Hi

I'm impressed by the great community of this great game.

The latest patch Plus 5.5 works incredible on my Windows 10.

So, here's the question: Any way to play with HD resolutions?

I mean, I've probed the 800x600 in game and this begins to shuttering (I've a AMD RX 470, so I don't think that my hardware is causing this shuttering).

So, that's all.

I hope that you can tell me a way to play in HD res (HD 1080, 2K 1440, etc)

See ya!

800x600 is the largest resolution that JJ2+ supports or is planned to support, because unlike some games, changing the game's resolution affects how much of the level around you you can see, rather than just the image quality.

That behaviour has three undesirable effects:
- If you can see all the surroundings, you won't be surprised (making the game easier).
- If the game engine tries to paint too far beyond level boundaries, it may show "garbage" or even crash.
- Playing at 4K would make every tile and sprite so small that you'll need a magnifying glass to see anything.

Maybe you wish a complete redesigning of tiles and sprites in HD, so you can see the same character size at a higher resolution. With the current game engine, I guess it is impossible. If source code is released, it would only take some changes to code and a complete rewrite of tiles; if it is not released, it would take a complete rewrite of code (plus the graphic work).

An idea that has been floated (by me, at least) is to allow full-screen play with a letterboxed 800x600 game view, so the HUD can be moved outside of the actual game view.

But this is an area where JJ2's archaic nature really shows - it's not made to deal with as many pixels as the higher resolutions have and this makes increasing max resolution a complicated affair. And given the fact that the gameplay resolution is unlikely to ever move beyond 800x600, it's probably not something we'll see anytime soon.

Yeah, even 800x600 is a tad bit jittery given Jazz2 was never supposed to show this much level area at once. We'd have to redo the game from scratch (and likely move from pixels to vectors to not make the game too easy and ridiculous looking) to ever get a truly HD pixel count.

that's very sad!

there's no possibility to obtain the source code?

too many games suffers the same dam problem

ex: blood 1, heretic 2, descent 3, star wars pod racer, etc

dam source code, dam developers, why they don't want release his source codes?

if we are in the 2017 year! come on!

well, my question point to the HD sprites and tiles, not to view more level around me (player character).

but, anyway, i see that here's another incredible game stucked in the low res by the fu... old engine.

however, thanks for all yours excelent responses.

i apreciated this a lot.

chers

The problem is not the source code, the problem is that redrawing every image in the game at a significantly higher resolution would require a ridiculous amount of time and money.

The only change I think would be worth making resolution-wise is increasing the max width to 854 so people can do widescreen 480p, although even that might not work properly, realistically speaking.

Originally Posted by Violet CLM

The problem is not the source code, the problem is that redrawing every image in the game at a significantly higher resolution would require a ridiculous amount of time and money.

but zup said:

If source code is released, it would only take some changes to code and a complete rewrite of tiles

if im not wrong, those means that with the source code this is more simple (not very) but viable.

FIRST: Not need to make a complete redrawing of every image
i know that exist many techniques for scaling with graphical filters that are called "re-scaling of pixel art"

examples....

• Scale3×
• Eagle
• 2×SaI
• Super 2×SaI and Super Eagle
• Etc

SECOND: If it were the case that need to make a partial redrawing until complete all the images
you talk about the cost or money, well, what is the purpose of a community?

if you look descent, they have DXX-Rebirth, D2X-XL and some others with a lot of work and time spended. the same thing with doom, they have doomsday, gzdoom, etc.

so, if you tell me that a community need time and money, well, they will have the enough time, and... money?

money?

Since when a community need money for doing things for a game that they love?

For something it's called "community", the community does thing for love, nostalgy or simply hobby.

Now, if you say that there is no community for doing things for love to jazz game, well, I acept you argument.

...but that would be sad, very sad.

Well, JJ2+ is a community product into which countless hours of free labour have been put, so I think your analysis is a little off the mark there. But manually redrawing every single sprite frame is a lot of work that also requires some specific skills (which only rarely overlap with programming skills), and the fact of the matter is that it doesn't look like anyone here is willing or able to do it. So that leaves commissioning someone to do it, which requires money.

The other games you mention all have larger communities or are 3D, which makes them hard to compare. You should also consider that JJ2+ exists, and adds a ton of new features and fixes to the game, much like the custom doom engines and whatnot.

Algorithmic rescalers are nice up to a point, and it would be cool to see whether they look any good on JJ2, but plugging them into JJ2's graphics systems is not trivial. If someone who knows a lot about old-school graphics engines like JJ2's volunteers to take a stab at it, they're welcome to do so - but that hasn't been the case so far.

I never say that JJ2+ community doesn't do nothing for Jazz, I say that to make things on Jazz engine is necessary to spend time, and money, well, you say that commissioning someone to do it, which requires money.

...so then? why the developers or someone not release the source code?

with the source code all this conversation will be more positive until now.

but the reality is that never will happen.

sadly.

Having the source code does not really have any bearing on how much work it is to re-draw the game's graphics. It might make it a little easier to tweak the game's graphics engine, but it's not a magic bullet where you change a number and suddenly the game knows how to draw more pixels, and anyway many of the graphics subsystems have already been tweaked or rewritten in JJ2+. Even if the source code were available, it's still the source code of a game that was designed to never run at resolutions higher than 640x480, and changing that would still be a lot of work.

As for why Epic Games does not seem to be interested in open-sourcing the game, your guess is as good as mine, but the fact of the matter is that they aren't and that is very unlikely to change.

Yeah, i supposed it

I mean, if you're willing to settle for a generic upscaling filter applied to JJ2's graphics output, instead of a prettier but inevitably doomed redrawing project, then sure, that's something that we'll probably look into at some point. Most of those filters are kind of terrible, and JJ2's graphics are much more complicated than Sonic 2's so I don't know how good any of them would actually look, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.

For all I know, there might be existing standalone programs that will apply an upscaling effect to another separate program? I don't want to try to google that but maybe someone else does.

Trust me, you don't want this.

But this on the other hand could come in handy. Keeping the max resolution at 800x600 and being able to add black borders around could be a nice thing.

Originally Posted by Violet CLM

The problem is not the source code, the problem is that redrawing every image in the game at a significantly higher resolution would require a ridiculous amount of time and money.

Hey it's a nice idea. But not gonna happen. Who has time for it?