Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

“Welcome to Academy young magician! Academy is the home of the wizards, where magic reigns. In academy all magicians may cast spells that they have learned, either on themselves or their enemies. To cast spells, a sufficient amount of mana is also required, which regenerates over time. Good luck!”

This level is probably my biggest multiplayer level yet in the terms of work and effort put in its development. I started active development on it in September 2017. After gaining more proficiency with AngelScript and the scripting API provided by JJ2+, I was able to write more advanced and cleaner code on my own than previously, with Jazzopoly for example. Once again special thanks to Sir Ementaler for helping me resolve very problematic situations.

This level is continuation to my previous levels like Conflux and Stronghold that were inspired by the strategy game ‘Heroes of Might and Magic III’. This time I didn’t only bring a theme visually, but practically as well, in the form of magic and a few other themes from the game. The music track ‘Tower.mp3’ is also from the game itself.

The level is based on the Tower-faction of the game, that is also known by the name Academy in other games in the HoMM-series. I saw the name Academy to be more fitting and describing in this case.

If you’re curious, the level is particularly inspired by this image: http://heroes.thelazy.net/wiki/File:Tower-in.png

The level has not yet been tested with a big number of players, but the level size is best suited for it (probably 8 or more players). Thus, if you encounter any bugs, feel free to report them here or to me personally.

Known issues:
- The fur for a server player does not always get properly reset on level cycling when pestilence is enabled

Finally, I wish you all fun times and a happy 20th Birthday to JJ2!

Changelog:
v1.0.1 – Fixed gameplay in overtime gamemode, and few other minor changes
v1.1 – Reworked the level script in general and separated features into different versions of the level
v1.1.1 – Made hotkeys untriggerable right after player releases chat
v1.1.2 – Made spells from tier 3 available as starting spells in normal mode to reduce the need to hog the “spell shop” to learn all of the spells and to balance the game in general. Fixed and optimized some processor loops code-wise.
v1.1.3 – Removed the use of samples in academy engine to potentially fix a majority of crashes caused by an excessive amount of samples being played
v1.1.4 – Mana now sets to 0 when dying, added support for duel version
v1.1.5 – Made minor adjustments to engine and duel version
v1.2 – Multiple changes -Multiple spells have been rebalanced and their behaviors and documentations tweaked -Spells are now learned automatically when collecting coins -Secondary skills are now learned automatically when collecting purple gems -Spell store has been replaced by RF crates -Tree of knowledge has been replaced by another gem mine -Gems/Coins required for the next asset are now displayed in parenthesis -Magic well now regenerates mana four times as fast, instead of twice as fast -New spell: Magic Mirror (reflects hostile spells on enemies)

EDIT: Made a LITE version ‘xlmacademylite’ without any spells or related features. Meanwhile the default version awaits for changes to make it more playable, the LITE version let’s people play the map in almost classic mode, with only scripted visuals and shield/seeker bonuses to replace spell buff bonuses. By the way, you can only get seekers from the bonus in LITE.

EDIT 2: Reworked the level script and isolated most of the functionality in .asc files as a separate engine. Scrapped the spell scroll system and made spells permanent, but some of them have to be learned first. Generally rebalanced the spells and fixed some gameplay issues. Made two versions of the level that use the level engine slightly differently. The default version ‘xlmacademy’ is otherwise identical to xlmacademyfull, except that it does not implement the performance-wise heavy scripted features, such as spells that use rewritten bullet functionality. To play with all of the spells, use xlmacademyfull, instead. But be aware, that it may cause performance-issues on slower computers (as might the normal version too, but feedback hasn’t been received yet).

EDIT 3: Made a duel version ‘xlmacademyduel’ with a cropped playable area and fewer level features, but otherwise same gameplay.

Special thanks to Sir Ementaler, PurpleJazz, Shaker and FireSworD for suggestions/hosting/testing/scripting assistance, etc.