PlanetJailbreak

There's always time for more widgets. Our beta testers have requested a countdown timer for the Arena Avenger Add-on, and I have volunteered to implement it. (Quick reminder: this component of Jailbreak gives the winner of an arena match an adrenaline power-up, so they can wreak terrible revenge on the enemy team.) Given that I know nothing about how the UT2003 HUD works, I was rather pleased that my changes to the code compiled at the third attempt. I was even more pleased to see that it worked exactly as expected: the adrenaline counter vanished and was replaced by the countdown showing the time remaining for the Avenger effect. There was just one problem... instead of counting down to zero, it was counting up. It seems my maths skills are even worse than my coding! Then I've had to repeatedly bang my head against the keyboard to get the replication aspects of the code to work.

Jailbreak 200x is of course being written by experienced coders who know what they're doing. I should reassure you that not one line of my sloppy code gets put in until it's thoroughly cleaned up, tested and de-moosified.

Lastly, here's a shot of JB-Conduit by ZedMaestro.

I'm not going to tell you when Jailbreak 200x is going to be released. But I can tell you it's very soon, this month in fact. We are still bug-hunting and fine-tuning, and there are even one or two brand new features still in development, that I'll be bringing you news on soon.

Now that we're so close to a release, I thought I'd refresh your memories with another look at the innovations behind Jailbreak's code design. You can also admire some of the Jailbreak features in our screenshot gallery. And from now until the release, I'll be posting shots from Jailbreak maps... and a few other little surprises that you'll just have to wait and see.

Any questions? Go along to our forum and a member of the team will be happy to answer them.

Sorry for the lack of news updates. I've been working flat out on finishing my map. The team is now working on Jailbreak 200x beta 2. Our "To Do" list keeps zipping up and down like a rollerblind, as our coders fix bugs and then our beta testers find new ones. Meanwhile, we're rounding up our mappers and locking them up in an underground bunker with the moose and getting them to finish off their maps, down to the final tweak (hence the lack of news posts from me). I'll try to post some screenshots of these over the next couple of weeks to show you the variety of playing environments we have lined up for you. So today, here's a shot from JB-NoSenseOfReality, by veteran Jailbreak mapper RevBillyG.

The Jailbreak team are now testing our first beta release for Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004. Note that unlike many other mod teams, this is an internal release: our beta testers are already hard at work, trying the game in every possible way, bending, stapling and generally mutilating it. We hope they're having fun while they're working. We hope that soon you will be having fun with it, too.