's game. Players had rudimentary status indicators, showing either Online, In Lobby, or Matchmaking (actively in a game). For JK, there were two real lobbies used: Nar Shaddaa and Canyon Oasis. These joined the offerings for other Lucasarts games around 1997 onward, including X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance. The latter JK lobby, Canyon Oasis, was seen as the sort of weenie hut junior, and a friendlier place where newbies could play, and "Week of War" games could be hosted (more on that later). The chat would actually contain friendly or funny content on a regular basis, and players could genuinely expect to be able to have their messages read and paid attention to, regardless of the purpose, like testing out a new map from Massassi.net (which is still going!).

Nar Shaddaa, on the other hand, lived up to its Star Wars reputation. This was early Internet—1998 through 2002 at its peak—and so it was basically a text-based version of the worst side of early Xbox Live. At high tide, the chat would scroll almost unreadably fast, filled with spam, racist jokes, obscenities, pranks, URLs to porn or other sites—anything you can imagine. The first 2 or 3 game tiles were always occupied by people advertising something or leaving up a joke/obscene message; these only opened up if the host lost connection (very possible via dial-up) or finally had to reboot their computer after over a week of uptime, which Windows 9x didn't handle so well. MSN retained sysops who were supposed to moderate these lobbies, but they rarely joined (you could immediately spot them by their top spot on the player status list) and when they did, you had to vie for their attention among the horrible spam and tons of DMs they were no doubt receiving. It was lawless.

The community itself organized around three main styles of gameplay: NF BGJ (no force lightsabers on Battleground Jedi), FF BGJ (full force...we used to joke "FF Bespin", I think because no one played that map), or good ol' guns, which I think was NF. I didn't see or hear of many people playing FF Guns, and didn't have much interaction with gunning clans except for NKM, Natural Killing Machines and their chill leader, Soldier. FF BGJ, on the other hand, was allegedly dominated by a guy named _jza, who appeared to be universally recognized as the best. I never played that style much, but from my limited exposure, it seems like rapidly spamming force choke was the only real winning strategy.

Before we move on, too, there were also plenty of roleplay servers, using Beefcaike's Dralloc Hotel & Casino, or some other maps (like a vacation resort whose name escapes me)—people loved to host servers with those and embrace the RP, and big maps encouraging it (like Purgatory, on Massassi.net) would have mini-events on their release. One of the most popular maps of all time was actually a gunning map, Jedi High School; ripe for roleplaying, it was also a huge hit in general for sabers as well, or novel gametypes invented by the community (like SWAT, where teams would need to infiltrate the school and defeat two or more terrorists). JHS is notably missing from Massassi.net these days, and I'm not sure why.

This brings us to NF BGJ, sabers. This was seen as a pure artform, akin to Smash Bros. "no items/Final Destination" settings. Jedi Knight gave you only two forms of attack with the lightsaber. Left-clicking made Kyle Katarn perform a short swing, or three in rapid succession if you held or spammed the button. Right-clicking made one long attack, sweeping the lightsaber horizontally in one direction in front of you before sweeping it back the other way. This was the only way to play—no one used primary fire. Taking a single hit from this attack would reduce your shield to a level that a second hit would mean certain death, and BGJ offered no shield regenerating pickups. We would go to best of 3 kills, meaning you could only afford to be hit 5 times. Different clans formed around this style, such as SyK, VDS (Virtuosi De Sable), END, Morte Xindicato, Dsbr, PrincE, QuEsT, JCS (hated those laggy bastards) and many others, like the one AnimuS was a part of; I think it was the most popular format on Week of War for JK.

(Week of War, by the way, was a monthly event where a website that tracked user-entered stats would log performance by clans and individuals through a straight week of play, and then tally winners. Because the reporting didn't require another user to assent, it was frequently abused with false data, especially by members of certain clans, like WLP, Wraith League of Players. You'd see things like people reporting 150+ kills on a single game of NF BGJ sabers against people no one in the community had ever heard of. It never gained as much popularity with Jedi Knight as it had with X-wing vs. TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance. The website that hosted it was made by a guy named Hero, who formed the two largest X-Wing series clans, as well as the two largest Jedi Knight clans; I forget the X-Wing versions, which were something like TLA/TRA, but I think for Jedi Knight, it was RGF and IGF, Rebel Ground Forces and Imperial Ground Forces. You'd join a clan by registering a new MSN Gaming Zone nickname with the clan acronym in your title.)

Fair play wasn't always the rule, though. There were several ways to gain unfair advantages in Jedi Knight, due to its lack of integrity checks on players' local files or hardware:

• Load "COG" files granting special abilities by placing them in your local user directory (people made checksum verification mods to prevent this, but some hackers were sophisticated enough to crack these); a member of PrincE was caught doing this once, leading to the inside joke "no all-out fade like Yackman" as Fade was a popular instant-death COG;
• Engage in "Tweaking", or purposefully nuking your computer's performance via running other CPU-intensive tasks or specialized scripts like CPU-Killer that would cause Jedi Knight to fail to register hits against you by the enemy's lightsaber;
• Or, straight up doctoring post-game .PCX score screenshots that we often took as proof of beating another player, or doctoring no-tweaking screenshots that people often took in conjunction with the display FPS command to show that they weren't tweaking (since a usual byproduct of tweaking was potato-quality graphics and 15 fps or lower performance). Even a member of VDS faced accusations of doing this in a tournament, but in this situation, when someone had their entire clan backing their story up vs. a loner's screenshot, there was no chance to win in the court of public opinion on Nar.

A silver lining to all the above is that the lack of a unified checksum system meant that you could easily keep your cosmetic mods while playing against other hosts and peers, and so many people had modded lightsabers that borrowed other textures in the game to achieve non-standard colors or interesting patterns. Some of the COGs were also funny, like the "Carpet Ride to Hell", which would emit a laugh upon drawing the weapon, and upon firing, embed the enemy in a slow-floating carpet texture that would clip through the nearest wall and then explode. I think EAH_HeretiK possibly made that one. The only acceptable cure-all for this type of thing was releasing a custom checksum verifier immediately before a tournament, WoW, or important duel, granting no time for people to crack it.

I think a clan called EAH was the most prolific maker of COG files, as they did it for the pure love of the art; their website detailed their fascination with breaking or modifying Jedi Knight. Shenanigans happened outside of the games too, as the MSN Gaming Zone was a fertile playground for kids and other innocent marks who'd readily surrender their IP address (thinking they were setting up an off-lobby game), only to find themselves the victim of a WinNuke DDOS attack or other script kiddie tools, including the old trick of hijacking desktop control and ejecting someone's CD drive to scare them. Social engineering was rampant as well, with players trying to gain access to each other's accounts or clan websites. Zone-wide tools became more interesting and powerful as time went on, perhaps culminating around 2001, when it became possible to randomly join other users' private chats; we spent a few nights trying to gatecrash cybersex sessions, with three successful joins.

The actual combat of NF sabers was deceptively straightforward—a way to fight to a near stalemate was to always be swinging with alt-fire while backing up, leaving few ways to penetrate this defense. Few players did this, though, as it would lead to 15 minutes of frustration (it was hard to even get to 3 kills for either party playing this way, like a 1v1 where both players camp). The mode was much more fun when players would actually show some aggression and take the initiative, hoping to cilp the other player's hitbox with the very edge of their attack, only briefly coming into close proximity to their foe. Somewhere probably around late 2000, however, a startling new combat technique was discovered.

Warping.

Jedi Knight had no movement restrictions tethering the player's point of view or behavior in game to mouse sensitivity. People who experimented found out that if they turned their sensitivity almost to maximum, they could pinpoint 180-degree reverse course while in full sprint, with no lag or stop animation. To an external viewer, it looked as if a player would run 5 steps in one direction before instantaneously appearing about-face on a completely different vector, before changing yet again in dizzying succession. It was damn difficult to control the mouse at such a high level of sensitivity, but after a week of practice, most people were able to master it enough. This was an absolute game-changer for both offense and defense:

• A defensive warper could cover a small area by constantly changing direction within a rough boundary, leaving no real entry point for an attacker;
• An aggressive warper could skirt the edge of a player's proximity before suddenly attacking in a flash, since the attack was completely unpredictable; your enemy could be running away from you in one moment, and then suddenly be in your face the next with no warning.

The best would just alternate styles. There was a preferred spot for combat on BGJ, and the first person to get there would adopt defensive warping, while the second would try some feints and aggressively try to move in without committing to a full-on attack, testing the defensive warper's behavior or trying to predict the next move in their pattern. You can imagine that two people warping at full speed might hit each other in passing without even really seeing each other; one may have just caught the unlucky edge of the other's attack while in the midst of a flurry of different directional warps. Naturally, this led to even more uncertainty and paranoia about "Tweakers" or people on dialup connection. Don't get me wrong—despite the visual chaos of warping, on a good connection, the player is still where they appeared to be and the hitbox would still register the attack; it wasn't like attacking an after-image or something. But introduce dial-up to the mix, and yeah, these fights could turn into a complete crapshoot of two people warping and just hoping to get lucky.

Warping separated the elite from the newbies ("noob" hadn't been invented yet as a common term). Where pre-warping, SyK had been arguably the clear best saberist clan, the introduction of this technique exploded interest in the style and tons of elite wannabes popped up. NF BGJ came to dominate the JK community in general, as there was a clear hierarchy players by skill, and a ton of itchy saberists looking to knock them down a peg. People competed for spots in the best clans, and becoming a member of VDS became seen as the highest achievement, despite its detractors (it's retrospectively accepted that England_VDS, possibly their best saberist on wins/losses alone, benefited tremendously from the latency of hosting games in his native UK and playing against US peers). Some players became household names for their rapid rise to stardom, like PuN (who started in one of the friendly big clans, WLP, and catapulted to elite recognition in a single WoW), while others were constantly made fun of for whatever real-life details they ventured to reveal or awkward high school photos they dared to show of themselves. And a lot of players who achieved membership in an "elite" clan would ghost out, akin to a champion who never defended their title. But in the mix of it all, a lot of friendships were formed alongside the fond, funny memories we had.

The game was definitely winding down by the end of 2002, although you could still find games and chat people up on Nar. But I think by 2005-2006, it had died. Many of us tried to continue via Jedi Outcast, but the multiplayer felt lackluster; someone had spread Warez links on Nar for Outast two weeks before its release, and the disappointed reactions were pretty immediate. I have a couple screenshots of Canyon Oasis and Nar completely empty some time after that point, taken by HeretiK. An FF player named Wodz (who apparently was the center of the FF gametype's social community) sensed the oncoming death of the community, and solicited players to submit their contact information, clan rosters, and photos (if they pleased) to some massive listings he made for his website, The Justin Chin Institute. EAH was humorously omitted from the clans.txt file, perhaps out of old anger towards their role in making COGs. The site didn't stay up too long, unfortunately; a couple other fan sites and Discords have taken its place, like https://www.jkdf2.net/. And Massassi is still adding mods and new levels. But the MSN Gaming Zone is long, long gone. I'm sure a lot of people miss it; it provided such a wonderful social aspect to multiplayer, irrespective of all the late 90s/early 00s edgelord vitriol and sociopathy. Some 640x480 screenshots and that meme feeling of "last seen: 14 years ago" is all the remains for most of us, but the story deserved to be told.

I'll make a post in a bit with some of my old screenshots.