what's up?

The Past, Present and Future of SJ3 on October 1st 2000.

past

Phew...where should I start? The road leading to this release of SJ3 has been a long and rocky one. The success of SJ2 took me by total surprise and the planned version 2.20 quickly grew out of the SJ2 enviroment and work began to spawn a totally new generation version - SJ3.

I am very embarrassed by the fact that I have made outrageous promises when asked about the release date of the next version. I got trapped in a syndrome, where you come up with all kinds of good new (crappy) ideas for the game during programming and you feel that you have to add them to the version you're working on - a kind of a cycle which most programmers will probably recognize.

The shear vastness of putting together a project that has inflated a lot from its early days also proved to be an enourmously time- and brain-consuming task for one busy young man. The main reason why it has been over two years since the last version, was simply the fact that I wanted to make the best possible ski jump simulator I could; something worthy to be the follow-up to SJ2. Whether it holds up in the highly competitive field of computer games is for you to decide; I did the best I could.

To end the weak explanations; I'd like to give a big heartfelt thank you to all the people who spared a little of their time and money to register SJ2, for without you there surely wouldn't be a SJ3 at all.

present

So now the new version is now available for download at the Download Page of these brand-new web pages. A lot has been changed but a lot is still the same, the registering fee is the same as with SJ2, you should still send in your hiscores (sendme.txt) as much as possible and so on. For a full listing on what is changed from SJ2, download the game and see for yourself. :)

I am also very anxious to hear how you guys like the new version. All your wishes from the last two years have been given a lot of thought, and most of the suggested features should be found in SJ3 - the most wanted feature being the Hill Maker, a feature in the registered version of SJ3, which enables you to build your own hills and jump in them too!

future

This is no time to rest, as work on SJ3 moves to another level. The focus is now on marketing the game, trying to make registering smooth and filling the home pages with all kinds of extra downloads and info. Also, a little program to assist the drawing of your own hills is in the plans.

If you have any questions or suggestions, don't hesitate to contact me at vkononen@cc.hut.fi.

Thank you very much for your interest in the game!

The former What's Up? Situation Analysis is still on the SJ2 Side of things.