Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

There aren’t nearly as many active Jazz 2 fansites as there used to be, but one of them, list.digiex.net (one of the list server hosts) has just blazed back onto the scene in a big way with three projects:

Expanded Server Stats

The website now shows detailed, realtime, graphical information about current/historical players and servers for Jazz Jackrabbit 2. You can learn what’s popular and who’s really into playing the game. Any time you play in any public server, even your own, the website logs the following information about your name:

• how many hours it has played, and how much of that time the server listed it as a spectator
• how many different days and weeks it has played (just the numbers, not which ones), and its longest run of days in a row
• the day it first turned up, and the day it was last on
• how many hours it has played in each game mode, like Battle or Capture the Flag
• the rabbit and colours it last played as
• its milestones, and the day each one was reached

To opt out: play in private servers, or use the contact form. In the latter case, your name will still appear as a current player when servers are open (just like if somebody was viewing the server list ingame), but afterwards, your name will not be logged, like usual.

Level Archive

Twenty-five thousand levels sourced mostly from people’s cache folders over the years. If you made a hotel when you were young, and later you changed computers and lost your old hotel, maybe you’ll find it here!

The obvious comparison is to Jazz 2 Online, which features levels whose authors released them intentionally. (Either to J2O itself, or to Jazz 2 City or Universe Jazz.) This archive instead tries to distribute every level ever made.

Like J2O’s, the level archive features detailed previews of each level, including some scripted features added by MLLE. Instead of static images, though, it presents a more immersive preview, with some objects and layers animating or moving with rough approximations of how they might move ingame. There’s even support for 32-bit tiles, which J2O can’t handle yet.

To opt out:
To prevent your server from being harvested: host private servers, or ban the name Level Preservation
To prevent your own levels from being made publicly available: use the contact form. You can’t request takedowns of other people’s unfinished/unreleased levels, only your own.

Native Mac/Linux Ports of Jazz 2

The newest addition to the list, coded entirely by AI. This is a port of 1.24 (The Secret Files) without the JJ2+ patch. As best as I understand it, this is mostly a curiosity right now—everyone tells me that Jazz 2 plays perfectly on those platforms through Wine—but apparently Wine might stop existing soon, so it’s good to have this as a backup. Otherwise, I don’t use these operating systems, so I’m not really qualified to talk about this. I can see from the screenshots that it has higher resolutions than vanilla JJ2.

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(A side note: I’m told that some people think J2O is “mad” because it took a while to write a news post. I can only say that zero discussions have taken place between any J2O admins about anything in this post—all other admins have repeatedly stated recently that they are busy in life, and some probably haven’t heard about any of these projects—and I’ve made no secret that I’m taking a break from focusing on JJ2, for the sake of my mental health. None of these factors made it likely that any of us would dedicate the time to write any news posts. Fortunately, J2O has always had a submit news button on the front page, so if you see something that’s not being covered, you can always write it up yourself!)

- Violet CLM

• 6h 42m ago
• 1 comment

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