Boring Jails
"Why are we waiting... we are suffo..." *cough* *ahem*
The heading pretty much explains itself. Boring jails were a bit of a problem in the old Jailbreak days before Mychaeel's Screen and CameraSpot components became available. Nowadays you have a ton of things at your disposal to throw in your jails and relieve the prisoners of their boredom while they wait to be released.
You can use:
- CameraSpot (UTJB), JBCamera (JB2003/2004)
- Put some JBCamera actors throughout your level in cool spots, and stick a monitor/trigger in Jail so prisoners can surveil the action outside while they get taken from behi... *ahem*... anyway... yea, there's also lots of functionality within these JBCameras – you can make them switchable by the person who is watching through them, you can make them change using a timer, or JB2003/2004 even has an automated function that you can set, where the game will choose the best camera for the player to view, based on the amount of players in view.
- Screen (UTJB), JBScreen
- You can put a scoreboard on the wall, or a map surveillance screen that shows the location of all the players in the game (just like the scoreboard minimap), or even an IRC chat screen where you can chat in an IRC channel from within the game! It's funny in #utjb seeing all the "ah s**t"s and "ffs!"s from people who are playing a level with an IRC screen in it :-)
- Prison Escapes
- One of those things where I can't begin to explain the fun you could have making one of these! So many possibilities – you could make a hatch where prisoners have to make a human ladder to escape, or there can be more elaborate escapes such as the excellent example in Tarquin's JB-Pressurized (UTJB). Or you could have a combination of human ladders and fighting monsters (JB-EternalCaves-III – UTJB), or an impact jump, then a death-defying (actually, often not "defying" death at all muhahaha) set of leaps on poles over a pool of acid, all the time have a stone titan throwing instant-kill rocks at you!!! (JB-SprinTitan – UTJB). Usually escapes will leave the prisoner low on health too so as not to give them too much of a reward (Hell, they already got out of Jail free!)
- Arena Switches
- You can put switches in Jails that prisoners on each team can press if they wish to challenge each other for freedom in an arena match.
...so you have no excuse to have boring jails in your maps! (I only left CastleBreak's Jails empty because I ran out of time... but that's not an excuse... *ahem*) One thing you will find about the Jailbreak community is that they love cool stuff. You will be worshipped if you create a really good and challenging escape!
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