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.
Posted by v113watch 