Music creation update, carnivore plant

In the last post I mentioned that I've started to read about music theory and to compose some pieces. Well, since that I've not coded a single line for the game. It took away all my free time, but probably it was not worthless. Some tracks have been put together for combat, plus a victory fanfare thingy has been born. I'll clean up a few things, license it and will publish it here one of them soon and integrate them into the game. Meanwhile goq669 is coding to improve the configuration/options setting/storing/loading part. tidbit has created a brand new monster again, this time a carnivore giant plant! So things are going on their right way! :)

Bit of progress in Options menu and Unlock window

The Options menu is gradually taking shape, some options in it are already working like audio volume and some effects' setting on/off. Meanwhile I've started the create the concept of the 'Unlock UI' for locked objects like chest. It's gonna be skill based and will require no action, only a bit of luck + good skills. Thievery and spell based inspection/unlocking, nasty trap types are in the plans. The pace of progress this week is a bit slow as I have started to dig myself a bit into music theory and am trying myself at creating some items that may resemble something like music. It's quite fun, and I'm trying to make it useful for jClassicRPG as well by trying to create pieces in a suitable style for fantasy - hopefully sooner or later something not too horrendous to listen to might born. :)

Moving back to LGPL license

Since creating the new license will take much time I've decided to go and switch back to LGPL license till it's gonna be ready. Time told that switching the GPL was not as much a good idea as I thought it first. The different interpretations that are around the media<-> code relation made me change my mind. In jClassicRPG there are already such media that might be dubious to use with GPL in such circumstances. For example the new music by Jasper is CC-BY-SA-NC which is not compatible. Anyway, SVN now contains LGPL source code again. So you can use jClassicRPG as a separate library again if you manage to do that. ;) BTW, I'm back to coding again after pushing the license thing to a lower priority level. New music theme by Jasper is intergrated to game and committed to SVN!

Main Menu Theme ready, and the 'fresh air' of License struggle

DarkStalion has just finished creating the complete version of the Main Theme for jClassicRPG! It's very well worth the listening, so don't hesitate to follow to his blog and grab it! I love it!

The big silence here at the blog for a longer period is due to the process that I'm currently in. The process of creating a new free & open source license for supporting easier free game development (easier from my point of view and with my considerations at least). There are already draft versions of the two planned flavors of it. Both are copyleft license flavors based on the Apache 2.0 license, appended with copyleft part. Copyleft means that it is required to distribute the sources of a work as well if someone distributes such work under the copyleft license.

The new licenses which are in the works offer patent license part, GPL compliance, non-conflictive nature, separative nature, copyleft nature, open source: the things that I consider important. I'm willing to use this new open source license for later releases of jClassicRPG to make it easier for those contributors to contribute to the project, who can't cope with some of the aspects of GPL-compliance for their media. Check this thread here about the creation of the licenses. (There's another lengthy but interesting thread about interpretations of GPL too here.)

There is two flavors of this new license we're creating: one is called Strong Flavor which contains stronger restrictions to make it stronger copyleft - redistributors of original work and derivative works has to make publicly available or distribute the source too. The other is the Weak Flavor, weaker copyleft - the redistributor only has to distribute or make the source publicly available if he distributes a new Derivative work.

If you're good at lawyer stuff, and willing to read it and suggest things, please visit the forums and reply!

PS: ah, after a half hour of thinking just after writing this post, we've concluded that the Weak Flavor is useless, so we've just dropped it (because redistributing a one copy distribution of a Derivative work would mean no source redistribution required only the very first time it's released, so it is basically very easily lost in the chain.)