What’s coming next?

With the New Inventory being released with 2085 and JA2 1.13 hitting some kind of a milestone, one might ask what else is down the road to keep us excited when playing v1.13.

While the 2085 release primarily focused on bug fixing and incorporating the New Inventory system, this time there is quite a lot of new stuff going on lately. If you check Bear’s Pit you’ll notice a couple of things that are worked on in public. So let’s have a look at these.

The most impressive feature in the pipeline surely is the multiplayer modification. Don’t quote me on this, but IIRC the multiplayer extension will be the key enhancement for the next big release. This project is in beta currently, so chances are pretty good that we are going to see something final in the not-too-distant future. Development builds are randomly available which means you already have the chance to try it out.  This is promising a whole lot of fun.

Then there is something for the modders out there: prof.dat externalization. Not only is this the task to XMLify yet another binary data but to break all the hard-coded structures in behind. From what you can read in the hot discussed thread the project seems well on track and first results in the shape of a couple of screenshots are already available. This one will be highly appreciated among modders since it has been demanded for a long time already and really adds value to the game when it comes to moddability.

Another big hit for the modders might be the development going by the name “Laptop files section” which describes pretty well what it is all about. There is not a whole lot said about it yet, but externalizing the file items in the laptop will come in handy for the modders. Let’s see how this continues and what creative people will use it for.

The next one aimed at modders is the airport externalization. This one would remove several restrictions for airport maps. Often requested and to some extend finished the undertaking seems quite dead now judged by the forum thread. The code however continues to live in a SVN branch which is kept up-to-date with the trunk continuously. Hopefully, it makes it into the next major update.

The last one in the queue is the Big Maps project, which allows one to create tactical maps of virtually unlimited size. I’m not sure about its progress, though. As far as I understand they have an editor supporting larger maps but only some alphas of the actual game. Definitely an interesting project nonetheless.

What I can see is that finally there are some serious attempts to address at least a few of countless issues modders struggle with. This change in development – if it is one – will increase v1.13’s attractiveness for mods and make it more of the platform it always wanted to be. Carry on, v1.13, we are watching you!

v1.13 – A brief overview

Since you visited this blog chances are that you already know about v1.13. Most people still playing Jagged Alliance 2 do. If you don’t, let me introduce you.

1.13 is a fan-made mod for Jagged Alliance 2 – one of the greatest games on earth ever, a turn-based strategy game released in 1999. Despite the name it’s not an official patch to the latest version 1.12 but a large scale modification thereof. After the publisher released the source code to JA2 back in 2004, one year later Bear’s Pit member Madd Mugsy reported on his work of externalizing some relevant game data into some XML files. What was a not-so-easy task in the past, when modders hacked the hard-coded data within the exe using rare tools, became as challenging as firing up notepad and making some changes to plain XML.

You need to know that although people have been able to produce amazing mods such as “Deidranna Lives”, “Urban Chaos”, “Vengeance” among many others, the process of creating them couldn’t be any harder since the game simply wasn’t made for easy modifications. It’s limited in so many ways that it’s even more astonishing to see so many high-quality heavyweight mods.

With the advent of the very first v1.13 releases not only it became a whole lot easier to make modifications but also limitations were removed which allows for even more mind-blowing mods than what we’ve seen in the past.

So it isn’t very remarkable that a huge buzz began which attracted both contributors and users and resulted into many new features never seen in JA2 before.

Those features include (but are in no way limited to):

• higher resolutions, 800×600 and 1024×786 now supported
• tons of weapons and items since maximums are removed
• many options to tweak the game to one’s liking via ini or XML.

For further information have a look at the v1.13 wiki.