A Present from Digiex to the Community! Source :)
 

Digiex is proud to present a surprise to the Community of Jazz 2 Online.

As you may know, Digiex currently has a deal with Epic Games surrounding hosting the official Jazz Jackrabbit 2 List Server (list.jazzjackrabbit.com). Well as Digiex has become a commercial company now, we were looking into ways to expand our business portfolio and went into discussion with Epic Games surrounding taking over the List Server for Unreal Tournament.

This led to myself and Matt Hill (Insanenutter) from Digiex heading over to Epic’s HQ in North Carolina to discuss with Tim (webmaster) at Epic Games about taking it over. You may ask what we get from it, but the advert revenue based on the homepage the Internet Games Browser UT uses is massive and its very cost effective for Digiex to take over and allows Epic Games to focus on their resources on their new projects like Gears of War 2. You will see a press release about this soon on Digiex.net.

But the news that concerns you, while I was there I got to meet a few big players, like Mark Rein and Cliff Bleszinski and had a chat with them for a while. Cliff was very interested in talking to me about how the Jazz Jackrabbit community is going, he was honestly amazed about how the game was still going strong with a community. Anyways, while talking I brought up about the desire to gain access to the source code so us as a community could work on fixing some of the remaining bugs left in the game. He said he had no problem with that and would look into it. After that we sorted out business about UT list server which your hear about soon.

The weird thing is, two days ago I got an email from CliffyB, turns out he managed to find the source code and had attached it to the email. At first I thought to myself is this really it? I kept it quiet for a while, then spoke to Overlord who looked at it for me and confirmed it really is the source code for the version 1.20. It may not be the latest, but its honestly better than nothing!

Anyways, I was going to work with j2nsm and j2o about how to do this correctly, and then realized I really don’t think anyone deserves sole access to this, so I decided to share this with all of you.

You can download the source code at: http://jazz.digiex.net/source

If you honestly don’t believe it, just download the zip file and take a look. Also Overlord can confirm how real it is.

Stay tuned to J2o and Digiex.net as more information surrounding the source code and what’s possible will be talked about, but for those of you who just can’t wait, feel free to download and take a look now.


Happy Jazz’ing! And enjoy the Anniversary Bash when its up. :-)

This is awesome. I'm already making my own Skitch Possum fangame, the code is that simple to use.
[IMG]http://forums.ffshrine.org/customavatars/avatar61659_1.gif[/IMG]

He will be able to attack with melee weapons such as his other arm.

Looking forward to it.

Awesome! I had seen some hints about this in the past few weeks so it doesn't come as a total surprise to me, but it's still super duper. Though I don't really know C++ I took a look at the files anyway and it seems to be all there and somewhat well-documented too. Nimrod earns the utmost respect of the whole community!

This is UNREAL

Is this an April Fools joke. Right? I man come on!

Why would anyone joke about such an important thing?! For shame SonicNathan!

This is very elaborate!

Sweet! I actually got it to compile without too much trouble. Lots of warnings though. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get the game to actually run yet. I'm guessing I don't have all the resources I need in the right places, but I'll keep on working on it to figure it out. This is pretty awesome.

Is there any license to go along with this, or are we free to do whatever we want with it?

Oh, and I don't suppose you got a copy of JCS hanging around somewhere, do you? ;o

I wonder why Epic gave the source for 1.20 if they could easely look further in their 'archive' to also pick the source for the 1.23 update, TSF code, and ofcourse a copy of JSC. If we organize the use of the source in a right way, the community could move to a whole new level. However, it would have been nicer if the JSC source was included, you can imagine how much easier the JSC+ project would have been then right?:-)

April Fools joke *yawn*

You wasted that much time on a joke that obvious?

someone banhamer dx and crimmiclown

now plx thx

I THINK SO!

Now presenting some of the code found inside the packets!

:D:D:D:D:D

Well, so much for jazz2 no source modification :(

Hahaha :|

This joke is probably your lamest yet

This is an april fools joke and really bad one.

I hate this day.

Hopefully Nimrod's provider doesn't mind the waste of bandwidth, I think not only a few community members but also some guest have downloaded the package...

Now I hope Ambesoft won't make the same joke with their JJ3 version....

(nvm)

Also, the jj2 source code is made in C, not C++.

The source code prank is pretty good. Nimrod's bestseller story about CliffyB wasn't.

You had me right through the news post. With great anticipation, I moved my cursor over the link... then reality kicked in.

Nevertheless, I was curious to see what it would be. At 43 MB, I was expecting a video or something. Where's my video?

Because it was a joke. Ok? Now apologize to me or I"ll plant a bomb in your hard drive.

I believe that if we had the source code the JJ community wouldn't be as cool as it is. Just look at what happened at DOOM. The community is all split up because of the many different source ports.

I might be an aborted fetus but at least I have a sense of humor

April Fetus :(

I have to admit, though, attaching a 50 MB file to an email definitely strikes me as something CliffyB would do.

Well now April the 1st is ending so those of you who haven't got the picture from reading should know it was an April Fools.

It's a bit of a bummer that someone went ahead and spoiled it very early on by showing the hidden messages within the fake source, the idea behind the whole thing was to provide some really convincing source code (be it, not the real thing) and then people would find out on there own while playing with it. I don't know if the earlier on posts if people were really falling for it, or if they were keeping up with the cover not to spoil it for others. (You don't deserve a medal for spoiling it, all you do is annoy the people who put a lot of effort into it)

Despite criticism from Cooba the very part he calls lame isn't far from the truth. Other Jazz'ers who were disappointed and found the joke not funny, may I point them to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day

Its to be expected, back years ago when we pulled the 1.25 prank and others, it was pretty much guranteed if anyone looked at the date the post was posted and the time zone, should have known or expected at least disappointment at the end.

Despite the belief of the cover story being rubbish by the previously mentioned person, the idea was to combine truth, and twist it slightly. Be it Digiex is in talks with Epic regarding UT and I've had regular contact with people their, perhaps not travelling 1000's of miles from the UK to see them, but at least electronically I have been speaking. Whatever comes from that, no doubt you will find out and yes JJ2 has been talked about(similarly as talked about in the hoax) and as always everyone says they will look into finding the source, but no one ever seems to find it or release it. Don't honestly expect any breaking news in that department, but people was still working hard to try and seek the source. If and when it ever gets released, rest assured it would be properly announced by J2o or J2nsm.

I liked the joke. Especially the actual zipfile with filenames and all that actually look convincing was well-done. Though come on, "source code released" on this date, it can hardly become less original ;)

As for the continued efforts of actually getting the source code for real, I've said it before and I will say it again: awesome. Whether we actually get something or not, it's good that someone is actually doing something more than just making plans on eventually maybe perhaps possibly doing something in a dead subforum.

I found it funny but i dind't laugh

I laugnhed on the second joke though

maybe it's just because I'm Polish, but stikll, this doesn't have that much impact as it could've (then again, liuke said before, maybe it's because it's too obvious(

Funny thing is the news post wasn't part of the trick. It was posted because violet was fooled by the fake source code.

I thought this joke was a little meanspirited but I applaud the effort that went into it and the fact that it managed to trick the j2o news itself. Even I was actually tricked by this for a little bit (at least in the sense that I bothered to download it) because even though I suspected this was a joke, I also thought that it would be an absurd waste of time and bandwidth to pull this off.

Indeed. I was preparing the Polish J2O when suddenly this appeared and my plans went haywire because there was another april fool's joke already to be the top of the news 8)

I was fooled by it in the sense of "probably a joke but it would be awesome to post it today and make everyone believe it is a lame joke but actually it isn't! so let's check it out anyway".

I think this was put together really well. Not just a link to "Haha, April Fools!", but many files of what appeared to be the project and code for the actual game. Well done.

Well constructed, a little too expected :(

My "bum chum Overlord" as you call him didn't seem to mind though :lori:

Wait, you guys fell for it? I read the topic's name and I knew it's a joke. I only remembered it's April Fools when I saw the other comments :O.

This joke was partially my work too. Everything inside the zip file was my work and it took a while to make something that would appear to be the real deal. However I can't say I take the responsibility for he rest of it.