Jailbreak: Source - More New Features! news - Jailbreak! mod for Half-Life 2

We made the Top 100! And we are insanely, dancing crazy about it! Thank you so much to everyone who voted for us, it means a hell of a lot, and we don't plan on disappointing you, the next version of Jailbreak is quite literally just around the corner...

As a little bonus to all the lovely and awesome people who have voted for us thus far, I thought I'd do a small write up today showing off a few of the new features of Jailbreak that have evolved and been added since 0.4.

Weapon Swapping and Selection:
A complaint which came up again and again during 0.4 was that players who "knew the maps" could pick up the majority of good weapons within ten seconds of the round starting, leave newer players with the basic spawn weapons. To alleviate this, we've implemented a very basic weapon swapping system, forcing you to choose which weapon to carry from six different categories.

Now when you walk over a weapon, you simply press X to swap it! The categories are Melee, Pistols, SMGs, Rifles, Heavy Weapons and Explosives. Likewise, changing weapons is much faster, you either flick your mouse wheel up or down or press 1-6 to select a weapon slot. You'll also notice that each weapon type now has it's own crosshair!

Stealth:
We've created a whole new stealth shader for the next release, inspired by the "Predator" and much, much more effective than before. It's also terrifying when someone attacks you out of the shadows!

The shader itself has chameleon qualities, so the more you move, the more visible you become, but if you stay still for a few seconds in one place, then you gradually blend into the background!

Team Selection Menu:
We've also redesigned the team selection VGUI menu so you can rapidly select a team and get straight into the action. There's no complex loadout screens or menu screens, just click the Dino or the Robot and get shooting! All the VGUI menus in the game have the same theme too!

Updates to Plague:
One of the most unpopular maps from 0.4 was Plague. Looking at our stats, when it arrived in the map cycle, players often left the server and joined a different one. After talking to the players, it became apparent that people were frustrated by the layout. The original layout was essentially one very long corridor, with a single choke point. Once players were killed, they would escape, and have a very long walk back to their base, only to get killed again.

For 0.5, we have completely redesigned the map, it is now effectively a whole new map, the layout is now based around a figure of eight, with many routes between the bases, and a much shorter slog between the two, making it much more enjoyable and more tactical for teamworkers.

Evolution of a Map:
I thought it would also be interesting to show how one of our maps has evolved over the last few releases. Abalos was one of the first two maps in the very first release of Jailbreak over 18 months ago. Since then it has become almost unrecognisable, and for 0.5 has had a complete lighting overhaul.

Escape Balance and Updates:
One of the key complaints was the balance of the escape routes, and on certain maps players felt that one team had a much easier chance of escaping than the other. We've really worked hard to address this in the latest version, with many hours spent timing and testing escape routes, particularly the fan favourite, Resident Evil inspired, laser dodging escape!

We've also created whole new escape routes for some maps, and new escape routes based on fan feedback about what they enjoy when escaping for the new maps, such as this Indiana Jones inspired jumping puzzle through an ancient tomb!

Visual Updates:
We've also made other smaller visual updates to add to the sense of immersion and theme, for example in the images below you can see that we've added blue muzzle flashes to the Robot and Heavy weaponry, we've updated the HUD with new fonts, made the overview slightly smaller, created all new animations for the weapons, and added new ammo and HUD icons.

Many more Features:
There's many, many more new features we've implemented in Jailbreak: Source 0.5, and we simply can't go into full detail here without going on for several more pages. Either way, you'll all get to find out a week or two from now! We'll be announcing the release date very soon and getting in contact with all the server admins who have promised us servers upon release! We want to make sure you've got plenty of choice when it comes to breaking out!

If you want more things Jailbreak, get on over to our website at www.jailbreaksource.com and be sure to add yourself to our Mod Watch if you haven't already!