Thursday's release was on Canada Day, so appropriately enough today's is on U.S. Independence Day.

This version makes several improvements to JJ2 levels. I forgot to mention that none of the JJ2 support would have been possible without Neobeo's documentation of the JJ2 file formats (available here). So, big thanks there!

Other improvements include Newspaz's fixes to enemies' shooting.

I'm pleased to announce that I've just added support for Jazz Jackrabbit 2™ level files. Select "specific level" from the episode list, and you can now type in the name of any level you want. Support is very limited at the moment, but there's more to come.

As you make your way from the launch of the program to the end of a level, you'll notice a bunch of other new features:

• The first change you'll see is Jazz blinking during the introductory cutscene, thanks to AnotherGuest. Other cutscenes have also improved.
• Next, you'll see that the main menu now has a plasma-y background effect, thanks to Alireza Nejati.
• When you load up a level, you'll be greeted by a planetary approach sequence.
• In-game, you'll find that animations are now positioned more accurately. Bad guys now explode properly, too. Thanks to Newspaz for both of these.

Today's release features an incomplete implementation of bonus levels. Gems can be collected and all levels can be completed, but road hazards do nothing.

There's also been more work on cutscenes, and the opening animation is now working.

Today's new version features scaling, added by Pickle. You can now play on a 640x400 screen as if it were 320x200, for example. This means that gameplay can be closer to the original on devices that have high-res displays.

By the way, recent weeks have seen new versions for the GP32 and the GP2X Wiz!

Yesterday's version introduced a bug which made it impossible to join multi-player games. This has now been fixed.

Despite the bugs and unimplemented features, it used to be possible to play to the end of almost every level. However, as the code has evolved, some levels became impassable.

There's a new version up now, with several bug fixes. It's now possible to finish every single level. Trust me - I've spent much of the last few days doing exactly that!

P.S. There are now two Windows downloads. One contains all the files and libraries, the other one contains just an update.

I've just found out there's an Xbox 360 version of OpenJazz - get it here!

I've also uploaded a more recent snapshot of the source code, with up-to-date makefiles.

There's a new version available to download. It introduces the previously mentioned race mode, and fixes several bugs.

Additionally, this version features a lot of work by anotherguest to get the cutscenes working!