Jazz2Online news for December 2004
Happy new year! - December 31st 2004
The Jazz2Online staff wishes everyone a happy new year. May this community stay around for many more years!
Featured level of the month. - December 27th 2004
This month’s featured download is none other than Garden Brawl, by FireSworD. I was originally going to feature Blackraptor‘s Reign of Blackness level pack, but I ran short on time, so I’d just like to recognize it and say that it’s a great pack that you should all download.
Garden Brawl uses Diamondus Beta, by Pyromanus. The eyecandy naturally looks great, considering the tileset and author. Not a single place in the level looks at all dull. The majority of the level is decorated with decrepit caves, and waterfalls. Where this is not the case, a myriad of flowers, trees, etc. is present. The overall feeling is great. 10/10 here.
The layout is magnificent. The size is not too big, and not too small. It is also fairly easy to learn. It shouldn’t take more than five minutes to learn this level. One of my favorite aspects of the gameplay in Garden Brawl is that you have to jump a lot to get around, but the level is still very easy to navigate in. Most levels either go overboard on flow and you rarely have to jump, or they make you jump so much that it’s difficult and frusturating to move around in. The ammo placement is good enough. The placement of the seeker powerup is nice, because it prevents one from sidekicking or uppercutting it in order to get a full ammo count. The only way to get the powerup in this level is to shoot it, so it’s not overly powerful. The carrot placement is also pretty nice. A number of +1 carrots are scattered around the level, instead of there being one hard-to-reach place with a full energy carrot.
So, what are you waiting for? Go download Garden Brawl! Below is a screenshot of the level.
The featured month is December, not January. Due to a bug I couldn’t select December.
Lauch TSF Games from GIP Scripts - December 25th 2004
I got fed up with not being able to use the Games in Progress Script to launch TSF games so I decided to standarize a “.j2si” file format that will launch TSF games directly. Also, in the spirit of the season I made a patch that fixes “.j2i” files for all you people who can’t join games directly from online scripts. Read all about this and download the patches here.
Hope that you enjoy this as much as I do.
Christmas Server Online - December 24th 2004
The Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Christmas Server, hosted by the Digital Existence Network, is now online. It will run until January 5th, 2005, switching from CTF to Battle midway. Nimrod asks that you download the level pack before joining the server. If you see that the server is down, please contact Nimrod, Alberto, or Monolith.
You can join the game from the server list within JJ2, from the Games in Progress, or directly if your computer is configured correctly.
End of year events - December 23rd 2004
There are quite some end of year events:
- There will be a christmas server event up online from tomorrow (24 December) until (most probably) January 5. When the server is up it will of course be announced here.
- Nominate the best JCF threads for 2004! You have until the 10th of Januari to name what you think was the most interesting/funniest/most insightful/etc thread of 2004. There are two categories, Jazz Jackrabbit Related and Non-Jazz Jackrabbit Related. Questions and comments can be posted here.
- R3ptile is asking for votes for the JCS awards 2004.
Remember to participate in all these events. Have fun!
White Rabbit Releases Blood Lust for 1.23 - December 20th 2004
White Rabbit has released his 2002 level Blood Lust for 1.23. Check it out and rate it here.
Levels for the Christmas Server event - December 19th 2004
Nimrod still needs more levels with a christmas theme for his Christmas Server event. If you have any battle or CTF levels with a christmas theme, and you think they are good enough, you should consider sending them to him, so we can have an even more fun time when the server’s up (no date has been set yet).
When you e-mail Nimrod remember to change the ‘at’ into @ to make the address work. The apostrophes are part of the piece you need to replace.
Animations and other site news - December 19th 2004
As you may have noticed there’s a christmas animation on the frontpage now. Here’s hoping it makes the site look a bit more joyful during the days around Christmas. If you dislike seeing an animated image every time you visit J2O, just click on the image to make it disappear.
We have the image thanks to Pyromanus, who gave us all the Jazz Jackrabbit 2 enemy animations in animated gif form as a present. You can admire them in our Characters section, on the Bad Guys and End Bosses pages (formerly the images there were static, now they move). Thank you, Pyromanus.
For wizkids who would like to retrieve the latest Jazz2Online news posts in their favourite newsreader or possibly their e-mail client, the news of this site is now available in RSS form. You can find the RSS feed here. The code for it was made by Nebula, and the bugs were fixed thanks to the help of Flash.
A huge majority of people agreed with eachother that the new version of J2O was great or awesome. Thanks! Of course there’s still much to improve. Some things weren’t completed when releasing this site, and there are still bugs here and there. We also would like to add more news and content. But we’re working on it. An example of progress is that we now have a new newsposter: Labratkid.
He is going to feature a level on the frontpage each month.
Here are the poll results:
What do you think of the new version of Jazz2online?
It’s really awesome – 48 Votes (39%)
It’s great – 56 Votes (46%)
It’s ok – 12 Votes (10%)
I think it’s not better than the old version – 5 Votes (4%)
I think Jazz2online is a really bad site. What am I doing here? – 2 Votes (2%)
Total votes: 123
The new poll is about what ages this site’s visitors are.
Web site activity - December 18th 2004
A few of you may have noticed that the Jazz Jackrabbit 3 FAQ and the tutorial site JCSref have been either down or broken. Well, they’re working again, and soon you may even see some more content on JCSref. I don’t know. I don’t work there.
Dx has also started a new Jazz web site here. Check it out!
Assault the Base Contest - December 15th 2004
Source: BlurredD's JCF Thread
BlurredD has decided to host an interesting assault level making contest with a monetary prize dependent on how many entries are received. Therefore, the more people who participate the greater the prize. For every entry, the prize will go up 3$, so if 20 people enter the contest there would be a 60$ prize, not bad for a JJ2 contest. :)
For complete rules hop over to the JCF and visit BlurredD’s thread.
DM wins JJ2WC - December 7th 2004
JJ2WC I’s final standings:
1. Dark Mercrenaries
2. Fellowship of the Ring
3. Gurus of Proactive Warfare
4. Total Freaks
5. Dream Team
-. VerSus
6. Legends Reborn
-. Jazz ‘n Spaz Zone
Jazz2Online IRC Channel - December 6th 2004
We have set up an IRC (chat) channel devoted to J2O and the JCF. You can ask questions and discuss issues, and the administrators or other users in the channel will try to answer.
The channel is #jazz2online on Quakenet. You can access it by connecting to irc.quakenet.org with an IRC client (such as mIRC) and typing “/join #jazz2online”. You can also use the web client and after connecting to the server type “/join #jazz2online”.
This channel will be most useful because you can often get an immediate response rather than waiting for replies to a forum post or private message. For general discussion, please use the channel #jj2.
JJ2 List Servers News and Updates Livejournal - December 3rd 2004
For many (including J2O admins) it is hard to keep up with what the current status of the listservers is. Which listserver is up, which one is down, which patch is the one that should be used to be able to play Jazz Jackrabbit 2 online with others? Why are non-existant games showing up sometimes, and why do they occasionally look like they are replicating?
For the latest updates on these questions and also the latest news on the improvements that are constantly being made by the dedicated list server crew and discussions on related topics, there’s now, thanks to Monolith, Nimrod and the author of this news post (a little bit), the JJ2 List Servers News and Updates Livejournal. Do bookmark it and use it as the place to go to when you know what is up with the listservers.