Here is the original messages between me and Yves in text format.
Trank – Hello Yves. My name is Tomas. I am from the Jedi Knight community (https://www.jkdf2.net/). We have been looking for a copy of Leia, the original level editor for Jedi Knight. We would love to if you still have a copy of Leia or any information on where it is and if we could get our hands on it? Thank you.
Yves Borckmans – Trank Hi. I’m afraid Leia was never made available to the public in any way. LucasArts had pretty strict NDAs in effect and they meant business about ownership of their IP, code and tools and not leaking anything. I didn’t copy anything when leaving for Nihilistic. To be honest, for most intents JED was better. The only advantage Leia had was it had an actual game engine window in the editor and you could immediately run through your geometry changes w/o launching the game. Overall, I actually preferred making a level with JED, even the earliest version. Sorry to disappoint… Yves
Trank – No no thank you! It was great to have a reply and hear from a developer of my favorite game. Thank you so much. Though i have three quick questions.
1. I read some where that you developed 4 multiplayer levels or worked on them for Jedi Knight. Can you remember which ones?
2. Also do you think that Lucasarts lost the source code to Jedi Knight? There was a rumor being spread by people that it was. And do you keep in touch with any of the Jedi Knight team?
Thank you again for your time.
Yves Borckmans – I worked on 4 CTF levels, if I remember well though we only shipped 3 and cut the one that was the least fun and/or the most buggy. I have no idea what happened to JK’s source code to be honest. It at least lived on in MotS, in Droidworks and in the Indiana Jones game that followed (can’t remember the title, sorry).We of course used source control, both for code and assets, if LucasArts IT did their job, somewhere there are backups. This code wouldn’t really matter today though, it’s from another age entirely. Had you asked me about keeping in touch with the team 3 years ago, I would have had an enthusiastic response for you, many of us were still at Nihilistic, talking and working together every day. When Nihilisitic shut down end of 2012, everyone went their separate ways though… sucks, but it’s life. Incidentally,I’m working for Walt Disney Imagineering at the moment, and I work daily with 2 of the people I worked with at LucasArts back in 97, 3 more of those contract for Disney too… the entertainment industry is a big gigantic mafia 🙂
Trank – Oh thats really cool that you worked on the CTF levels. Those levels are legendary now. Awesome. And yeah hopefully the guys at Lucasarts kept the source code safe. Its also very cool that you are still working with some people from Lucasarts, and im very glad to hear you are working for Disney, thats huge. Well thank you so much for talking to me.
Yves Borckmans – You’re welcome, it was fun to reminisce a bit about that era 🙂