Jazz2Online news for August 2010
JJnet Duel Tournament v2.0 - September 5th 2010
“JazzJackrabbit.net and “the crew” is organizing a sequel to the CTF duel-tourney held last year. There will be prices for the top 3 players (specially designed T-shirts), like last time. If the player belongs to a clan, that clan will be awarded under “awards” here on jjnet. This tournament has space for a total of 48 players, and is FREE FOR ALL!
…
The previous tournament was a direct elimination-tournament, thus the draw wasn’t probably as balanced as it could be. Version 2.0 starts off with a Group Stage where players will be drawn into different groups to play versus others in the same group. Each player will get to play (x) matches minimum, and that way all players have about equal starting points. In addition the performance in the Group determines your position in the Elimination Stage.
Originally posted for JJnet”
So thanks a lot to Superjazz for organizing this awesome tourney & good luck everybody!
For more information/match results, click here.
This was posted on RabbitJournal on August 22nd 2010. You can post, too!
Poll - August 16th 2010
We’ve had the last poll up for a while, and the results have pretty much stabilized:
| Gizmo |  23 votes (39%) |
| Chickens |  36 votes (61%) |
| Total votes: 59 | |
This was a very traditional poll dating back to the earliest days of the JJ2 community, for those of you who didn’t understand what was going on. Gizmo was a community member who claimed to be perfect, and yet, Chickens beat him out every single time1.
Continuing in this nostalgic fashion, we will ask again the very first poll ever posted on the website Jazz 2 Stuff, in late April 1998: “Which of the folllowing characters (Jazz, Spaz, Eva, Devan, and Chuck) do you like the most and why?”
1 Paraphrasing the original disclaimer here: I’m not sure if that’s actually true, but it should be.
CliffyB: No new Jazz game in development - August 12th 2010
Source: The Examiner
Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski, one of the developers of both Jazz Jackrabbit 1 and 2 and currently top dog at Epic Games, stated that Epic isn’t currently working on a Jazz Jackrabbit title, according to an article on news site The Examiner.
What else is new, you might ask (and rightly so), but the interesting bit came after that: he said he’d “discuss” it with Chair Entertainment, developer of XBLA game Undertow and to-be-released title Shadow Complex. Which points to a future Jazz Jackrabbit title, if it’s ever released, being an Xbox 360 game – not all that surprising considering how little Epic seems to care about the PC game market nowadays.
Anyway, it’s a tiny glimpse of hope for those still waiting for a new game in the series. Head over the The Examiner (link above) for the full article.
Edit: old news, apparently. There goes my journalistic reputation.
CONVERT.EXE discovered - August 12th 2010
Source: JCF thread
JCF user Jojo has discovered (or at least actually let people know about) what seems to be the original program used by Epic Megagames to create the .psm files for JJ1, essentially the equivalent of JJ2’s mod2j2b. Download here.
The same limitations noted by Doubble Dutch in the readme for JJ1MOD exist in that not all modules will be successfully played in JJ1, and convert.exe doesn’t do as well at anticipating errors as JJ1MOD, but it does support a wider range of module formats, and it’s the real deal. For instance, here’s a successfully converted .mod file.
We posted earlier that OpenMPT, an open-source version of the ModPlug Tracker utility, had added support for .j2b files. A newer version has just been released which supports custom .j2b files (i.e. those that didn't come with JJ2) as well.
Jazz2Online is 10 years old! - August 8th 2010
It seems our maybe-too-subtle earlier attempt didn’t quite succeed in getting the point through to people, so I’ll repeat it here more explicitly: Jazz2Online’s 10th birthday is… today! Exactly 10 years ago, the site was opened in response to the then-biggest Jazz Jackrabbit fansites closing, and 10 years later we’re still here, serving you the latest JJ2 (and JJ1) news and downloads.
To commemmorate this event we’ve temporarily reverted the layout of the frontpage to the very first look of our site (also known as J2Ov1). Don’t worry, a real new layout is still in the works – but for now, enjoy this trip down the memory lane. [EDIT: In case you missed it, the J2Ov1 layout can be still seen here.]
I thought it’d be appropriate to give a small summary of just how big the site has grown in these 10 years:
- Our main site feature has always been the downloads section. In the past 10 years, no less than 4829 individual levels, tilesets, music and utilities were uploaded (not counting those that were deleted), including an overall count of 14833 (that’s more than ten thousand!) individual files, taking 1,2 gigabytes of webspace.
- The downloads section wouldn’t be what it is today without people reviewing all those files, which they have done 26122 times so far; that’s about 5 reviews per upload.
- Our users have posted a total of 1419 user pictures to the picture gallery, making for an additional 172 MB of files.
There’s also a small statistics page if you’re interested.
No need to slow down now, so do continue uploading stuff to the site and reviewing it ;) After all, this site wouldn’t exist without you contributing to it, so thank you all for the past 10 years! Do keep an eye on our frontpage, there might be some anniversary features in the coming days…
HAPPY 16th BIRTHDAY - August 1st 2010
Happy birthday, Jazz Jackrabbit! 16 years ago the green hare first appeared in the Jazz Jackrabbit series’ debut, and look at him now, he’s even got a fansite! Here’s to a lot more years.
In related news, Violet CLM released the Jazz 1 Layout Editing Suite, which complements Newspaz’s J1E to make it even easier to make your own levels for the first game in the series. So how about making a few nice JJ1 levels in celebration of our green hero’s birthday?
Uploading was broken; it should be fixed now. Sorry for the inconvenience.