jjPLAYER

If you're writing some AngelScript for Jazz Jackrabbit 2, one of the most natural things to want to affect is Jazz Jackrabbit himself! Or Spaz, or Lori, or so on, as the case may be. Many hook functions—all the onFunction# functions, onPlayer and onPlayerInput, all the onDraw# functions, and so on—include jjPLAYER@ parameters so that you know which (local) player you should be affecting within a given chunk of code.

In some cases you'll want access to some player other than the one who triggered a function. For this, there are two global arrays: jjPlayers[32] and jjLocalPlayers[4]. While JJ2/AngelScript shouldn't actually crash if you try to access a player that doesn't exist in the game, it may not give you the most useful results. Thankfully, jjPLAYER objects have boolean isActive and isLocal read-only properties to help you figure out which jjPLAYER objects to affect with a given section of code.

(Of course, since AngelScript is predominantly local in its domain, the isLocal==false jjPLAYER objects are mostly only useful for reading values, not writing, and even then only a few of those values—xPos, yPos, currWeapon, and so forth—will actually be locally accurate. Trying to set, say, jumpStrength for a non-local jjPLAYER won't do you any good. When you encounter a need to change properties of other players, this is possible to achieve with use of custom packets; for that you will need the jjSTREAM class and the jjSendPacket function.)

For the most part, properties and methods of jjPLAYER objects are familiar from regular JJ2, or at least can be easily understood. What merits discussion is a new feature known as the Player Timer. Put loosely, it is a player-specific on-screen countdown which, once its time runs out, calls a certain AngelScript function (usually onPlayerTimerEnd), passing as an argument the player that it belonged to. The most important jjPLAYER methods are timerStart and timerFunction, which respectively begin the Player Timer (and set how long it will last) and set the effect of the Player Timer running out.