UTJB Beta 1.01 - Readme


Introduction:

Well, it's finished. This is the first beta of the resurrected JailBreak mod for Unreal Tournament. This is my first foray into Mod building. I just hope it's not completely riddled with bugs. Jailbreak is originally a Quake mod, and a popular one at that. Gameplay resembles CTF with a major difference. Every time a player is killed, he or she respawns in his team's prison. To release him, a teammate needs to trigger a release mechanism which opens the jail, allowing the inmates to escape. When a complete team is captured, the capturing team scores, everybody respawns, and the game continues. Originally it was Mongo of Rocket Arena fame who set out to implement Jailbreak for UT. This project was abandoned in may of 2000 due to internal problems. I picked up the original beta 5 code from Team Reaction in September and went to work on it, teaching myself to code in Uscript as I went along. I hope you enjoy the result.

This update fixes several bugs and adds a new feature: Llamahunt. The original release was prone to llamas disconnecting and reconnecting to get out of jail. The 101 release fixes this in a rather novel way. You'll see.

This release also incorporates several essential bugfixes. See the history.txt for more information.

Rules:

Nothing special here. The game is played in two teams and strongly resembles CTF. Whenever a player dies, he respawns in a jail. Every jail has one or more release mechanisms, usually heavily guarded. In order to release his team, a player must trigger this mechanism. When a whole team is jailed, the opposing team scores and everybody, including the scoring team, is respawned in their own base, keeping their weapons. The first team to reach a predetermined score wins. Individual scoring is similar to other UT variants. One point for a kill, minus one for a suicide. No scoring may take place by players in jail, nor can a player score points by killing an opponent already in jail. Upon capturing a team, the capturing team members gain points equal to the number of captured players on the opposing team. Due to the nature of the game, translocators are never allowed in UTJB.

Starting a game:

Simply select Jailbreak as game type and continue as you would otherwise, setting the score needed to win and the time limit. It is recommended that you turn 'weaponstay' off. Feel free to pad out your teams with bots or even play against a bot only team. They're quite savvy. Alternatively, simply select a Jailbreak game from the game browser. With any luck, they won't be hard to find.

Gameplay:

UTJB represents a more tactical challenge than many UT variants. Although your death is not the end of the game, it can lead to several minutes of enforced boredom. Combine this with the fact that enemy bases are often heavily defended, and you're in for quite a challenge. Depending on the map, you'll often find that essential weapons and powerups are available inside your base. You'll need to gear up and form raiding parties of two or more players to stand a chance of success. Those of you who are used to the no-consequence gameplay of many of the standard variants may be in for a surprise.

Known issues:

The command menu has unexpected results. Although bots will follow commands given, UTJB features a dynamic allocation routine that may override whatever commands you give them when the system deems it necessary. I advise against using the command menu at all. Your mileage may vary.

During play, your log may fill up with warnings. This has no known effect on gameplay and is being researched.

A capture will not take place until everybody is respawned in Jail. There will be a delay between killing the last opponent and scoring.

Credits:

Original code: Mongo
Revised code: Daikiki
Artwork: Appel
Maps: Muad'dib, Wolf, and Daikiki
Modelling: Marble_X
Voice acting: TheVoice
Playtesting: Garulfo, Lomedae, Dzjirian, Othello, Wu-Lan, Vincent, Misdaadverslaggever, Exile, LePloep, Vledder

Special Thanks:
Special thanks go out to the boys at Epic for giving us such a great platform to play around with and to the people at Wolf's Unreal (http://unreal.gamedesign.net) for showing us how. 

Contact:

All correspondance to twitch@dds.nl
Visit us at http://www.daikiki.com/

Copyright issues:

This code is based on code that was originally reverse engineered from the beta5 release of the official Jailbreak by Team Reaction and Mongo, as is legal under European law, and was extensively rewritten to represent what is a different product. Although I have requested permission to build upon the existing code from both Team Reaction and Mongo multiple times, I have never received a single response. Since I didn't want the project to go to waste, I have decided to release UTJB without their explicit permission. It should be noted that I make no claim of ownership of either the Jailbreak name or the original code. This is _not_ an official Jailbreak release and is _not_ endorsed by either Team Reaction or Mongo.

Subject to European and Dutch law, this release may be distributed in a not-for-profit fashion over the internet in its original form with the copyright notice intact. All other uses are subject to explicit permission. Sorry guys, I'm not a big fan of copyright notices. This'll just have to do.
