Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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

- Violet CLM