Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

oh, ok I used this thing some years now and never testet j2fff xDD so woops :D

This is exactly what Overlord’s j2ff does, except j2ff can also recompile them for you. (Granted, the recompilation messes up on TSF-only levels, but otherwise it’s all good.)

woops, saved it one time in 1.24 jcs, but I made it in 1.23 xD

Edit: Converted it back and reuploaded it…

Why bother using the 1.23 version if you made the level in TSF?

nice

Well yeah, as StarLORD says it’s certainly the best program put on J2O today so far, but frankly that doesn’t say much since it’s 11:15 AM at the moment and utility uploads are typically rare. I therefore doubt that this achievement alone is enough to warrant a 10.0 rating and suggest you look at the application’s actual qualities instead, which are:

- It does what it says on the tin

That’s pretty much all of it; open a tileset with the program and it shows you the tileset’s image, much like J2O’s file preview feature. Sfaizst’s effort however uses black as a transparent color (black is what’s used internally in the tileset file) instead of the purple-blue that everyone’s used to because it’s what JCS uses. While the one color isn’t inherently better than the other it’s always a wise idea to stick to what people are used to if there is no particular reason not to do so.

I imagine the typical use of this utility would be quickly checking out a tileset from inside Windows Explorer. That can certainly be useful and the utility eliminates the tedious work of opening up JCS, scrolling down the tileset list, looking for the correct set (which can be rather hard when you have a few hundred sets) and loading it.

That’s pretty much where the feature list stops though as once you’ve opened a tileset with the program not much can be done with it. You can’t view the masks, export the tileset image or do stuff with the palette. So while this app does do what it promises to do, it doesn’t do anything else apart from that, limiting its use. Still worth a download if you have a large set of tilesets you’d like to check.

(Honestly, I mostly wrote this review to balance out StarLORD’s ridiculous 10. A shorter version would’ve been “what Violet said”)

This program is somewhat functional, but I’m not sure what use it has. First off it’s not even all that good at displaying tilesets: the window isn’t fixed width, even though the contents are, and for some reason there’s a black margin to the left of the tileset image so you can’t have nothing but the image in the window. Not that you’d want to, since the information displayed at the bottom of the window is actually wider than a tileset. The transparent color, as noted, is black, unlike the traditional purple, and this cannot be modified. It takes longer to load a tileset than JCS does, and displays only the image, not the clipping or transparency masks.

• Function to create (and presumably begin editing) a new level using the selected tileset
• Function to list all levels using that tileset
• Grid view
• Number of repeated tiles
• Number of animated tiles possible using that tileset
• Export to image
• Clipping/transparency mask view
• Palette extraction (and saving as .pal) and importation
• Really any kind of editing capabilities at all
• Any direct exportation functions (but I guess j2ff already does that)
• Function to change version
• 1.10o support
• Palette-sensitive events preview (as in JPS)
• Integrate tileset viewing algorithm into the Windows Explorer Preview Pane instead

However, not a single one of those possibilities is realized, and this program, incredibly, does just what it says on the box: it shows you the image of the tileset. It’s competently written, and the code should be a good base for actual utilities down the line, but right now, this is no more than a proof of concept uploaded to J2O instead of posted to the JCF or left on the uploader’s HD as a stepping stone towards future projects.

P.S. StarLORD: If you’re interested in finding the best utility upload of each day, I have another recent upload to point you towards…

Works on WinXP.
Shows transparent color as black.

well, it seems Sfaizst came up with an pretty program. for the use off clients so they lose hearts when joining a server. the buttons and stuff makes it really easy to use, and the detects aren’t really a problem i guess since they’re not many jazz.exe’s that are different then the names stated their.

their is one thing i noticed tough, the utility works from the client. not as a setting from the admin on the server. in that case.. to let real concepts work with Coop, then all clients need to run this utility. which is quite a hard job and irritating.

also, it is a windowed program beside JJ2.. which is actually bad. We don’t really appriociate to run more programs at once just for jj2.. you should have made a patch for it instead. so it patches jj2 to it’s new upgrades.

however.. good job. to come up with this. i don’t say this is bad. unfortunately, it’s awesome. but you should try to make those points i stated here. ( for instance ask blur to put it in jj2+ as an option) if you manage these fix these annoying things. then it will also upgrade your rating.

Yeah! Thank you very much Sfaizst!
You fixed this Bug in a few hours, nice =)

Thx u, i hate this bug. This was rly unfair.. And now i can play with lose hearts :)

[Start making your one-liner reviews quick PLEASE. ~cooba]