PlanetJailbreak

"But the New Year was in January," I hear you cry? But no! The year changes when Epic decrees it with a new version of Unreal Tournament! As UT fans all over are busily installing UT2004 on their hard drives (and, hey, Sweeney, where's my complimentary copy, huh?), so the thoughts of the Jailbreak team turn to Jailbreak 2004. Beta tester SirTahngarth has tried the current internal release of Jailbreak on UT2004, and reports that it works almost perfectly: "we need a MaterialSequence and a description for the gametype," he says.

The word from coder Mychaeel is that we'll probably be branching Jailbreak for UT2003 and UT2004. Maps are compatible and only minor changes will be needed for the new GUI. That way we'll be keeping up with the latest technology, while also supporting those who won't be upgrading just yet. (Tim, you have my address, right?)

Some artists like to work on a grand scale. Some of Monet's paintings, for example, fill a whole room. But here at Jailbreak, we think it's about quality not quantity, and a small canvas can be just as expressive...

Now it takes a lot of classes to make Jailbreak work nicely, and as you may know, mappers' heads get easily frazzled with complicated things (I should know!).

So we like to make things easier for our mappers, and we like to make things pretty too, by giving each actor that appears in a map a nice icon for UnrealEd. Here's the ones we already have, for (left to right) the jail, the generic release switch, the arena, the jail camera and the timed trigger actor. The first four were made by ElBundee, the last by Spoondog.

Do you think you could join their rank by making us some custom icons?

It's been a while since my last news post: tracking down bugs doesn't make for thrilling news. But now here's something to make up for it: Alpha 7 of Jailbreak 2003 has been released internally. The most striking new feature is the addition of the Jailbreak Theme Song, by Pablo "Guybrush" Delgado. This plays when you select the Jailbreak game type in the configuration dialogs.

Another really nifty new idea from Mychaeel is the JBSpeech framework. This slices together speech announcements in realtime from short segments, allowing a large variety of game announcements from a smaller number of samples.

Add to that all the fun features I've been telling you about (human ladders, celebration screen and so on) and I think our testers are in for a fun time.

So far everything seems to be quiet in the world of UT Jailbreak. Parole here, Lockdown there, nothing much.

However, in the past few weeks, eight teams have gathered and started a friendly, 6vs6 tournament. The first round has been finished, and the contestants who passed are about to start the second round in a couple of days.

Update: Dates and times of the next rounds added to the Tournament Page.