Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Plus v5.10 Release news

JJ2+ is back with a new update featuring the longest changelog in seven years! Here are some of the awesome highlights:

One of the most common thing that new JJ2 players want to do is play the official campaign in Cooperative with their friends, so 5.10 dedicates a significant percentage of its changelog to Cooperative mode, and particularly to making it all just work, out of the box, rather than be buried behind a maze of advanced options. Key gameplay elements like extra lives, checkpoints, boss battles, secret levels, and coin warps have all been rethought for Cooperative to make sure everyone can play as much and as easily as possible. Not only that, but nearly every enemy and boss has had its behavior code at least partially rewritten to include network code for Cooperative servers, and in the process, many old low-priority enemy/boss bugs got fixed, from improving collision detection to restoring unused animations.

Sometimes JJ2+ includes a big new feature just for fun, and 5.10 introduces Debug Mode, triggerable in single player games by pressing the F10 key. JJ2 has always experimented with cheaty ways to skip through levels: the "JJNOWALL" cheat code disables collision with walls, and the "JJD" code from certain beta versions disabled collision with objects, but Debug Mode does both, letting you rapidly scroll through the level and resume play anywhere you want. Not only that, it exposes a host of options for placing (or deleting) objects in realtime, even objects that haven't had their sprites loaded for this particular level.

For level designers, the banner new feature is all the new layer drawing options. There are three main new textured layer options: REFLECTION, which draws a reflective lake surface across half the screen; CYLINDER, which borrows an effect from Super Castlevania IV; and WAVE, which applies regular sine wave distortions to graphics to make them look like they're underwater, blanketed by heat, or simply psychedelic. Texture effects may also for the first time be drawn to only certain areas of the level or background, instead of the entire screen, allowing multiple textures to be drawn at the same time, e.g. a 3D sky at the top and a 3D lake at the bottom. There are also options to derive the parallax speeds of tiled background layers automatically so level designers don't need to worry about accommodating players playing with different game resolutions.

Other major drawing options for level designers include the two sprite modes seen above: CHROMAKEY (green screen effects for drawing complicated graphics into subareas of the screen, of any arbitrary shape) and MAPPING (allows multiple palettes to coexist at once, as well as infinitely flexible recoloring of sprites so different turtles can have different colored shells). There's also a new API for choosing how players are drawn, including giving them shields and flags, plus new support for importing sprites and palettes from PNG and GIF files.

One final highlight: although competitive multiplayer is less of a focus in 5.10 than in many updates, we do have some nice quality-of-life improvements to spectator mode. For example, it can be easily turned on and off from the Esc menu (pictured above). Spectators are shown less inaccurate information about other players. Spectators don't constantly play a "woohoo" noise anymore. And a new "/spectatingcamerashift" option gives you greater control over how you want spectating to look.