Although version 5.10's long development period meant that it underwent more prerelease testing than possibly any other JJ2+ update, it touched so many important components of the game that a number of oversights still slipped through to release. Most of those (we hope) are fixed here in 5.11. Running multiple game instances simultaneously, saving after playing multiple other levels, and clients not downloading the right files from online multiplayer servers are the highlights here. Other fixes include player physics interactions between Spaz's melee attack and certain slopes, horizontal vines and high speeds, and bullets and frozen enemies, as well as some new possibilities for loading external sound files.
Asteroid Armada, a custom JJ2+ level
But because this is a fairly short changelog, it's also a good time to talk about our issues tracker. It's always the first place you should go to report bugs or to suggest new features. Ideas like the 800x450 widescreen resolution have originated from there. But we also have a lot of opportunities right now for people to test or volunteer for things:
- We have a number of proposed changes to player physics. These are intended to make gameplay feel more logical, but have an inherent risk of confusing or alienating people used to the older, buggier code. Feedback from players both experienced and casual is important here... a couple fixes were already incorporated into 5.11, but others (like the one pictured below) are still up for discussion.
- Another public test build provides some different models for deciding whether bullets hit players in online servers, to see if any of those other models feel better when lag gets involved.
- We're also soliciting feedback about the player physics details affected by the /quirks chat command, and whether they should be incorporated into a new multiplayer gamemode devoted to the parkour-like "test" maps that have been popular since JJ2's early days. If you use any of the /quirks settings outside of test maps, we'd love to hear from you.
- JJ2+ has added a lot of new messages, settings, etc. over the years, and this doesn't give the best experience for people who want to play the game in a language other than English. We'd love to find volunteers who can translate JJ2+'s new strings, especially into languages that unpatched JJ2 is already translated into, like German and Italian and Afrikaans.
- One very specific opinion/game design question: in Capture the Flag matches, would you like to know how much health your team's flag carrier has? If so, how should that be represented in the game's GUI?
- Of course, we have an open call for volunteers to playtest private builds with upcoming features and fixes.
- More testing opportunities coming very soon!
Is the mouse control option quick to select now or still annoying? That's my feedback. Needs to be as easy as swapping to it from the pause menu.