Thread: JCS+??
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JCF Éminence Grise

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Nov 30, 2017, 05:34 PM
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Okay, let's be fair though. MLLE does sometimes produce levels that are not universal in their openability. There are two reasons for this, broadly speaking.

1: It's supposed to. The last few releases of MLLE have seen it adding a bunch of JJ2+-exclusive features, like custom palettes, recolored sprites, infinite layers, and infinite tilesets. If JCS tried to open such a level, it would have no idea what to do with it, and would only corrupt its data... so MLLE makes sure JCS can't open them.
2. MLLE has bugs. It does nobody any good to pretend this is not the case. The current one I'm wrestling with (you can help, if you like, it's open-source) is that the zlib library I'm using is occasionally spitting out incorrectly compressed byte sequences based on [I have absolutely no idea why this happens]. Fortunately this happens only very rarely, though reliably when it does occur, but it has happened.

But here's the thing. There is no reason to think that editing JCS—once you overcame, as Stijn alluded to, the enormous startup cost involved with that—wouldn't be any different. It'd still be us same people writing the code and making the exact same mistakes we do or would with MLLE. Just because a JCS+ started out as JCS doesn't mean it wouldn't be modified to do different things as time goes on—otherwise there'd be no point in at all. Switching from MLLE to a JCS+ in no way would eliminate human error.

(As for MLLE's color scheme, that's because the level editor that Epic Games actually used to make Jazz 2 looked just like that. JCS's pinkpurple makeover was just to make it fancier for the players. But I'd love to see a more colorful MLLE if you felt like forking it, like Stijn said; it's just never been a priority for me.)

Also, fun fact: it's possible to create .j2l files that unpatched JJ2 can open just fine, yet if JCS saves them, they get corrupted or lose information.
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