Sunday 24 February 2008

The "Winter Killer" release is out

Highlights:
"Main menu added with working Save/Load/New Game options. Sounds and in game music added along with the new Audio System. Character generation screens with many skills and classes along with currently 4 new races were added. Party setup for new games is working now. On screen party portraits view to visualize your party was added. A set of portraits was added for use with the character generation."
Download, test and report back here or at the forum. :-)

7 comments:

Dragonbait said...

Alright with the new release of 20080224 I was able to start the program. Here is what I have to say.....

Start version 20080224

hit enter to start new game

music! nice addition. kind of too technoish for my tastes but still good to have some music to listen to.

I'm still getting some errors of the same issues of the previous post but was able to get into the game.
You can scroll through pregenerated characters by using the left, right arrow keys. Pressing enter will select the highlighted character and his/her portrait will appear on the left side of the screen. Was able to select the total of 4 premade characters. OK how about creating my own? lets see. Press the down arrow to select new character....current races = Human Elf Dwarf Catkind. While its possible to hit the right arrow to move downward through the list you might want to make it possible for one to hit the right arrow to move through the list and back up to the top of the list by keep hitting the right arrow instead of hitting the right to get to the bottom of the list and then having to hit the left arrrow to go back up the list. Select your race then press the down arrow to move to the gender selection. Select gender then press the down arrow again to get to the character stats. Current character stats = Strength, Speed, Concentration, Constitution, Psyche, Piety, Charisma, Karma. As a human male, I have 10 points to add to my stats. A strength of 16 will allow me to become a warrior. So far the warrior class is the only class that is currently available or at least the only one I was able to find after trying out different varying stats. OK I chose 18 STR and 12 CON for my warrior. next select the down arrow again to get the character portrait selection. Select your portrait, then click the down arrow to the profession selector. Was only able to use the warrior so click the down arrow again to access the next page. Hit the enter key. More detailed character stats = Martial, Social, Physical, Mental, and Magical.

It seems since I am a warrior, the only fields that I can select are from the Martial Field. Might be a good thing to be able to gray out the other attributes If the warrior class will not be able to choose from the other categories. Also for choosing further skills below...
Wrestling, Short Blades, Medium Blades, Long Blades, Staffs and Wands. I think it would be better if we could see the skills stats to the right side of the screen, instead of the middle. I can see currently the Wrestling, Short Blades, Medium Blades, Long Blades, Staffs and Wands skills and points are currently listed in the middle and the skill that you are adding appears to the right. The way it is set up now might be confusing as what appears on the right is only one skill. The current skill you are modifying. Having the final modified skills appear to the right rather than the middle would make it clear that these are in fact the final output of skills. Also the text color of the non-selected skill appears very faint if the size of the screen is of smaller size which makes it harder to read. I had jcrpg in a window so that I can type as I review and noticed that. Maybe making non-selected fields a bit brighter but make selected fields a different color or highlighted color. Well since I'm a warrior I went for 34 skill for long blades. Sure I probably won't get a long blade right away when I start off but when I get ahold of one I'll be darn good at hitting monsters with it! After selecting your fighting skills hit the down arrow again to enter your name. Now here there are two fields one for your forename and one for your surname. Maybe the surname portion could be eliminated. I mean if you have enough room in the forename field you could enter a full name first and last if you wanted to. No need for two fields. Most characters I and probably most people just consisted of one name anyway. Just a thought. When your done hit the down arrow to access the Ready button and hit enter.

OK on to new character #2. Tried to make a thief character but current character creation only allows for warriors so I made a character with 16 strength to meet the minimum warrior criteria and put the rest into speed.

OK a total of 6 characters can be added until the party is full. OK scroll down to start game and.....er what's going on? it booted me out! um er ah. OK I'm going to have to go back into this again and start over.

I hope you don't mind my constructive criticism's but JCRPG is an important project to me and I hope to see it succeed very well and anything I can do to help along the way I will do.

pzi said...

You can have a real lot of kind of professions if you find the right combination of attributes. only prof. skills are currently added to tuning, it's only half-done so expect more skills later.

About your crash, please post the error, it's important!

You don't have to start it over, characters are saved, you can use them again. :)

Dragonbait said...

I'll have to go back in again and try to catch the error. Is there a way to set the black screen that shows all the text so that I need to X out of it manually? Since currently the screen will close out autmatically and it is very fast. If I don't hit the pause button in time I don't catch it.

pzi said...

Go to the given directory in Total Commander for example under Windows, type 'cmd', use this window to type jcrpg.bat and you will get the console to read after the game quits too. :)

Anonymous said...

I've made a winter version of the pinetree textures (including bark), since this is under CCSA (the "gpl" of CC licences). Where should I put them? (Fully snow covered pine needles, 1/2 snow covered pine needeles, other, and snow dusted bark).

--MikeeUSA--

pzi said...

Wow, Mike, this is really great news! Please, if you can, share it on the jcrpg's contribution forum at freegamer:

http://forum.freegamedev.net/index.php?t=thread&frm_id=16

pzi said...

forum link

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