Useless JJ2 stats
 

From time to time I run a python loop through all the JJ2 levels or tilesets or something, to uncover some bit of useless information that people might still find interesting. Here's a repository of those. Let me know if you have any specific data-driven questions that could be answered this way.

The official JJ2 changelog for version 1.20a mentions "New level masks implemented. Reduces the risk of players getting stuck in the scenery." Here's a full list of every tile mask that was changed between 1.20 and 1.24x (left is original, right is patched):

Here's how many official levels each food pickup appears in:
Eggplant does appear in CC99, though, in the user level XB-Kings-ea.j2l.

To compare, Here's how many levels uploaded to J2O prior to September 2017 each food pickup appears in:

Rough ratios of custom tilesets to official tilesets according to my 1.23 cache (2009 and earlier), J2O (2010 to 2017), and TSF cache (2018 and beyond):

Number of channels in official music files:

For every official tileset, images of all the tiles that are not used in any official levels.

I'm pretending that every palette of a tileset has the same tile layout, which is not quite true. (For example, the Castle1 foreground pillar tiles aren't shown here because Castle1n uses those tiles as a green curtain, which is used in the level.) Easter is counted as a Carrotus palette. Multiplayer levels are included. A tile appearing as a frame in an animated tile counts as it being used even if the animated tile itself is never used, so that's why you see the (unanimated) bottoms of bonus signposts but not the (animated) tops. If the same tile image appears multiple times in a tileset, all but (potentially) the first appearance are hidden.

Poor eggplant :(

How many tilesets there are with sizes in each range of hundred tiles. We can see the most common size for a tileset is between 900 and 999 tiles, and it's hugely uncommon to have more than 1099 tiles, which is understandable because the maximum size for a 1.23-compatible tileset is 1020 tiles. Alternate palettes are counted separately, because they are separate .j2t files: for example there are fully seventeen different Improved Medivo palettes, all of which are 960 tiles.

September 2017 is an arbitrary cutoff date in that it's when I got stijn's J2O dump, but it's also pretty convenient in that MLLE's "Save Tileset Images" tool was added just a few months later, and that would confuse the higher number data.

Well, that dilutes the data set given its original purpose. Alternate palettes should probably be discarded wholesale.

The trouble is, I don't want to manually scour hundreds of tilesets looking for the ones that are probably alternate palettes

Are you able to check for whether or not the mask images are identical?

Oh that's a good thought. I'll try this again later.

[img]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/597155742113595422/1095221963003269130/spritePalettes.gif[/img]
[img]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/597155742113595422/1095223252332318823/spritePalettes.png[/img]
Different official tilesets use (slightly) different colors for the sprite palette. Here's how they're grouped. For example, carrot1.j2t and easter99.j2t use the exact same colors, but carrot1n.j2t has different colors. What I'm calling "default" includes colon1, beach, beach2, jungle1, jungle2, inferno1, infernon, xmas1, xmas2, xmas3, town1, town2: almost every HH98/TSF tileset uses it (although hauntedh1 is very often totally unique), but even before then it was still the most common.

Generally, colors weren't made up from scratch each time, you see the same gradients recur across different tilesets in varying configurations. Here's the finer details:

thank you, now i know.

and knowning is half the battle.

mieli = puhallettu

Two versions exist of the 1.20s shareware release, one with version number 1.12 in the readme file and the left version of Share1 from this image, and another one that fixes both, with 1.20 in the readme and the right version of Share1 from the image.

[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/0BhxoFY.png[/IMG]

The Christmas Chronicles released with a number of homecooked levels, which were some of the contesting levels from the TSF level contest. One of these levels, easter hunt by F. Quist, is slightly incomplete, since the music file was not included with TCC. You can still download the file here to complete your TCC setup!
https://www.jazz2online.com/download...nglerace-pack/

When Gathering of Developers released Jazz Jackrabbit 2 in the US, they decided to include a copy of Jazz Jackrabbit 1 on the disc. Unfortunately, they forgot to add the game in the earlier releases, adding a note in the box with a number to call, so people could still get a copy shipped to them for free.

[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/NJHmADP.png[/IMG]

Version 1.21 of Jazz Jackrabbit 2 added a new CTF map called Chemical Warfare to the game. This map was included twice, once as part of the shareware CTF levels and once as part of the full game CTF levels. Unfortunately, if you owned version 1.20 of the game and would patch the game to version 1.23, you would still be missing out, since for some reason the patch does not include the new map.

Multiple shareware versions were released for Jazz Jackrabbit 2, including 1.20s, 1.21s, 1.23s and 1.24s, with 1.21s and 1.23s being available both as patch or full installer. Note how 1.22s is missing from this list, and even downloading the shareware from the Gathering of Developers website, or getting it from the Gathering of Developers demo disc at the time, would get you the 1.21s shareware release with the Project Two logo at the start.

A Macintosh release, published by Gathering of Developers, also exists, which is basically the same as version 1.22 for PC, also showing 1.22 in the main menu. A shareware version for this exists as well, showing 1.22s in the menu, which means the Macintosh shareware seems to be the only 1.22s release available.

When releasing version 1.21 of Jazz Jackrabbit 2, which is the mail order release, some issues were known with some people having trouble installing the game. For this reason, the game was included twice on the disc, once as the normal installer, and once in a resource folder, which has the game pre-installed. Users could then copy this folder to their hard drive manually. A letter was included with the game, notifying players of this issue and instructions on how to use the resource folder.

[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/hMBiQLw.png[/IMG]