PlanetJailbreak

Some of the older players amongst us may remember a place where historical battles happened, a place where the good and the evil met, a place where only the strongest survived – that mystical place once was called The Jailbreak MotherShip.

I have met QAPete in our IRC channel yesterday and made him change the server link on the BeyondUnreal mainpage, now pointing towards our server. Thus I took the opportunity to rename that server from "Sexmachine's Jailbreak Server" into "Jailbreak MotherShip Server". Everything else stayed the same, it's just the name (a reminiscence to LarryStorch and of course QAPete) that has changed. So prepare to visit these holy grounds and bring the myth back to life.

See you at today's Sunday Lockdown and don't forget about our GameVoiceServer.

One of Jailbreak III's best-loved, most original and above all, most fun features has been notably absent from our internal alpha versions so far... I speak of the llama hunt, of course. Originally, this sprang from a simple problem with Jailbreak: a jailed player can disconnect from a server, and upon reconnecting is spawned out of jail as a new player. This, naturally, is unsporting behaviour, that is, llama-ish in gaming slang. So for UT Jailbreak, a system was devised that would detect this happening, and brand someone cheating in this manner as a llama: their view is disrupted, and they are clearly marked for other players to hunt down, as punishment.

This was of course something we wanted to include in Jailbreak 2003, since it had grown far beyond a simple cheat-protection to being one of Jailbreak's distinctive features (and a rare opportunity for our coders to see just how seriously they can mess up a player's POV!). And now it's here, souped up for the new engine. As you can see from the picture, the llama now looks like... a llama! Other new effects on the drawing board include real braying sound effects, and a first-person HUD that could well cause a few upset stomachs. Llamas beware.

Once upon a time, there was a brave GameVoiceServer waiting for people to communicate while playing Jailbreak III online, but unfortunately most of the players forgot to connect before they join the battle these days and thus the poor GameVoiceServer started to suffer. While he was hoping for people to make use of his extraordinary abilities (thinking about suicide at the same time) two good friends appeared from out of nowhere. It was the old and wise NaliCity FileServer taking a walk along with the honoured and well respected DJ RedirectServer (kudos to the Death-Juggler clan). Both froze immediately as they noticed the melancholy mood the brave GameServer was in.

'Hey GS, why do you look so sad?' the Fileserver asked with his deep and soft voice and the surprised GameServer told them the whole story of his misery and grief. His long and sad monologue closed with the one and only question possible: 'Do you wise guys have an idea how to end my pain?' he asked and after a lengthy debate with the RedirectServer the FileServer spoke up: 'Listen mate, we do have a plan. My humble friend right here has already updated his collection of redirected files, so he can send each and every needed file to all the lazy players missing one map or the other sometimes. So say goodbye to the 'server refused to send file' message for once and for all. Besides that, I myself do now have the most complete and up to date collection of Jailbreak III maps ever, enabling less lazy players to download all necessary files before joining the battlegrounds. This includes the ability to add comments and scores to each and every single JB map, which is a fun thing to do in my opinion.' And the RedirectServer continued '...as all of this makes playing Jailbreak online even more comfortable, I am pretty confident you're about to become the attention you deserve.'

'So you really think this may end up my lonelyness and that there will be a lot more people using the voice-communication software in the near future?' the GameVoiceServer asked with a smile on his face. 'Well ...err ...no ...' both wanderers replied with one voice, 'but you have to admit that this was a nice story so far - wasn't it?'

Update: I forgot to tell you the moral of this story, so here it is: Don't expect others to log in to the GameVoiceServer first. Just connect yourself and stay connected even if nobody else is around. If we all try to handle it that way, I am pretty confident that the brave GameVoiceServer is not going to stay lonely for long. Talk to you later!

Sexmachine writes in our forums:I am bugging the JB CoreDev team with collecting/posting reports of remaining issues/minor probs with Jailbreak III (SP2) at the moment. So if you know about something that does not work as expected, feel free to reply to this thread (try to add as much detail as possible to help us reproducing/hunting down the problem).

This is not to be mistaken as a promise for another version of JB3 (SP3) because right now there are no human resources left (while working on JB2003) to look into JB3 issues.So there you have it. I'm fairly confident that Jailbreak III completely rocks moose, but if any tiny little buglets are still around, let us know. Because, let's face it, we really like it when Sexmachine cracks the whip.