Jazz2Online News

Jazz Twosday: JJ2+ v6.3

Violet CLM — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 04:08:00 +0000

Version 6.3 of JJ2+ is now available!

We took a break from the near-weekly feature releases to focus on an ongoing community discussion: how players (especially clients) in multiplayer servers should react to bullets shot by other players (especially enemies). We attempted to resolve this issue back in 5.8, without success, but there’s been renewed community interest, so we’ve rewritten the code and notably broken it down into three command settings, not just one.

When a client’s rabbit comes near a bullet, there are three different things that may cause the rabbit to move away from the bullet:

If a client locally thinks that their rabbit is touched by a bullet, and that bullet was shot by an enemy, and the client is not currently blinking, the client will locally launch their rabbit into the air in recognition that they’re about to be injured. Sometimes this results in them moving out of the bullet’s trajectory, so the server does not think the rabbit is ever touched by the bullet, and therefore no damage is ever done. This behavior can be disabled by the new /bulletpush command.
When a client rabbit is injured by a bullet, the client receives two sets of instructions for how far the rabbit should move: significantly upwards, like when a server rabbit or local splitscreen rabbit is shot, or not very far upwards, similar to touching a Hurt event. Based on network timing effects, either of these two instructions may arrive first and so it is largely random which one visibly happens. When /bulletpush is disabled, the new /injuryknockback command lets servers decide which of the two instructions to prioritize.
When a seeker, RF, or TNT bullet (or some custom weapons) explodes near a player, it sends that player flying away from the center of the explosion. Based, again, on network timing effects, this may or may not override either or both of the two instructions mentioned above. Disabling the new /blastknockback command turns off this blast effect for greater consistency across all weapons. Crucially, even when the command is disabled, your own blasts still affect you, so you can still perform RF climbs, TNT jumps, and so on.

This is admittedly very complicated, and we hope the community will be able to identify a preferred solution or two that feel good to all players in all use cases, rather than rely forever on these three separate—yet somewhat related—settings. In the meantime, though, /bulletpush and /blastknockback are both enabled by default, meaning that unless a server deliberately changes either or both settings, gameplay should remain unchanged from 6.2 and earlier. This experimentation is all opt-in.

Also, the above only applies to 6.3 clients in 6.3 servers. 6.3 clients in older servers, as well as older clients in 6.3 servers, will assume the default settings, which is to say, the gameplay from 6.2 and earlier.

Anyway, we also found time in the last couple months to track down some bug reports, targeting oversights from 5.12c, 6.0, and 6.1a. More excitingly, the Race HUD is now even better than in 6.2, especially in the track preview during the pregame.

You can download 6.3 in-game or in-browser

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2025 Jazz Jackrabbit 2 World Championship coming soon

Violet CLM — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 02:48:49 +0000

A new edition of the JJ2 World Championship is beginning, now at an alternate URL from its traditional one! The World Championship originated in 2004 and was JJ2’s first successful clan-based tournament, although this year has more of a focus on 2vs2 gameplay.

It looks like this edition will begin on Saturday August 9th, and there is a mappool posted, mostly with familiar names although “xlmbut” isn’t a level on J2O so that one may be a surprise. No rules have been posted yet, so maybe the same rules as from past tournaments. No instructions have been posted yet for how to join the tournament, but you could try sending a private message to organizer spejsboi, or emailing jj2wc3@gmail.com

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Jazz Twosday: JJ2+ v6.2

Violet CLM — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 01:48:23 +0000

Version 6.2 of JJ2+ is now available, revitalizing Race mode! Race was a big feature in version 5.0, but it was gradually overshadowed by mutators, including the aptly named “race.mut.” This update changes Race mode in two major ways:

First, we realized that players weren’t happy with Race games ending as soon as any one player finished all the laps. That made sense for JJ2’s other multiplayer gamemodes, but it’s not how other racing games work, and it wasn’t a good match for JDC events. In the new model, all players must finish, but they are ranked in the order they finished, like an inverse LRS. Players who’ve finished have their names drawn in orange and can freely spectate.

Second, there was a lack of information about the level and other players. Even with race.mut, it was easy to get lost and difficult to know if you were winning. 6.2 introduces a new system for level designers to define the layout of their race levels, using Text events as waypoints. All official Race levels have been retrofitted with these new waypoints and ship with JJ2+, to give you plenty of examples besides the documentation.

Waypoints have three major effects on gameplay. There’s an onscreen minimap, showing the track layout, your location, and other players’ locations. It’s now possible to estimate who’s in first place, second place, and so on, and the new HUD emphasizes this. And during the pregame for each level, the camera automatically scrolls through the track, giving you a preview of the level and helping to put all players on an even playing field.

Since the big 6.0 release and its 32-bit graphics feature, we’ve been focusing on changes that affect online multiplayer, not level design. (Although this is a bit of both.) We hope you’re all having fun making new 32-bit levels and tilesets, and we don’t want to confuse your process by introducing other level-editing changes too quickly. If you missed the last couple JJ2+ updates because they weren’t announced on J2O, 6.1 added purple text and emoji, and 6.1a reformed how the “passing” mode works in online team games with flags or gems, among other things.

You can download 6.2 in-game or in-browser

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Jazz Twosday: JJ2+ v6.0b

Violet CLM — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 23:06:00 +0000

Version 6.0b of JJ2+ is now available, adding a new /hidespectators option for when you’re having trouble seeing the game because there are too many spectators in a server, as well as assorted bug fixes, mostly based on our issues tracker. You can download 6.0b in-game or in-browser

After weekly updates through May, it’s been three weeks since 6.0, and there was no news post for 6.0a. We asked you (on J2O, the JCF, and ModDB) how updates should be announced, and what our update schedule should be in general. In those three weeks, we have received exactly one answer to the first question (keep announcing them on J2O) and zero answers to the second question, so we’ve been flying blind. Please head over to the JCF and let us know.

On the bright side, we’re happy to report that there are already two different tilesets released using the 32-bit graphics introduced in 6.0! Make sure to check them out and review them, and then please join the conversation about how to improve MLLE‘s 32-bit tileset support.

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Jazz Twosday: JJ2+ v6.0

Violet CLM — Tue, 27 May 2025 20:59:00 +0000

Version 6.0 of JJ2+ is now available, adding support for 32-bit sprites (including .j2a files) and 32-bit tiles (including .j2t files)! You can draw tilesets using any colors you want, and as many colors as you want, without worrying about a 256-color palette. A full alpha channel is also supported, so you can have images with semi-transparent windows, and images that fade at the edges, and so on. A new “plus32BitGraphics” example level is included. You can download 6.0 in-game or in-browser

We’re done focusing on the autoupdater and can now bring you other new features! We want to hear from you (ideally in our JCF thread, or you can use this news post’s comments)…

What should the update schedule be going forwards? Every week? Every two or three weeks? Something else?

Should it depend on what part of the game the next/previous update focused on, or how big the next/previous update feels?

Since JJ2+ now notifies you about updates and downloads updates on its own, do you want us to still announce every update in a J2O newspost and a JCF thread reply? Or is that redundant at this point?

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Jazz Twosday: JJ2+ v5.12c

Violet CLM — Tue, 20 May 2025 21:23:11 +0000

Version 5.12c of JJ2+ is now available. We weren’t quite done working on the autoupdater yet.

First, we gave ourselves the option to remotely disable autoupdating, in case a serious problem is ever discovered with a new release for example. We’re taking advantage of this release to test that option. The game should tell you “Invalid URL” and invite you to download the installer through your web browser instead.

Second, BlijBlijBlij and FawFuL noticed that the game ran the installer incorrectly for people with multiple JJ2 folders on the same computer.

Taken together, we’re once again asking you to download and run plus_install.exe yourself (for each of your JJ2 folders) for this release. Hopefully this is the last time you need to do this, and going forwards, the autoupdater will work perfectly for everything. :)

Thank you all for your patience and troubleshooting over the last couple weeks! As a bonus, all of today’s changelog is dedicated to resolving issues that you reported, mostly from our issues tracker.

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Jazz Twosday: JJ2+ v5.12b

Violet CLM — Tue, 13 May 2025 18:48:00 +0000

Version 5.12b of JJ2+ is now available. You can get it from the usual URLs, or preferably, you can run JJ2+ version 5.12a and try out the new automatic updater code, which should download and install 5.12b directly from within JJ2+. The update screen replaces the splash screen that you normally see after the logo videos but before the main menu when launching the game. (If you want to try the automatic updater process multiple times, to help us troubleshoot, you can redownload 5.12a here.)

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Jazz Twosday: JJ2+ v5.12a and the future of JJ2+

Violet CLM — Tue, 06 May 2025 20:29:00 +0000

It’s been a while since the last JJ2+ update, but we’re back! Let’s go over today’s release and what to expect going forwards.

5.12a is now out. It updates plus_install.exe to work on Windows XP and show better error messages. More importantly, we’ve added a new screen that automatically detects newer versions of JJ2+ and downloads and installs them for you (if you choose “Update”).

Currently, the game should feel completely unaltered, except that the main menu will say 5.12a instead of 5.12. However, please download this anyway. We want to make absolutely sure that this new update code didn’t mess anything up before we move on to the next release.

5.12b will release on May 13th at the earliest. It will feature assorted little changes that shouldn’t break anything, and will be the first public test of the automatic update code. Once 5.12b is out, when you run 5.12a, you’ll get to see the new update screen.

6.0 will release on May 20th at the earliest, once we’re satisfied that the 5.12b rollout worked. 6.# versions will represent the new JJ2+ era of smaller, more frequent releases instead of releases separated by many months that seem to change every last part of the game at once. We’re currently planning to stay in 6.# until JJ2+ leaves beta at 7.0.

As you may know, since November 2017 we’ve been lucky enough to have GOG.com distribute JJ2+ directly through its website and Galaxy client. Unfortunately, GOG is busier than it used to be, and months can elapse before we hear back from them when we want to do a new release. We eventually managed to get their permission to adopt this new automatic update system—and a big shoutout to grovespaz for coding most of it, and stijn for server support!—which will allow us to finally start updating again. We’re very grateful to GOG for this accommodation and all the others they’ve made for us in the past, and we’ve got loads of fixes and new stuff that we’ve been waiting to show you. :)

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Bash 27 Retrospective

Violet CLM — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 22:00:00 +0000

Last weekend was light on oldie visits, but heavy on great gameplay and fun chatter! Between that weekend and the days getting ready, I spent an entire week probably doing nothing but sleeping, working, and JJ2, sometimes with overlap… so it’s taken me some time to recover, but what a great few days!

If you enjoyed the levels we played, please remember to write reviews so the level creators feel appreciated!

What’s next? I know it’s been a while, but you should be able to expect some JJ2+ news soon… ;)

Finally, I recorded most of the bash—here’s day 2, day 3, and day 4, but twitch deleted all of day 1. Everyone else please feel welcome to drop your own recording links in the comments too.

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BASH is TODAY

cooba — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 09:19:40 +0000

Anniversary Bash 27 is planned to begin today, between 5:00 PM and 6:00 PM!

Download the packs here:

Battle | CTF | see the full list

The Bash will be hosted by PN Events, courtesy of ShakerNL.

See you soon!

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