Jangaron 0.6 Online: 3rd Person Perspective!

After improving the Jangaroo tool (sorry, new version not yet released) and major refactoring of Jangaron into separate modules, I put online a preview on the upcoming new version:

Jangaron 0.60 (beta)

Now, eventually you can play what you could only see in a video so far!

The new features include:

• smooth switching between 1st- and two different 3rd-person perspectives
• shrinking lightcycle walls when players derezz, like in the movie, instead of fading walls like before
• support for IE8 (also patched Jangaron 0.54) -- lightning fast!
  
• offer you an offline version to install (you need to install Adobe AIR first -- I used version 1.5.1), much easier than my previous attempt. Jangaron now has a really nice build process (Maven), so that I can promise to build a version to install for each future update.
  
• bug fix: controls now work correctly when going very slowly
• redesigned the Jangaron home page with the look and feel of the new version and links to all available versions of the game to give visitors better guidance which one to start
• added meta-data so that iPhone and iPod touch use full screen mode
  

Open issues are:

• clipping: depending on the type of browser, when you go very close to another wall, the angle of the wall may be displayed incorrectly. The reason is that when introducing arbitrary trapezoids, I removed clipping for the time being. Different browsers have different limitations in the size of borders (most around 1000 pixels) which lead to problems with steep slopes.
• restart game: you still cannot return to the configuration screen other than by reloading the page. This is especially annoying in the AIR version, where you cannot reload! I hope I'll have this fixed soon. Besides that, there are still some states (glance direction, speed when having jumped to another lightcycle) that seem to be reset incorrectly when the game restarts.
• iPhone on-screen controls are not yet available. As you might remember, I patched them into 0.54, but this solution will be replaced by browser detection and/or configuration.
  

I successfully tested in Firefox 2 (Windows XP), 3, and 3.1beta, IE7 and 8 (Windows Vista) (known not to work in IE6 and never will!), Safari 3.1 (XP) and 4 beta, Chrome 1, Opera 9.62, AIR 1.5.1 (Vista), and iPod touch 2.2.1. I also experimented with a new open source AIR alternative called Titanium, but only made work the "mini" Jangaron version, i.e. the one without the settings dialog. Brave folks can download a Mac, Windows, or Linux installer on the Jangaron Titanium page.
I'd like to ask you help me collect all other browser/OS environments Jangaron 0.54 or 0.60 run on! Please report any functional or performance issues!

Play Jangaron 0.52 Offline!

Jangaron does not need a server connection, as it is not (yet) a network multiplayer game. However, it has not been so easy to play Jangaron offline - until now!
At the request of Brian, I just uploaded a zip of the Jangaron 0.52 files (only 57 KB, without sound files), including a small patch to make it run without sound locally. Just unpack the archive to some folder, and open jangaron.html in your favorite browser.
The problem with sound is that Flash (which I use for sound only) refuses to load sounds from local file-URLs. The simplest way to make it work locally is to install a Web-server like Apache (don't be afraid, download the binary release and it's really simple!) and put all Jangaron 0.52 files and the Jangaron 0.52 sound files (3.5 MB in two subfolders) below Apache's htdocs folder. Then, start Apache and browse to http://localhost:8080/jangaron.html, and you can play Jangaron with sound, even when you are not connected to the Internet!
Please tell me if you succeeded to install Jangaron (with or without sound) or contact me if you need more detailed instructions.