JSW Central

[IRF]

I have a copy of 0.4beta dated 3rd June 2020.  However, there were several other beta versions after that and before 1.0, which I believe was the first 'official release' (gamma?) version.  And then there were a few more changes after that, right up until v1.5 which was created on 2/12/20 to fix a typo in one of the room names - as far as I am aware, that is the version which became the current 'finished article' (would that be an 'omega release'??)

A few additional caverns were added to the game at some point between v1.0 and v1.5.  Furthermore, following feedback in the 'Playing around' thread, some other changes were implemented to improve the gameplay, including amongst other things:

- The 'Additional Bonus Points for Lives Remaining' feature was added, to stop players from 'artificially inflating' their end score by losing several lives in the Kong caverns after repeatedly flipping Kong;

- Using the 'H/K' and 'J/L' keys to rotate the torch beam anticlockwise/clockwise in 'Lantern'/'Torch' modes;

- I had noticed that in the 'Torch' mode, some of the caverns (the equivalents of Cold Room, Return of Kong) required Willy to make a 'drop of faith' to reach the flashing portal from the top of the cavern - you couldn't see where the horizontal guardians that guard the portals were before you started the drop, which I thought was a bit unfair - so Norman increased the vertical range of the torch beam to account for that.

However, this is probably all too much detail for the entry on JSWCentral!

Edited April 15, 2021 by IRF

[jetsetdanny]

Thanks for your assistance, Ian!

I have added info about the 0.4 beta version release to Chronology.

I did have info about the 1.0 to 1.5 releases included already.

The release of the other improved versions indeed seems too detailed for Chronology, unless there were other numbered beta versions (like 0.5?) before version 1.0 was released.

I had the same dilemma with "Willy does the Great Pyramid!". There were a number of beta versions released there, and then a dozen Release Candidates. Sometimes there would be more than one improved version released in one day. From one point of view, I thought that, to be consistent with everything else on Chronology, it would be good to mention every single release. On the other hand, this would get immensely detailed, especially that many updates did not have any numbers to identify them, they were just improved files with names that had no consequence, so to speak.

In the end I settled on indicating the date when Geoff released the first beta version (an historic moment, indeed!), and also on indicating the date of the first Release Candidate, as this shows the progress of the project (then the gamma-release, of course).

I hope this is satisfactory for JSW history. However, Geoff, if you happen to read this and prefer that all those details be added to Chronology (date of every single release of files during the beta stage and every single release of Release Candidates), I will be happy to add them 🙂.

[geoff]

I think that's probably enough; nobody's going to want to know any more detail than that. At least I hope not.

[jetsetdanny]

Thanks, Geoff! 👍

[jetsetdanny]

With the recent additions of Willy does the Great Pytamid!, several minor versions of Manic Miner (Manic Miner: creme de la creme, Manic Miner - Light Modification and Manic Miner Presto) and one version of Jet Set Willy (Jet Willy Mono Plus), and a complete update of Chronology, embracing the events of a little more than a year, I believe JSW Central is now up to date 🙂 .

Please let me know if you know of anything that should be there, but isn't.

I will now take a break from its development for a short while. When I resume it (hopefully a couple of weeks from now) it will be to finally start upgrading the pages that are not yet up to my standards (mainly because they don't have complete screenshot galleries or embedded JSW Central YouTube videos) - unless new developments in the meantime will produce a need for further updates 🌞.

[IRF]

Long overdue - I've added a hyperlink to jswcentral.org to the first post in the pinned 'Useful Links' thread.

[jetsetdanny]

Thanks, Ian! 👍

[jetsetdanny]

JSW Central has just been updated. It was the first update since May, but I do plan to make the updates (small ones) more regular now.

The pages of "Jet Set Willy III", "Join the Jet-Set!", "Spaceman Willy", "Willy's New Hat", "Jet-Set Willy in Space" and "Willy does the Great Pyramid!" were modified to include embedded videos from the JSW Central YouTube channel.

Furthermore, the spelling of the title of Richard Hallas's first JSW game was changed from "Join The Jet-Set!" to "Join the Jet-Set!" everywhere. This is because I know he prefers this spelling (I do, too), and it appears in this form on the title screen, so it's fully justified.

Now that I think about it, I don't know why I used to spell this title capitalising the article. The capitalisation must have been "inherited" from Andrew Broad's list of MM and JSW games, but I'm not sure why he opted for it, since the text file  I've got (with a March 1997 time-stamp, so an old one) also has the article spelled with a lower-case "t", and this is also the spelling on Richard's website.

[Spider]

Thank you for the detailed update! 🙂

[jetsetdanny]

You are welcome 🙂 .

Today I've added a complete screenshot gallery to the page of "Jet-Set Willy in Space".

So both pages dedicated to Richard Hallas's games are now complete 🙂 .