I've played a lot of Quake II in my life with many mods. However, I don't recall playing one called "Jailbreak" longer than about 5-10 minutes back in the early 2000's. It seemed sort of like a football mod I had played once. Mods like this are cool concepts, but they usually only worked if you had enough friends to play it who had interest in both Quake 2 and a sport or whatever, a setup to play the game (not really an issue these days), and patience to put up with old ways of getting your game client properly configured. All of that is assuming the server admin has things configured properly on his end.
My friend Robb requested I load up his favorite mod on my Linux Quake 2 server. That mod was Jailbreak. Unfortunately, the developers of that mod only released a Windows library file for their mod. A Linux server requires a mod library to be a .so file rather than a .dll file. In order to make this happen on an EC2 instance in Amazon Web Services, I had to launch a Windows 2009 base server instance. Getting the initial server going was easy. After downloading all of the Quake2 base files and quake2/jail files to the Windows server, I then opened port 27910 (default Quake2 port) in the Windows Firewall with a new rule. Also, I of course had to have the associated AWS security group allow all public traffic on port 29710
I needed a modern server binary to handle traffic, and that's where Yamagi helps. I downloaded the binary to that as well to the Windows server and copied it to the Quake2 directory. During our test of this server I found I had accidentally set my Windows shortcut to the server binary to the original one. This results in people randomly getting disconnected despite the server staying online, so I strongly recommend using a modern server binary rather than the original if you want to run your own server.
This is an example of how "target" should look on the shortcut tab in the properties of your Windows shortcut assuming you are using Yamagi binary:
C:\QUAKE2\yquake2.exe +set dedicated 1 +set game jail +map jb25map1 +set maxclients 16 +exec server.cfg
I wanted map voting and to report to a living "Master Server" (A public hub for finding servers), so I added the follwing to quake2/jail/server.cfg:
//MapVote
set allow_vote 1
//VoteTime
set sv_votetime 15
// Master Server
setmaster master.q2servers.com
I will be keeping the server up for a couple more weeks to make sure all is running smoothly, then the plan is to transfer ownership over to Robb.
At this point this is the only other jailbreak mod server running with exception to the TastySpleen server which requires an anti-cheat be present in your cleint. We do not use this requirement as server population is usually low on most Quake 2 servers and in my opinion you can always just kick/ban cheaters if you are paying attention to your own server (No offense to TastySpleen. They run many, many Q2 servers).
Anyone is welcome to join! The server address is jail.jizaboz.com:27910 and will remain so unless Robb wants to use his own domain.
Here's how to get started if you need help..
- Download a modern Q2 client if you aren't already using one. A very good one is Q2Pro
- Download the Jailbreak mod
After extraction, you should end up with a quake2/jail folder with a pak.0 inside of it and other stuff.
- Start Q2Pro or whatever client you are using. Hit the ~ (tilde) key and type "connect jail.jizaboz.com" (You can also find it in the MP server list)
Note: If for some reason you connect and do not see red or blue skinned character models (this is a team game after all!) then you do not have the jail mod files in the right place. To dummy-proof this and just download those files from the server if you must; hit ESC to open the main menu, choose
Options / Download Options / and enable Download player models and skins
