I think this is suggested already or its too hard to make:

Trigger Crates with the same things as a trigger zone but for the whole server (so you can put triggers on and off for everyone).

That would throw a major monkey wrench into everything. Local triggers vs global triggers is confusing enough with already.

Imaging Triggering scenery without a crate. That would be so confusing!!!

However, expanding the number of usable triggers would be quite nice.

Originally Posted by Foly

I think this is suggested already or its too hard to make:

Trigger Crates with the same things as a trigger zone but for the whole server (so you can put triggers on and off for everyone).

It would be cool to have a global trigger crate but with some options like: affects everyone, affects only one person(must specify) and the function to stop trigger's working.

But where did Neo got JCS+ for Neobeo's firetruck?
JCS+ is finished?
If yes.. Where can i get it?

Originally Posted by mortalspaz

But where did Neo got JCS+ for Neobeo's firetruck?
JCS+ is finished?
If yes.. Where can i get it?

JCS+ is coded by NeoBeo so he's the creator of it.
JCS+ is not finished and I don't know if he had in mind to finish this, probably not..so you don't have where to get it.
Just download the Reworder prog and try edit with

firetruck was made in paint

Ummm what do you mean by.. "made in paint"?
You cannot just drop an image as a map. Can you?

Neobeo can do anything. Even make jazz 2 levels in MS paint!

I mean, I guess you could... I don't see why you'd want to, though. Level editors can certainly learn some things from paint programs but I think the separation of map and tileset is a good one.

Lets make a level in 3D Max Studio Pro.

Wait, how to compress to zlib though?

LOL it would be cool but wouldn't work the engine wouldn't even be able to support it.

Originally Posted by Grytolle

firetruck was made in paint

nah, firetruck was made in Photoshop

It wouldn't be hard to turn BMP into J2L, which I suspect Neobeo did.

Originally Posted by DarkB

nah, firetruck was made in Photoshop

Don't spam. Neobeo really did use paint

Originally Posted by Grytolle

Don't spam. Neobeo really did use paint

ok ok ;p it made lvl in paint then edited in photoshop joke :P

Originally Posted by DarkB

ok ok ;p it made lvl in paint then edited in photoshop joke :P

Jokes are supposed to be funny...

Originally Posted by Grytolle

Jokes are supposed to be funny...

What!? Outrageous...!

Let's go back on topic and talk what should be implemented in new JCS

Apparently: Paint, Photoshop and jokes.

Boy, would that be an interesting copyright...

But what about the laser shield? In the description it sais it can be aquired only by jjshield. Can you find a way of geting it in JCS?

Originally Posted by mortalspaz

But what about the laser shield? In the description it sais it can be aquired only by jjshield. Can you find a way of geting it in JCS?

As far as i know the laser shield is an un-finished event. And you can't make it work unless you use a cheat but it crashes the servers if you don't use JJ2+(blocks the laser).

And whit-out the source code of jj2.

Originally Posted by klemenkin

As far as i know the laser shield is an un-finished event. And you can't make it work unless you use a cheat but it crashes the servers if you don't use JJ2+(blocks the laser).

And whit-out the source code of jj2.

The event isn't even unfinished: the entry exists in JCS.ini, but that's about it. The laser shield itself exists, but there's no way to get it aside from jjshield, or other cheating. It's fairly easy to spawn the laser beam object itself, of course.

As for the laser shield event, there's no sprite for it, or any other behaviour programmed in the game to speak of. It has exactly the same properties as an "empty" event. Compare this to other events such as "butterfly", which is unfinished but still does something.

But, when you do type jjshield, the white laser does form around you. I wonder why they bothered creating it if it crashes servers. And furthermore, why did they put it in JCS if there is no event to spawn the shield?

Originally Posted by Dermo

But, when you do type jjshield, the white laser does form around you. I wonder why they bothered creating it if it crashes servers. And furthermore, why did they put it in JCS if there is no event to spawn the shield?

Originally Posted by EvilMike

The event isn't even unfinished: the entry exists in JCS.ini, but that's about it.

No more need be said. They started making some early work on it, they had an "oh crap the game needs to be released" moment, the end.

And it would've been WAY too much work for them to remove it altogether.

You know what I would like to see in a brand new JJ2 level editor? A brand new JJ2 level editor.

Originally Posted by Troglobite

You know what I would really like to see in a brand new JJ2 level editor?

A brand new JJ2 level editor.

Originally Posted by Dermo

You know what I would like to see in a brand new JJ2 level editor? A brand new JJ2 level editor.

As made obvious by my previous post, I agree. Although for the moment I am content with reworder.

Originally Posted by Dermo

And it would've been WAY too much work for them to remove it altogether.

More likely they just didn't see any need to remove the gameplay logic for it. There's no event so you can't get it by normal means, so without cheat codes you'd never see it. Quite a lot of games have unused content in them - ideas that never got used, stuff that was cut to make a release, stuff that turned out to be too complex to be worth completing, bits of old debug or boilerplate code (Ocarina of Time has the code and model for a fully functional Arwing fighter, Goldeneye has a whole level that was probably used for testing).

Originally Posted by Dermo

I wonder why they bothered creating it if it crashes servers.

I think they didn't expect their audience (bunny game players..) to produce tools that are capable of enabling the laser shield in multiplayer games.


After all, jjshieldjjshieldjjshieldjjshield doesn't work in anything other than Single Player.

Originally Posted by Jerrythabest

I think they didn't expect their audience (bunny game players..) to produce tools that are capable of enabling the laser shield in multiplayer games.


After all, jjshieldjjshieldjjshieldjjshield doesn't work in anything other than Single Player.

The ultimate memory edit in JJ2: secretly enabling cheats online.

But yes, I'm quite sure Epic didn't anticipate that JJ2 would eventually have not one but a few hacking groups dedicated to it.

Sry that i post 1 Year later, but now
i have an Wishlist:

• Maybe more tilesets in one Level.

• If you add frames to an animation, you dont need to click the frames many times.

• Let the BG-Layer (WITHOUT Textured Background) Auto-X/Y and X/Y work.

• Allow tilesets 24-Bit-BMP's.

• Allow to change BG-Color at tileset making (instead of black).

• More Layers .

• Tileset-Selection Tab more stable (example: if you go out'a the Tab, it closes).

• Function "Erase Password" (instead of that code "nEobEo GRYToLLE ANd OVerLOrD").

• EDIT: Making the Colored Letters "|" like at Chat (i mean that: if you press "|", the next words are colored in the same color. But at JCS you need to type "§0#|B|||||||l|||||||A").

Hope you will still see (myb Use some of it) it

RedMser
P.S.: My first post

You can get colored text by putting the # symbol before what you want to be colored, although it creates a cycle of different colors, not just shifting to the next color.

Most of the other ideas sound somewhat more difficult to implement, although I would agree that they sound useful. I know exactly what you mean by the tileset selection tab problem, and that definitely bugs me too.

Originally Posted by RedMser

Function "Erase Password" (instead of that code "nEobEo GRYToLLE ANd OVerLOrD").

Theres custom JCS exes that will automatically bypass any password.
I don't know if I still have one, but I'll get in touch with you if I do.

Originally Posted by Troglobite

You can get colored text by putting the @ symbol before what you want to be colored, although it creates a cycle of different colors, not just shifting to the next color.

Isn't "@" symbol for new raw?
For ex. Troglobite @Likes @To play JJ2
you will get

Troglobite
Likes
To play JJ2
text in game :P

Yep, that's true. # is used for colour.

Originally Posted by RedMser

Sry that i post 1 Year later, but now
i have an Wishlist:

• Maybe more tilesets in one Level.

• If you add frames to an animation, you dont need to click the frames many times.

• Let the BG-Layer (WITHOUT Textured Background) Auto-X/Y and X/Y work.

• Allow tilesets 24-Bit-BMP's.

• Allow to change BG-Color at tileset making (instead of black).

• More Layers .

• Tileset-Selection Tab more stable (example: if you go out'a the Tab, it closes).

• Function "Erase Password" (instead of that code "nEobEo GRYToLLE ANd OVerLOrD").

• Making the Colored Text "|" like at Chat.

Hope you will still see (myb Use some of it) it

RedMser
P.S.: My first post

Well, I'm pretty sure some of those are JJ2 issues, not JCS ones.

EDIT:
By the way, would a JCS+ program be possible now? I know Neobeo made one and all, but one that's actually available. What with Reworder and WebJCS, something like this would be within reason, wouldn't it?

Definitely I'd like the ability to post multiple events on one tile. I've been trying many ways around this limitation but there are only so many solutions :\

That's definitely an example of something that you'd need to change JJ2 for.

Let me try to shift the discussion here a little. There've been a lot of ideas, but I suspect that over the years most or all of the really good and feasible ones have already been mentioned. (And to be honest, a large percentage of those were in the very first post of the thread.) Rather than just features, what would people like to see as an interface for a new JJ2 (et al) level editor? I feel that the actual coding is no longer all that difficult.

My current idea is kind of akin to a graphics program. Any given level would have a single window, which would basically be a combination of the edit and parallax view windows in JCS, in that all the layers would be visible (and scroll at their relative speeds) but you could only edit one at a time. Some combination of popup menus, dropdown menus, and hotkeys would allow you to affect how opaque non-active layers were at any given time. You could have multiple levels open at a time, MDI-style, and there'd be a dedicated tileset window which would display the tileset for whichever level you were working on at the time. This could be docked to one side of the master window or left to float and be moved freely. There'd also be at least one other movable or dockable window for things like drawing options. Animated tiles would be a popup window selectable from the menu somewhere, but not visible all the time.

Originally Posted by Unknown Rabbit

My current idea is kind of akin to a graphics program. Any given level would have a single window, which would basically be a combination of the edit and parallax view windows in JCS, in that all the layers would be visible (and scroll at their relative speeds) but you could only edit one at a time. Some combination of popup menus, dropdown menus, and hotkeys would allow you to affect how opaque non-active layers were at any given time. You could have multiple levels open at a time, MDI-style, and there'd be a dedicated tileset window which would display the tileset for whichever level you were working on at the time. This could be docked to one side of the master window or left to float and be moved freely. There'd also be at least one other movable or dockable window for things like drawing options. Animated tiles would be a popup window selectable from the menu somewhere, but not visible all the time.

I agree with all of this. I also think the interface could be improved in a way that adds a lot of functionality to JCS, though:

There are a number of things which you can do with j2l files that can only be achieved via external programs, such as reworder.exe. Having tools like this available in JCS itself would be convenient (some sort of low level tile cache editor). Saving the level should NOT reset the tile cache, unless it absolutely has to (or you tell it to). No more rwmacro stuff.

A better editor for text strings would be nice. Reworder.exe also contains this. However, I would also like to be able to colour text strings without having to type ||||||| after each letter (just have the program add them automatically and hide them from the user). Text should be displayed in colour within the editor itself.

There's also some weird stuff like editing the speed of layer 4 (this only makes a level look weird, which is why it's locked in JCS, but it's still possible to hack a j2l file this way). Basically, I don't think the editor should lock away things like this, even if there isn't much use to it.

Further customization of jcs.ini would be good. Right now you can move events around and rename them, but you can't change the structure of the event tree itself. For example, there will always be an "enemies" tree with "bad guys" and "end bosses" categories, currently.

I'd like to see improved tools for placing tiles within a level. This includes simple things like flood fill and line drawing, and more complex things like being able to lay down certain patterns of tiles. That last one would be hard to make, though.

The edit window should display more information. There should be a toggle which switches between displaying events as JCS does now, and displaying them as sprites. For things like sucker tubes, which don't have sprites, extra information can still be given (for example, an arrow pointing in the direction the tube goes). Springs could have a line extending from them which shows how high they take you. Lighting events should have a circle around them which shows how far they extend. That sort of thing.

There should be a way of keeping track of warps and trigger zones. A good start would be able to search for say, warp target #50, or display all warp targets, or that sort of thing. Perhaps some sort of labeling system could also be helpful - you can name trigger 10 "door trigger" so you always know what it is (though I'm not sure how easily you can save that in a j2l file).

An MCE editor would simplify things a lot, especially for more complex MCEs (ie anything involving more than 3 events). What you would do is tell the editor to place an MCE at a certain spot, fill in all the info, and then the editor would put down all of the necessary stuff so your MCE works the way you want it to. Then you can have easy regenerating trigger crates.

When placing an ambient sound effect, the editor should give you a list of all the sound IDs that actually work, and allow you to preview them.

I'd like to see some kind of error checking. This would scan the level for things like warp targets placed to the right of solid tiles (these get you stuck), missing warp targets, flipped scenery tiles which will cause access violations, missing start positions (crashes MP levels), scenery events placed on non-animated tiles, and so on.

Finally, "save and run" should be a little more advanced: I want to easily be able to play as spaz or lori, choose the difficulty mode, test in modes other than single player, and so on, right out of JCS.

I agree with nearly all of that, in turn; I think the tile cache should be reset on each save, because otherwise filesizes would be ridiculous, but there should be some independent word editor within the program. .rwmacro files suck, though, I agree. As far as I can tell, you can throw as much information into a .j2l file as you want and JJ2 won't notice it, as long as you're relying on the file never being saved in JCS.

Some of those things I'm a little uncomfortable with on the grounds that they're very JJ2-specific, and I'd like to see a .j2l level editor that can accommodate other games using the same level files equally well, including but not limited to Battery Check. Things like spring heights and specific errors to check for would have to be in another file somehow, maybe an .ini but rather more complicated.

Do you have a suggestion for an exact way of implementing the Save & Run choices? I agree in principle and put as many options as I could in Reworder, but it feels a little clunky that way, and I'm not sure how to implement save and run as Spaz for 1.23 anyway.

The save and run thing could, for example, pop up a box asking you which character and difficulty you want. Then you could just have a 'last used' button, or just a quick save and run.