Random question
 

A while ago I took a look at the thread Evilmike made about his next SP pack, and was interested in how it mentioned the .dll files and that. Just out of curiosity, would it be remotely possible to do something along those lines so that Jazz would use a custom anims.j2a? I mean you could use it to make 'new' enemies or something like that. Just wondering.

JJ2 will use whatever anims.j2a it finds in the same folder as its .exe file, assuming you've patched it to accept .j2a files with different checksums, and Jazz Sprite Dynamite will do that for you.

I feel I should say that while the stuff I mentioned in that thread is possible, it was mostly "best case scenario" type stuff. Due to more recent developments (or to put it better, the lack of developments) I most likely won't be doing any of the crazier stuff that was posted about. At the moment it is looking like plan B will be the way to go, which is to wait for JJ2+ to support more than 2 exits in a level, and then just use that. Maybe in conjunction with a simple background "utility" in the vein of karrtotshire, if certain problems regarding saving and loading games can be resolved.

Interestingly, a custom anims.j2a would probably be the one thing that can actually be done, right now, with existing tools. All it requires is the skill to make your own sprites. Of course, without some more advanced hacking, your new enemies would behave (and sound) exactly like the old ones. But that's no problem, since most jj2 enemies just walk back and forth anyway.

With some creativity, you can do a lot with enemies that just look different though. The game seems to use sprite collisions for hurting enemies, so you can delete weapon sprites and they'll become unusable as I believe was discussed in another thread. Also, I've played around before with clearing the "idle" sprite of enemies like fish that will charge at you. This makes it impossible to snipe them at a distance, and your only chance to kill them occurs when they're already attacking you. You could probably also edit the monkey or dragon enemies to create a banana or flame turret that couldn't be destroyed without TNT.

That's almost what I meant. I just thought that for SP packs it would be a pain for people to have to swap the anims.j2a back and forth manually. It would also only work for regular 1.23 and TSF, not 1.23x or those.

The largest problem is (in my opinion) the filesize of Anims.j2a. I don't believe that someone will let you upload 0.02MB level, 0.2MB tileset, 1.5MB music and 9MB j2a file adding some custom enemies.

If there was a demonstrated demand for it, I don't imagine it would be too hard to separate out the edited animations and make a program to inject them into existing .j2a files. However, there is no demonstrated demand.

I personally would be more interested in the possibility to do these injections mid-levelpack and then revert them. So for example in one level you have Hatters changed to, say, Doofus Guards, and in the next level they're Hatters again. I THINK it could be done with a third party program running in the background...

You mean something like the XMPlay sound engine replacing the Galaxy system in a non-plusified JJ2 with a plus.exe running in the background? I don't know any coding, but if that was possible in JJ2+, I guess it could be done.

:H

That's why I am not sure :gabber:

Although you couldn't actually upload it on J2O, it would be fine to upload it to some other website that allows large uploads (like mediafire), then upload a text file with the link to J2O. While it would obviously be nicer if there was a way to just upload the edited frames, it is by no means impossible to get a .j2a onto J2O where it could be reviewed and rated, even if it couldn't be directly uploaded there.

Please don't take that as an encouragement to put all kinds of (expiring) mediafire/rapidshare/whatever links on J2O though. I'd much rather see some sort of patching utility.

Yes, this is exactly what I meant. Just so that the third party program sees that Jazz2 has loaded 'whatever.j2l' and then switches from anims.j2a to anims2.j2a, or something. It would be cool in an SP pack, but yes, the filesize would be a problem...

Of course this could give some great effects, but in my opinion, it's a little too complicated. However, if someone will make such a program, I'll for sure use it in my levels. Or maybe two programs. One doing something with the filesize and one changing sprites in-game. It for sure sounds too complicated.

Agreed.