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Progress Report - August 2024

· 4 min read
Vaser
Vaser

A slower month, but modders are having fun with some new animation tooling.

Release Info​

This month's OpenGOAL Tooling (jak-project repo) release is 0.2.16.

General Changes​

Merch Update​

Despite the overwhelmingly positive reaction and interest in the idea, we won't be going forward with it at this time for the foreseeable future. Once again, thanks to anyone who took the time to give feedback.

Black Screen Fix Once Again ​

A quick bug fix from last's month black screen fix. That fix only worked for users that already had a pc-settings.gc file created. This month the fix is extended to users who have not yet created that file (first time launching).

Additionally, previously, the settings file would only get created once you interacted with the pause menu, now it will get created on first launch. This should help reduce confusion and help us see what the game is initializing the settings to.

Per-game App Icons ​

Instead of using the same yellow OpenGOAL logo, it will now change depending on the game being played (Jak 1 / 2 / 3).

Mod Support in the Launcher ​

It is now possible to install and manage mods for OpenGOAL from within the official launcher.

The way this works is you can add a "mod source" URL to the launcher which is a way to look up what mods are available and how to download them.

We provide and maintain none of this ourselves, so be on the lookout for an announcement from the modding community on how to take advantage of this new feature.

danger

NOTE - Mods are provided by third-parties and are not vetted, endorsed or supported by the official team.

They can run arbitrary unverified code on your system, so only install mods from sources that you trust!

If you run into a problem with a mod, you will likely have to reach out to its author and not the OpenGOAL team.

Jak 1​

Updated Finnish Translations ​

Jak 1's Finnish translations received a huge update this month, thanks Aloqas!

Jak 2​

Fix HUD in Mirror Mode ​

This was missed in last month's mirror mode update. HUD elements should now be located on the proper sides of the screen.

Updated Finnish Translations ​

Aloqas also made a gigantic update to Jak 2's Finnish translations as well!

Additional Speedrunner Autosplit Locations ​

A few more autosplit spots were added to Jak 2 for those who want to use them.

Tooling​

CI Workflow to Detect goalc Output Changes ​

When we make changes to the OpenGOAL compiler, of course a potential worry is that the output has changed in a way we did not expect. This new workflow should flag the situation where a change to goalc results in file(s) being compiled differently than on master's goalc.

Extract MERC Models into Individual .glbs ​

Instead of extracting every model into one giant file for the foreground and one for the background, these models are now separated and organized. This compliments the recent model swapping features nicely.

Skeleton and Animation Support in Jak 1 ​

This adds a feature to the build_actor tool to support importing skeletons and animations from .glb files.

Multiple animations are handled and will use the name in the GLB. The default viewer process will end up playing back the first animation.

There are a few limitations:

  • You can only have around 100 bones. It is technically possibly to have slightly more, but certain animations may fail to compress when there are more than ~100 bones.
  • Currently, all animations have 60 keyframes per second. This is a higher quality than what is normally used. If animation size becomes problematic, we could make this customizable somehow.
  • There is no support for the align bone.