2085 – New version released feat. New Inventory

All waiting is over. Finally, the new JA2 v1.13 version has been released.

Here is an excerpt from the changelog:

- New Inventory
-  A lot of new shortcut
- Items and Weapons
- Full German and Russian translation
- Allowed militia to wear camo
- Enabled music in windowed mode
- New options in ja2.ini
- New options in ja2_options.ini
- Added missing description texts for IMP skill rooftop sniping and camouflage

Installation packages are available for English, German and Russian versions at the v1.13 Wiki.

Congratulations and thank you very much for all your great work, dear 1.13 team!

Own personal rant: Still only stupid installers …

The New Inventory System

Few things – if any – have created a bigger buzz than the New Inventory system (NIV). The masses jump at it as never seen before. I can’t understand why it’s so popular with the community. What the hell makes NIV a must-have?

The old inventory system is fairly simple. There are some pockets and you just dump your stuff in. Big items only fit into big slots and that’s pretty much the whole complexity already. Simple indeed but intuitive at least.

The new inventory system on the other hand is everything else but intuitive to handle. There’re like zillions of slots scattered around the whole interface panel. But only adding some slots is nothing new, we’ve seen that before. Nope, the real new thing is that you can’t drop anything anywhere anymore as we are used to. Now you have to pick certain items like combat packs and such in order to enable some of the new item slots. But not enough. Even if enabled they won’t take just any item but only those designed for fitting in. There’s a whole new science popping up which researches how to actually use this giant new mess. That’s progress.

Yeah, I’m not convinced of NIV, not to say that I don’t like it. Of course that made me lose most of my readers (like I had any). But to me the whole thing seems like an artificial complication in order to justify the addition of hundreds and thousands of items which are all the same basically. This isn’t an enhancement to game play but a limitation to the mess created in the first place. Anyway, it has a huge CAF.

And now with that said to the reason you’re actually here: the download links. Provided that you updated your game folder to the latest SVN revision go to http://ja2.h758491.serverkompetenz.net/ NewInventory/ and download the following files:

Update 29th April 08: download links removed due to final integration with release package, see 1.13 wiki for updated versions. /update

Don’t forget to pay a visit to the Bear’s Pit forums for feedback and support (and to tell them how much you love NIV).