PlanetJailbreak

Fed up with our Sunday Lockdown server lag problem? There is a temporary cure, and it's called JELP 2005. For those that don't already know, "JELP" means Jailbreak Euro LAN Party, and it's a long weekend of Jailbreak fun in the Netherlands, starting on Thursday 7 April. There are still places left, so if you think you can get you and your PC over to Geldrop, whether for the whole four days or to arrive on the Friday, check out the full details from Boost.

And just as a reminder of what JELP is all about, plenty of photos from JELP 2003 and JELP 2004 are in the features section.

PS. I tried to think of a good April Fools story, and couldn't. Sorry. Next year maybe?

I'll start today's post with a quick Lockdown update: basically, there's not much to tell. Sexmachine has asked DefCon whether they can move the server back to New York, and we're waiting to hear back from them.

Some time ago, Mychaeel made this forum post about an eventual Jailbreak 2004c, and what features we'd all like to see included in a patch release. If you check out the thread, you'll see there's no shortage of great ideas, but as is often the case, the problem is actually implementing them. CoolDude is working on the Jail Fights Add-On (see picture), Mychaeel is planning a Spray Paint Mutator, Wormbo has made a InitialSpawnDelay mutator, but there are other great ideas with nobody to work on them.

So if there are any coders out there interested in getting involved in Jailbreak, now might be a good time. Here's a quick summary of some of the add-on ideas floating around that I think could be the most promising...

Radar Addon: same idea as the radar map in the Onslaught gametype.
Overtime Last Chance: if a match goes to overtime because of a tie, the release switches become jammed to nobody can release any more. Last chance to score a point!
Some client-side features from Jailbreak III: automatically switch to Arena Cam when an arena match is starting, switch the release switch colours, gib both arena players in the event of a drawn match.
Get Out of Jail Free card: like in Monopoly! There's even a model for this already, made by RevBillyG.
The Jail Door Toggle: touching your own release switch shuts the enemy jail door.
The Release Switch Flip: only one team's release switches can be active at one time. Release your own team, and the other release switch shuts down until your release is complete.

Do any of the above inspire you? Or do you have ideas of your own? Read about how to join the team and let us know.

It might seem like all news posts these days are about RevBillyG. That's because he's been popping the maps out at quite a rate. He's recently started working on a new map, whose working title is JB-Galactica, and you can follow the progress on this map in this forum thread. There won't be anything playable for some time, but there's plenty of screenshots: it's a rare oppportunity to see a mapper at work and follow the development of what promises to be a great map. Aspiring mappers take note!

There have been several maps for Jailbreak released over the last couple of months, and there are more in development. But that doesn't mean we don't need more maps, rather the opposite: the Jailbreak community is always looking out for new places to frag. Thinking of working on a map for Jailbreak? Post in our mapping forum board.

We're still looking into the reasons for the problems with Sunday Lockdown last week. If you can join Lockdown tonight (ut2004://209.124.57.9/), please do, and report any problems in this forum thread.

If we have the same horrendous lag tonight, we might be able to move the server back to its New York location.