Originally Posted by Sir Ementaler
As you probably know, all sounds JJ2 ever plays are loaded from a single file, Anims.j2a. With a single exception: a sound played during the Gathering Of Developers intro cinematic that comes with some distributions of JJ2. This one sound is read from a file named GODSnd.j2v - even though it is not actually a valid J2V file. In fact, it's a completely regular WAV file with a modified extension.
One of the resources contained within Data.j2d is a grayscale texture named "Shield.Plasma". This texture is used by - you guessed it - the fire shield. No, not the plasma shield. Please stop calling the lightning shield that.
Speaking of misnomers, and getting further from official JJ2 facts and closer to community facts, here's something I found out one day and won't shut up about: Every once in a while you'll probably see somebody wanting to play "some survivor levels" or uploading their "first survivor level". Then sometimes another person corrects them saying they meant ground force, which is a game mode, while Survivor is BlurredD's level pack. But are they right?
You probably know part of the story: Survivor is indeed a level pack by BlurredD, based on a concept level named Ground Force created by ET, after which the entire mode was named ground force. But did you know Ground Force also came from a pack? Now, given that Ground Force was the first level of its kind, you should ask what game mode the rest of the pack was. The pack is most widely known as Cracco Pilot and its game mode is named by its main creator, Chiyu, "survivor".
It's starting to get complicated at this point, and unfortunately I couldn't find any records of naming the game mode that prior to release of BlurredD's pack, but the levels of Cracco Pilot mostly predate those of Survivor, and in particular, at least some of them predate Ground Force. Quote from Chiyu (note that while I try to keep lowercase/uppercase notation consistent in the rest of this post to indicate a difference between game modes and levels or packs, I didn't want to change the notation in the quote, so sorry for introducing even more confusion): "There are two well-known spin-offs of the concept Survivor. A few months after the release of the first Survivor levels, ET came up with a nice twist for this concept, and he asked me if he was allowed to use this idea combined with my original concept to create Ground Force". To sum up what we learned so far, Survivor is a ground force level pack, Ground Force is a ground force level, and ground force is a variation on survivor.
So what actually is survivor? Again, I'll let Chiyu explain: "Survivor levels have to be hosted in treasure. [...] The point is to stay in the arena as long as possible. Most levels have some added things to make this hard; such as destructable blocks/ground, self-exploding TNT's/bombs, lasers and events like winds, belts, suckertubes etc. If they're not falling by themselves, you have to 'fight' your opponents off. You can push them, but you can also shoot them with various ammo [...]". Sounds familiar? Well, it should, because this is essentially an elaboration on JDC description of gladiators. What on earth happened there?
Perhaps, like I, you came across the JDC description once and thought "hm, that's a cool idea, I wonder what levels there are for that". I spent my time looking around, browsing archives, and asking people, and came to conclusion that A) there is not a single gladiators level (other than Chiyu's "survivor" levels), and B) there has never been any gladiators event. So why would JDC list it? And more importantly, why is it named "gladiators"? Don't you think that's a fairly distant association? Trying to push and shoot people so they fall to their deaths versus swordsmen fighting in the closed space of an amphitheater?
I don't know why this happened, but I do have a theory: perhaps one person asked another: "what was the name of that concept game mode by Chiyu where you fight players in an arena until only one is left?" and heard back "you mean gladiators?". Because, guess what, it so happens that Chiyu also uploaded a bunch of concept levels named Cracco Gladiator 1 through 12. Those show a completely different concept game mode of their own, which is up to 8 players in a single elimination tournament in separate secluded arenas fighting battle mode duels until there's a single winner. This, in a sense, is reminiscent of what JDC calls One Day Tournament, although the levels are specifically constructed for it and each duel is played in a different arena.
At this point, I propose accepting the following classification: survivor is any level played in treasure hunt mode where the objective is to be the last person left in an arena. This mode's sub-types are ground force, characterized by being mostly composed of destructible scenery, gladiators, characterized by its lack at least for the most part, and airboard survivor, the other variant Chiyu mentions, which contributes majority of the Cracco Pilot pack.
To conclude, you can now link to this post when people try to correct you. Go play some survivor levels.
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