Jazz Twosday: JJ2+ v6.3
- Posted:
- 2 Sep 2025 at 04:08
- Source:
- JJ2+
Version 6.3 of JJ2+ is now available!
We took a break from the near-weekly feature releases to focus on an ongoing community discussion: how players (especially clients) in multiplayer servers should react to bullets shot by other players (especially enemies). We attempted to resolve this issue back in 5.8, without success, but there’s been renewed community interest, so we’ve rewritten the code and notably broken it down into three command settings, not just one.
When a client’s rabbit comes near a bullet, there are three different things that may cause the rabbit to move away from the bullet:
- If a client locally thinks that their rabbit is touched by a bullet, and that bullet was shot by an enemy, and the client is not currently blinking, the client will locally launch their rabbit into the air in recognition that they’re about to be injured. Sometimes this results in them moving out of the bullet’s trajectory, so the server does not think the rabbit is ever touched by the bullet, and therefore no damage is ever done. This behavior can be disabled by the new /bulletpush command.
- When a client rabbit is injured by a bullet, the client receives two sets of instructions for how far the rabbit should move: significantly upwards, like when a server rabbit or local splitscreen rabbit is shot, or not very far upwards, similar to touching a Hurt event. Based on network timing effects, either of these two instructions may arrive first and so it is largely random which one visibly happens. When /bulletpush is disabled, the new /injuryknockback command lets servers decide which of the two instructions to prioritize.
- When a seeker, RF, or TNT bullet (or some custom weapons) explodes near a player, it sends that player flying away from the center of the explosion. Based, again, on network timing effects, this may or may not override either or both of the two instructions mentioned above. Disabling the new /blastknockback command turns off this blast effect for greater consistency across all weapons. Crucially, even when the command is disabled, your own blasts still affect you, so you can still perform RF climbs, TNT jumps, and so on.
This is admittedly very complicated, and we hope the community will be able to identify a preferred solution or two that feel good to all players in all use cases, rather than rely forever on these three separate—yet somewhat related—settings. In the meantime, though, /bulletpush and /blastknockback are both enabled by default, meaning that unless a server deliberately changes either or both settings, gameplay should remain unchanged from 6.2 and earlier. This experimentation is all opt-in.
Also, the above only applies to 6.3 clients in 6.3 servers. 6.3 clients in older servers, as well as older clients in 6.3 servers, will assume the default settings, which is to say, the gameplay from 6.2 and earlier.
Anyway, we also found time in the last couple months to track down some bug reports, targeting oversights from 5.12c, 6.0, and 6.1a. More excitingly, the Race HUD is now even better than in 6.2, especially in the track preview during the pregame.
You can download 6.3 in-game or in-browser
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It is genuiely heartwarming to see the community still so dedicated to this game. I love JJ2+ and I wish servers were still as full as they were back before 2013. All your hard work on this mod is appreciated.
Thank you lune!
here is brief feedback to 6.3:
the feature fixes the "bug" of wrn's mut which makes ammo redirected by TNT invisible. redirected bullets are visible again. thanks alot.
since 6.3 and all 3 commands being turned off i dont recall seeing the kind of moments where u get hit and u get sent flying across like a third of the map at super high speed like in the issue i described in jj2+ issue tracker on 6th june 2023 ("extreme bullet pushing")
i was told blastknockback ON breaks the friendlyrf command, but it is no problem if blastknockback is off anyway.
i prefer it when all 3 commands are turned off. /bulletpush off is a nobrainer bcs it fixes bouncing off bullets without getting hit.
also it was sometimes rly annoying and frustrating to get pushed so high or far by bullets, especially for example when u rush to base to recapture but the defender hits u and pushes u far enough away from base so that the opponent can still sneak below u to score. but when players only get pushed/knockback over a short distance or the rabbit simply performs the injury backflip and that's it, the game experience is better. thats why i think it's best to have the other 2 commands turned off too. i rly like the game that way and i haven't seen anyone complain about the settings when all 3 are off either.
i havent seen any new bugs with all 3 commands being turned off, either.
overall 6.3 is a good update and when all 3 commands are turned off it's an improvement to the game and replaced a part of wrn's mutator.
This update addresses an issue(s) that has been central to discussions on CTF gameplay alterations over the last several years. And, while it doesn’t really affect me personally – it’s interesting to observe the plethora of options and variables that have been made available for players. I don’t have a personal opinion about whether the impact of bullet collisions should displace a character in a multiplayer games. However, it’s also a valid argument that in CTF, the displacement (or knockback) of a bullet collision is a legitimate move for preventing another player from scoring or from capturing, by pushing them off the base.
At the same time, it’s also fair to prefer to play games without characters being drastically pushed around by bullet collisions, especially when the bullet doesn’t even deal damage to the character. I think that ultimately it’s a choice that the administrators of game servers have to make, which of these parameters should be enabled or disabled, or players can decide for themselves. I would imagine that on average, reducing the impact of random factors (such as bullet collision knockback) would enable more intensely “competitive” gameplay, whereas the implementation of those very same random factors could make the game more entertaining from a “casual” perspective.
I thought it was funny the other day, in a CTF game I had the flag, and as soon as the other team lost the flag, a bullet from an opposing player knocked me directly onto the base for a score; but at the same time, that sort of a random score is moreso a result of luck than skill; in general that’s sort of anti-competitive when the outcome of a game depends on luck not skill – however when playing casually it’s somewhat amusing. The discrepancys between “casual” and “competitive” gameplay continue to accumulate, especially as CTF ranks for individual players become motivation for players who want to win, which is a newly implemented system in JJ2’s CTF scene, as well as CTF ladders and tournaments that are also even more motivation, and a part of the tradition of establishment within JJ2’s CTF scene.
It might be interesting to find out whether JJ2 CTF gameplay becoming more streamlined means that the outcome of tournaments is more likely that the team that deserves to win actually does win, or that the players that deserve to be highly ranked actually do place highly in the ranked ladder. I am relatively certain that without the element of luck, winning at CTF is something that has to be earned as a result of effort, as opposed to the time I was describing earlier when I scored from a bullet pushing my character onto the base, which was facilitated seemingly by random chance, not really a direct result of an effort that I made.