The "Anniversary Boom" release attacks!

One whole year, 365 days have passed since leaving the safe harbors of non-game-developing times. It's been a long one, with many joyful and many painful moments. At start I thought that one year will take much further in completeness but 15 releases did not brought its fruit that easily - every corner brought new ideas and new things to code with hours to spend on them. As progressing from thing to thing it became more and more relevant that the undertake, the scope of the project needs a whole lot more of work hours than projected at start. But every step taken made the progress more and more unstoppable, rounding up such a concept in my mind that lures it further and further to completion. Every step taken made the vision clearer and me more eager and curious to turn the vision into reality. And so we progress further every day.

The big revelations while doing the design and development through the months - as far as I remember - were the following things...first the Magnification of the stored world into bigger blocks using hashing and other surface calculus algorithms to fill up the world with detailed content on the fly. This brought the possibility of relatively large lands to store in little data. Second came the idea of "Magnification" of living things into Entities, groups of beings with a common intelligence and keeping EntityMembers as special persons with more detailed personal intelligence - this will make large populations available even with less memory and cpu consumption, and bring a real edge to the things happening around the player..you won't mess with a whole population of 200 members around, "you'll try to keep a good reputation" if you want to live in the town one might guess. Yet powerful NPCs (special members of an Entity) can serve as a hook to these groups who can serve as a strengthening channel between player and a community. And these masses can serve as basis for big scale historical happenings between rivaling Towns and so on...who knows what other possibilities yet. Third came the idea of adding a set of Social skills to rule the problems of life in the game by more peaceful means - social skills with act forms like spells in a magical book yet different, Reasoning -> Deduce like Elemental Magic -> Shocking Grasp :) - which gives more color to the encounter situations with the help of such points as Morale and Sanity along with normal Health, Stamina and Mana Points. And fourth came the idea of dynamic relations and dynamic economy with Ecology and Economy updates which will bring a dynamic progress to the world of jcrpg - a turn in the game when whole town districts may change their face, new buildings and streets, new agriculture around. Along with these things we cook the cool things what the legacy of classics like Wizardry, Bard's Tale and lastly Dune 1 (because of its group based + personal "strategy-rpg" likeness) - multi-member party, turn based encounters, strong skill system, 6 direction only movement, 3D tile based graphics. Well, well many of these things are really partially complete, but these ideas serve well a game that I would like to play. And probably will...

Especially because such a big and good community like Freegamedev.net was and is helping this thing to get ahead! Many names could be named who helped to keep up the things and my faith on the way, all of those great people's name are carved on the walls of the Hall of Fame of jCRPG... Thank them a lot again! :)

So here we are on the road of development, standing at the time of first anniversary... let this be celebrated with a new release! A big lot of new things are pushed into this one, all of them of much importance. Check it out downloading, testing, commenting, bug reporting and so on and so on. Oh, and probably feel free to be the first person ever to donate to the cause of this project through this Pal of Pay at the top of the blog. ;-)

Highlights:
"New UI windows for Encounter Phase, Turn Act Phase, Character Sheet (F3 key) and Inventory (F4) were added. New Population generation algorithms (GrownInfrastructure, DefaultInfrastructure) were added along with new integration level of named Towns for friendly populations to unite in. Economy Update Turn implemented for growing or declining population changes. Basic level Entity relations and Entity states (level and points) and Entity fragments (roaming entity groups) were added. A few Objects for inventory were added. Skill system further implemented with object dependencies and Skill Act Forms (like some spells and some combat forms etc.).
New animals heron and deer were added and wolf replaced (glestanimals of wciow at glest.org). Smaller bugfixes, optimizations (culling works again now correctly). This is the First Anniversary Release!"

Downloading here, forum here.

PS: if you've downloaded it before this post you should download it again, I've found two major problems in the previous tar.gz, so I re-uploaded it!