In any case, JJ2+ continues to support Windows XP, despite the dangers of people using it in any other context.

I'm sure you have your reasons, but the fact remains that you are using an operating system, connected to the internet (I assume), which is not equipped to deal with the attack surface exposed by doing so. This is even more true now than when I wrote that previous post. Perhaps you have weighed the pros and the cons, and made sure there is no personal data at all on the PC, et cetera.

But from experience I feel it's safe to say that many other people who played JJ2 on XP, three years ago at least, had not carefully considered the disadvantages of doing so, and simply did so because 'it still works' or because they did not want to go through the hassle of upgrading or switching. That remains a bad idea, and if anyone reading this is still using XP for that reason, I again strongly urge them to upgrade.

The same goes for Windows 7 users.

Hello,

Hey, I’m sure that people still using Windows XP or 7 are very old-school people who never have any simple consideration for recent opinions or facts.

I've had much better luck running JJ2+ with recent versions of Wine than anything Windows ever offered since 8 came along.

Besides odd micro stutters, the problem of losing connection in-game after switching from fullscreen to windowed kept persisting all the way to the latest version of Windows 10 (build 2004). Alberto's ddraw.dll substitute at least made fullscreen mode manageable.

Hi everyone again! It's been a while... I'm happy to continues the Windows XP support of the Plus. Because the my laptop is weak to Windows 7 or above.

New release (5.7)
Download from J2O | Download from ModDB | Download from GOG (or use GOG Galaxy)

The full list of changes can be found over here.

If you are having trouble with the latest version, report the problem in this thread! General discussion of JJ2+ is fine in this thread too. For less urgent bug reports or suggestions, please visit our dedicated issue tracker instead.

Yay!

Related to the anti-cheating updates, here's a long article I wrote with some ruminations on JJ2+'s (lack of) anti-cheating features if that's something you're interested in.

trojan virus wacatac.d3!ml
 

Violet, Windows Defender is flagging both of your downloads as containing the trojan virus wacatac.d3!ml.

partayyyy its finally betterified :D i love it!

Thank you JJ2+ developers for the continued support and the awesome new features. Your work directly invigorates the community. My favourite in this update is the "rescalable window" option.

I am sorry to potentially sow distrust here, but my Windows 10 antivirus tags the "plus_install.exe" downloaded from Violet CLM's link ("Download from J2O") as a virus, more specifically "Trojan:Win32/Wacatac.D3!ml". Respectfully asking, can you offer an explanation for this alert?

The same issue has been brought up in another thread here (note that the thread starter mentions 3 other pieces of antivirus software that don't detect anything).

It's hard to guess what Windows Defender has an issue with precisely, but it's probably the usual: it's a rarely downloaded file from an unknown source, it's new and Defender hasn't seen it before, and it modifies an exe file on your computer to run its own code. To antivirus software, that sounds scary. Perhaps it also detects some specific byte pattern that just happened to occur naturally by chance within the file.

It's always hard to know, because antivirus software relies on heuristics. It tries to be usually right but there's just no way to reliably tell malware apart from safe software, and antiviruses are generally closed-source so we can't just check with them and figure out which of the things we did triggered an alert (which makes perfect sense, because if we could, so could malware developers).

Just out of interest, would that mean that an antivirus eventually stops detecting it because some magic download number has been reached?

Not directly. I think Google Chrome takes download count directly into account and warns you if an executable file is rarely downloaded, but Chrome is a web browser. An actual antivirus would probably have to go further than that. I know Avast has the thing where if it suspects a file is dangerous, it suggests that you send it for further analysis. Who knows what that means; probably still heuristics but ones that take so long to run that people wouldn't want to do it on their own personal computers, so they have servers do it.

Theoretically, a large number of downloads (by unique people all running the same antivirus software) could lead to the software coming to conclusion that "OK, a lot of people are running this file instead of just 5, maybe we should actually perform deeper analysis on it," which could effectively mean that a magic threshold has been reached and now the file is suddenly no longer considered malware, but internally it would be because it has qualified for further analysis which found it safe. This makes sense in theory - if the more accurate analysis is more computationally expensive and performed on company servers, the company may want to avoid using it for every report, and the number of users it affects is a decent metric for estimating how urgent that is. Does any antivirus software actually employ this strategy? I have no clue. They're black boxes as far as I know.

Thank you Seren for your thorough reply.

Had the same issue for some reason

What version of JJ2+ are you running? That bug was fixed in 4.3.

Have fun using our mod! I'd provide some tips but apparently you already know how our software works better than those of us who've been developing it for the last 13 years.

Same here, it's working very neat with my LK AVALON version. Not sure what Seren wants to say.

I don't know what shady version of Jazz Jackrabbit 2 you've got, but the mod doesn't and won't ever work on the official LK Avalon version.

Hi there, this is my first post on these forums (despite being a JJ fan since... forever). I managed to patch my copy of the game from 1.20 to 1.23, and download the Plus version. I can't wait to test all of the extra content! :)

New release (5.8)
Download from J2O | Download from ModDB | Get from GOG

This release was prompted by solving a problem Windows 7 users were having when they closed the game, and it got buffed up with fixes to stuff reported in our issue tracker. Other features are actively in the works but weren't quite ready yet for release. The full list of changes can be found over here.

If you are having trouble with the latest version, report the problem in this thread! General discussion of JJ2+ is fine in this thread too. For less urgent bug reports or suggestions, please visit our dedicated issue tracker instead.

Finally, a "May" release!

If you'd like to help with future versions of JJ2+ but are not in the habit of checking our issue tracker, please consider taking a look at it. We're running a bit low on testers right now, so I've posted several topics about ways that people can help out even without writing any C++.

New release (5.9)
Download from J2O | Download from ModDB | Get from GOG

This release fixes a problem experienced by users of Windows 8 and Windows 10 when enabling full screen mode in online servers. It also reverts a bug fix made in 5.8 following some community discussion. Please continue to use that thread for future discussion of the issue, in case you think some alternate solution can be arrived upon besides reversion.

If you are having trouble with the latest version, report the problem in this thread! General discussion of JJ2+ is fine in this thread too. For less urgent bug reports or suggestions, please visit our dedicated issue tracker instead.

For the next jj2+ update, is it possible to have a feature where we can hide the interface elements (lives, hearts, points, weapons) without adding plus features? So that non-plus "save game" levels would look nicer.

The goal is to someday have a way for scripts to say "hey, even though I'm a script it's okay to save in this level, I promise I won't break anything if you do that."

That would be an amazing day!

Only now got the chance to say what an amazing patch this is. Just wondering, will widescreen resolution support ever be possible?

Thanks! Widescreen is supported in the form of the 800x450 resolution, which uses a 16:9 aspect ratio. That's available in JJ2+ for windowed mode, but if you want it in full screen, you'll need to add it to your monitor's list of resolutions, because JJ2 gets its list of available full screen resolutions directly from your monitor. In my case, that means running a program called "Intel(R) Graphics Settings," choosing "Display," then "Custom Resolutions." You may have that, or you may need to run other equivalent software from different vendors depending on who made your computer.

It's incredible how much you guys were able to expand vanilla JJ2's abilities, and you just keep going and it's getting better and better!

Are there any chances to ever see JJ2+ for Linux? (I know about Wine, please, lets not talk about it LoL). Just very curious: is it hard to make a native Linux application out of programs like JJ2, JCS, MLLE, etc? What would the work mainly consist of? Would you have to rewrite the whole code, or is it just a matter of inserting some lines? Please be gentle on me, as I'm completely code-illiterate!

Thanks for the positive feedback!

The way JJ2+ works is that it take an existing windows application, jazz2.exe, and sneakily adds some code at various memory locations, mostly code telling jazz2.exe to call functions contained in plus.dll instead of (or in addition to) the equivalent original code. The bulk of the program, the framework in which all those sneaky insertions are based, is still a windows application. I don't see how the same principles could be used to make it run on other operating systems, but that's in part because I know absolutely nothing about writing programs that run on other operating systems. Learning more about the subject would mean doing a significant amount of research that might not lead to anything, and--in all honesty--seems pointless when Wine exists. My intuition is that such time and energy would be more productively spent working on fixes or features that benefit a wider chunk of the userbase. We are, ultimately, a team of hobbyists: we have no resources for bringing on specialists to tackle problems like this that need less familiar bodies of knowledge.

As for MLLE, it's open source, and I have been told there is something called "Mono" that is somehow involved in making C# programs (such as MLLE) run on other operating systems (such as Linux). That's the extent of my knowledge on the subject, but anyone who knows more is welcome to give it a try.

Suffice to say Wine wouldn't need to exist if it were reasonably realistic to convert a Windows executable to a Linux binary without the source code. The required effort is immense and the gains are negligible so we're not presently considering that to be within the scope of the project. Instead consider following attempts at multi-platform open source implementations of the game, such as Jazz 2 Resurrection.

New release (5.10)
Download from J2O | Download from ModDB | Download from GOG

Check out the highlights at ModDB, or read the full list of changes.

For bug reports, feature requests, participating in public opinion polls, and participating in calls for volunteers, please check out our issue tracker.

Love the christmas chronicles art for the menu, very good job! keep up this mod as it's way too important!

New release (5.11)
Download from J2O | Download from ModDB | Download from GOG

Read the full list of changes.

For bug reports, feature requests, participating in public opinion polls, and participating in calls for volunteers, please check out our issue tracker.

Hi! Horrendously long time no see.

First and foremost, thank you to everyone who keeps this project going. It has gotten so many new updates since I last played this game. The advanced scripting stuff is cool and really blows open the doors of what can be done with the engine… but being the bore that I am, I'm just as easily impressed by the normal updates, like the unused frames being re-added and the like! Fantastic stuff!

In any case, I was reading the change log and I noticed one particular change. An April 2010 update changed the customization options for Lori. Or rather, it made them actually work! (They look great, by the way!) I noticed, though, that there were two updates on that same day: Build 2010-04-08 and Build 2010-04-08 A, which says the color options were further changed. Being the curious sort, I went to the old version archive to do some comparing… only to find that there was no 2010-04-08 build. Only the alternate build from later that day was uploaded!

So, all that being said, I was wondering if the original 10-04-08 build was floating around somewhere. I'm really curious as to what Lori looked like in that build!

Cheers and thanks!

Hi JC! I haven't found a download link for the original 10-04-08, but here's a comparison picture.

Added links to the color charts and made an observation.
 

I had to right-click and open it in a new window (is that how Digiex normally works?), but yeah, I can see the small differences.

It's… odd… that the installer or code for that one specific version seems to have vanished. And kind of disappointing, too. But I mean, it's not like anyone needs it. I, myself, was just working on some little charts comparing the different interpretations of each color to… uh… each color. Nothing important. Just pure curiosity for curiosity's sake.

Thank you, though.

Edit:
I finished my Lori color charts. I'll go ahead and post these here just for laughs.
(I doubt anyone wants or needs these, realistically…)

- Lori's Color Options (v1.24 (The Secret Files) Unmodified)
- Lori's Color Options (JJ2+ Beta (Build 2010-04-08 A))

Also just noticed this: the shading on the edges of her clothes (and parts of the rest of her) never change. They're consistently various shades of umber. This isn't really something you notice unless you're looking for it or you're zoomed in pretty close. Interesting…

Edit: I also just noticed… the stripe on Lori's shorts doesn't change color, either. The stripe is actually supposed to be pink, according to her official art, and the stripe actually is pink in the big character preview… but the stripe got converted to grey on the sprites. Yet another sprite oversight on P2I's part, I guess.

[img]https://i.imgur.com/P6dqeva.gif[/img]
(Excuse the weird palette distribution. JazzTool is kind of… not perfect.)

In any case, I think it'd be neat if the stripe changed colors, too. I'm sure it could be done with scripting rather than editing the sprites. As I said, the stripe is grey – a completely unique color on her sprites, in fact. Just a thought!

New release (5.12)
Download from J2O | Download from ModDB | Download from GOG

Read the full list of changes.

We recognize that this build was sent to GOG for publication fully a month ago, and that it took them an additional month to release it to their Galaxy client. We're researching our options going forwards for easier distribution, and appreciate your patience.