what's up?

The Past, Present and Future of SJ3 on November 9th 2000.

past

So, SJ3 was finally released on October 1st and everything been rolling quite smoothly from the word go. The sj3 home page has been slightly adjusted to suit more frequent updates and extra visitor comfort, and the extra hills section has been growing at a good pace.

I've been trying to answer your mail, update the page and send registrations as quickly as possible, this early rush has been a lot work and I have away from the house a lot, so sorry if I've been late with my replys. The Hall of Fame has been filling up with some blinding results (gee, I thought the game was difficult!) and also some very cool original extra hills have been made and they are of course available for download. Super cool!

And I am also pretty excited about finding the very first "I should make a ski jumpin' game cause the others suck" quicky test version - in other words Ski Jump v1.0 from 1994! I compiled the quite simple code and put it up in the exclusive Pro Corner for download and your amusement; it's funny to check out how the times have a-changed the game.

present

Right now, the plan is to be on top of things as well as possible; there's a lot of promotion work to be done and the pages - especially the pro corner - need refining. Also, I'm looking to make a small program to help with the palette handling when drawing your own hills, which can be a quite difficult task with the modern drawing programs. If anyone knows of a simple and small picture quantization (reduces the amount of colors in a picture) program, please let me know.

Also I'm very glad that when sending in your SENDME.TXT's, you guys have been filling out the real names in top part of the file really well. Good job, it speeds up my job a lot, so keep it up!

future

Despite my earlier comments, a version 3.01 or even 3.10 is in the plans. The fact that the hiscores of the extra hills aren't saved when exiting the program was a poorly-thought feature and I plan to fix that somehow. Also, saving and watching replays of jumps should be included in the next version.

Also, I would like to see the game get more recognition in central European countries like Germany, Austria or France to name a few. If you live in a country where SJ3 isn't well known yet and you are willing to do a little promotion work and earn a registered version in the process, drop me a mail and we'll talk out the details. Later.

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 What Was Up? at a time when SJ3 was fresh out of the oven.