PlanetJailbreak

If you're a regular in our forum, you'll know that while Planet Jailbreak strives to work for any web browser, some of us are quite fond of alternatives to Internet Explorer: Mychaeel uses Opera, and I use Mozilla, for example. But now there's a reason why some of us might consider switching to Firefox...

Some time ago we implemented RSS feeds for Planet Jailbreak syndicated news (see the bottom of our menu bar for the links). You can use these already in any news aggregator to keep up to date with the world of Jailbreak. And now, as of Firefox's 1.0 Preview Release, you can see Planet Jailbreak news headlines as 'live bookmarks'. You simply bookmark the RSS feed, and this presents the latest headlines within a folder of your bookmarks. You can read more about this feature on the Firefox site...

The Jailbreak Developer Network (JDN), our prime resource for all information regarding Jailbreak 200x content creation, is sporting two new tutorials:

• JDN: Making Voice Packs, courtesy of RavuAlHemio, gently describes step by step how to create new Jailbreak Voice Packs using the JBSpeech Framework.
• JDN: ASVehicleFactory_SentinelCeiling_Proj, courtesy of ZedMaestro and the coding work of Blitz, turns the well-known Assault Sentinel Turrets into a highly configurable and deadly means to dispose of a captured team. The tutorial covers all steps required to set up such turrets in your map, and the corresponding forum thread explains a bit about the new component's background.

While you're there, don't hesitate to explore the entire Jailbreak Developer Network if you're interested in creating custom content for Jailbreak or curious about Jailbreak's inner workings -- JDN is chock full of tutorials, documentation, source code and background information for your perusal.

The rumours are true: After winning the Make Something Unreal contest in the Best Game Type category, here comes another accolade: Jailbreak 2004 is one of the featured mods on Epic's Editor's Choice Edition of UT2004.

Have we been content to just send them the most recent download version of JB2004? Like heck we have! A number of bugs that were brought to our attention by our testers and the community have been fixed, and Atari's own in-house bugtesters reported some quirks they asked us to iron out.

All that goes to make Jailbreak 2004 ECE (Editor's Choice Edition), also known as Jailbreak 2004b (see the full release reference). If you already have Jailbreak 2004, you can download this as a patch, which will update your installation to Jailbreak 2004b. Either way, see our downloads page.

This comes with four new maps, in which we've finally taken advantage of one of the coolest features in Jailbreak 2004: Vehicles! The original bundled Jailbreak maps come in new, updated versions: just small tweaks such arena timings, a few terrain holes, and the odd bit of static mesh optimization. To avoid any confusion on servers and your hard drive, new versions of maps have the suffix "-Gold".

Now for the bad news: We found a bug in the "Gold" version of JB-Heights, and we found it too late to fix in the files we sent to Epic. This only affects botplay, but it makes botplay in that map pretty darn impossible. Basically, the map file JB-Heights-Gold.ut2 found in the Epic retail version has a bug, it's our bad, and we're extremely sorry about it. A fixed version, JB-Heights-Gold-v2 is available separately if you've got the Epic retail version: see below. It is included in both of our downloads: the full installation and the patch.

To summarize, there is...

• A complete download of Jailbreak 2004b, as umod and zip (118 MB).
• A patch for existing users. To make this as small a download as possible, the files for this are in the 7-zip compression format. This cuts the filesize by over 20 MB, but you will need the free 7-zip utility (download for Windows, Linux). The patch is 67 MB, and comes in 7-zipped UT4Mod installer and 7-Zip archive flavours. For Mac users, there's also a regular zip version on our download page.
• The fixed version of the map with the bug, JB-Heights-Gold-v2. This is for people who have the retail UT2004 Editor's Choice Edition.

Just a quick note to let you know that the Spoils of Victory Add-on has been updated. Version 1.4 will now work with the latest UT2004 builds. You'll find this on our Add-ons download page, and more about this cool add-on in our forum.