Stalax

Description
Oh hey, look what we have here - a mod.

And now before us we have a mod called Stalax, however it's not like other mods out there that have closed coding base. This one is actually something else.... It's a coding engine. Stalax allows to code for JK3 in Lua which is simplier than C and brings almost unlimited posibilites.
The author also states that he is working on a decent physics engine for JK3 that hopefully will be later added to Stalax.

Now let's move onto the content of the mod.
What we have included is Stalax itself plus an example test map with example test scripts coded in Lua. They are quite interesting I must say.

The map itself is very simple and has repetitive textures but it's point is not to look awesome or anything, but to showcase how Stalax works.
There are a few rooms in the map, each has a corridor with doors leading to it and inside the rooms there are examples of Lua coded scripts.

Time to describe each of the rooms.

The first room has a terminal that opens locked doors leading to the next room. So what's so special about it you may ask, well it's quite simple.
The terminal requires password that you input in console, now that's special isn't it? To do so, we walk up to the terminal and press use button, it asks us for password and we go into console, then we need to write /input pass (It's not the actual pass, the actual one is told in the readme) and bang, the doors open.

In the next room we have another terminal that opens closed doors, but it has a subtle differenace compared to the previous one. To use this one, we walk up to it and press use, but this time it tell us to say the password instead of writing it, so how do we do it? We open chat by pressing default Y button, or any other you have set if you're not using default, and write the password in chat, then press enter. That way we open the doors to the next room with...

A teleporter terminal, that's what is inside of third room. It obviously can teleport us to selected places. We walk up to it, once again press use and then it shows us possible choices of where do we want to go. We go into chat, type the number of selected choice and press enter to use the teleporter.

If we chose option to teleport into next room, we would find ourselves in a room with... Luke Skywalker?! His job here is to work as a NPC that we can talk with. We walk up to him and, yep you guessed it, press use button. He asks us what do we want so we tell him to open the doors to the next room using the same method as with chat password terminal or teleporter. He asks us if we're sure about our decision and if we chose yes then we should be in the last room.

The last room has something quite interesting - Item grabbing. With this script, we can grab any pre-coded element just like in Half Life 2, very cool thing I must say. Well, we pick up a crate and put it on a pedestal on the other side of the room, that way doors open, showing us a corridor with another closed doors at the end.

Sadly this is where it ends for the example test map of what Stalax as Lua coding engine can do.

With this final line I'm only going to say that Stalax is a great mod to make mods and with proper usage we could see very interesting stuff come to life. If you're creative and know Lua, submit bandwith now. If you want to learn Lua, do the same since that way you will be able to learn faster.



-Schrödinger