Update, Female Voicepack still needed

Recently the water around jCRPG became a bit calmer than in the last few monthsit had been. For a while it's predictably staying so -- as in the month behind I was relaxing and for the next couple of months I'll be quite busy in my spare time.

Still there's some update realized by getter77 who took the precious time to fix some of the less well-done parts of the texts. Thanks Brian for helping out there too! :)

Meanwhile, if you happen to be able to help out with a female voicepack, don't hesitate, we still have very little to zero female voicepacks. :) Details here.

Feedback regarding the previous release is still much welcome, just as donations.

Trac on sf.net activated - for task/bug tracking

I've decided to check out the task/bug/project tracker utility used by many projects. I've looked at it many times, lately related to PARPG project. It's looking neat and useful with all the project management/svn/task tracking integration it has. Form now on jClassicRPG project will use this facility to manage such things.

URL: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/javacrpg/roadmap.

Unfortunately it needs sf.net account to be editable (at least that filters spamming), so if you want to report a bug you'll need to register on the sourceforge.net site. (You can still browse it without an account though.) After registering that you'll receive email notifications about updates for your reported bug, so it might be worthy to register - as the jCRPG forum has no email facility. Those who prefer to use the forum - you can still use that as a less 'technical' form to report problems. (Old bug tracker is deactivated on sf.net project site.)

Minor Fix release is out

Head to the downloads at sourceforge.net. If you already downloaded 20091104, download the 20091104-fix zip only. If you didn't, you should download the full pack (20091122). Link.

Please give more feedback, bugreports, so that we can try to take care of the problems! :)

Important quick fix again and great news - donation received!

Hello, folks!

A problem experienced by some of the testers and also reported on happypenguin.org, is now hunted down and exterminated! It was related to the logging of X11 events and a badly created filter pattern in Jcrpg.java. Now it's rooted out and committed. You can find a zip with the fixed ./bin directory of the release here: link. I will provide a patch release on sf.net later (hopefully tomorrow).

Another problem experienced on some weaker video cards (like 9600 mobility or intel video chip) can be resolved by first running the game with the jcrpg-lowest-debug.sh. (Then go to option menu and probably switch off the Normal maps totally too, save it, and later you can use the jcrpg.sh to play the game as the low settings got saved that way.) So if it looks like you are having troubles with starting, try to fall back to that jcrpg-lowest-debug.sh/bat file.

Very good news is that the project got a new donator! We have received donation of $5. Big thanks go out! I'm contactacting the donator to get info if I can share the name or nickname (desired one) of the donator before I can post it here and add to the DONATORS file of the project.

EDIT: The new donator is Chris Noffsinger from the USA. Thanks Chris!!
Donator granted me permission to share his name.

Feedback! :)

The release rolled out more than a week ago, there's been over 300 downloads! I'm really happy about that. Team members and a few other piece of folks pumped back some useful notes and bits. Still it would be quite useful if more of those kind gamers who try it would give us a heads-up about how things worked out. So hereby I kindly call those of you interested in this piece of game to give us some more of feedback. Here at the blog (or blawg?) or the forums. It would certainly boost the enthusiasm to carry on! After all this game is not for its own sake only, but for the gamers too. Without players it all might seem worthless... So grab your keyboar(d)s please!

Quick fix needed - fatal error in loading reported

Here you can download the quick fix in case you have downloaded the game before this post (20091102 version) - those who have the new version (20091104) can skip this post.
The bug prevents you from loading the save games. Also the save game saved without this fix will not be working even with the fix. So it's recommended to update ASAP, before saving games! :) Soon I'll upload a full package too. Installation: unzip in the folder of the game, overwriting previous files.

EDIT: Full package uploaded now. Fresh downloaders use the new full package - you shouldnt do anything special, just go to download page and now everything should be okay. :)

The 'Head Chop' Release

Yes, we're ascending to the next level of our destiny through the obstacles of the great dev-eater beast of Tiredness and Desperation. We have entered the sanctuary of the miraculous Release again. Here we stand astounded and in silence, holding back breath. We are aware that something great surprising and of elemental effect may happen anytime. As we are there awaiting for some never-ending minutes, a booming sound starts to cite something strange, slowly - pressing each word. Listening carefully we try to memorize what's being told:

"
- New monsters/humanoids (by tidbit, TheAncientGoat)
- New animations for some beings (by tidbit)
- New town types (anatipion and yeti by tidbit)
- New buildings (by tidbit)
- New character voicepacks (by getter77 and qubodup)
- Generated Road System added
- Mouse support added (based on patches by mkienenb)
- Camera set to smooth turning in combat mode
- Options menu completed
- Very basic scenario support with seed choosing at New Game
- Intro text for scenario added
- Behavior skills are now used in perception
- Easier to use character creation
- World map window enhancements, graphics, town icons
- Enhanced shaders and more normal map textures
- Displaying percept beings in 3D in walk mode with fade shader
- Top button row for accessing windows
- Tooltip system added
- Optimized font rendering for UI elements
- Lamp light added (key L)
- Buffer pool debug OSD (key T)
- Many-many bugfixes, optimization, reference leak fixes
"

Right after finishing these words, a glowing globe elevates from out of the darkness of the Sanctuary. Yeah, now you know what awaits you, jcrpg's next sneak-peek enchantment is in your hands like a crystal ball. It may be that it helps you to look into a distant Future... so let the Trial begin!

Candidates for Testing - don't hesitate! And don't forget to report back at the forums or IRC chat channel.

If you wish to make the dev happy, don't forget to donate some bucks to the project through paypal (at the left side of the blog, the links positions your browser there). It will help to keep the enthusiasm high and also let the remaining audio tracks to become free (CC-BY-SA without the non-commercial attribute). It still needs ~340$ (see Project Budget on the left side of the blog).

Please note, that the project greatly lacks female voice packs, so if you happen to be a kind lady, please stop by and create a voice pack for the game. :)

The 'Head Chop' Release Is Out

Spread the good news. I have no time for a proper blogpost now, tomorrow I''ll do it. Anyway here is the link to the download zip: http://sourceforge.net/projects/javacrpg/files/jClassicRPG/svn_20091102/jcrpg-20091102.zip/download . Instructions still here: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/javacrpg/index.php?title=Download . Use the jcrpg.bat under Windows. chmod +x jcrpg.sh under Linux. ;)

3D beings displayed in walk mode, more animations

Good news feature- and contributionwise. A quick feature idea born out of 'nowhere', as with the further development of the Entity'O'Meter and skills the code is now able to be aware who you can really percept/recognize, that way it's really straightforward to display those in the 3D world too! And that's already working well and committed to SVN. A little bit more care for the unit placement code and it's ready. I even wrote a little shader that modifies alpha channel of the fragment color to let the appearing units fade in and out instead of instantly popping up. Shaping it nicely. :) Check the owner of the house (the test NPC gorilla for all the humanoid towns :D) on the screenie.

Meanwhile our fearless 3D staff (embodied by tidbit) is ruthlessly treading on the path of The Federated Animation of Mostly All Beings in jCRPG. That means 3 new monsters got animation (idle,attack,damage): harpy, plant'o'bite, lizard. Big thanks to tidbit again! Also getter77 is providing nice new soundpacks to spice up the experience. It will be fun to play with the psychotic, the evil or the nice guy voices just contributed by him. :)

While the freegamedev.net forum is up again and the recovery of the posts and data is underway, the backup forum is still available. I want to keep the separated forum as a mean of alternative even after things get okay on the original forum, but I still think keeping jClassicRPG as a part of the fgd forum community is an important goal.

PS.: further refining placement, a test shot with a group of angry boarmages around. ;)

Contributions, shaders, new normal maps

Polishing, polishing, polishing - that's what's being done right now. And nice contributions by our new community member getter77, an aspiring and talented game developer. Right now he has created a pair of male voicepacks (1 for psychotic and 1 for bully personality). Thanks getter77 (aka Brian)!

Meanwhile I've fired up gimp-normalmap + gimp-dds plugin again on my laptop, and started to spit out a dozen of normal/height/spec maps for the already present building/road/tree textures. The result is awesome. The heavy use of such mappings culminated a series of interesting bugs/detection of missing features of the shaders. Most of these problems are now resolved, also a new level of normal map shader detail is added to the Options menu (detailed shader can handle 2 lights blended). Also fog is now supported by those shaders - and the shadow render pass is also fixed to work correctly with those. Check the screenshots for shaders/mappings in action! :) On the second one you can catch tidbit's new stone base square for the anatipion towns. Release is very near now...

Screenies, polishing, testing multiple platforms

Options menu is again in focus. A few related bugs resolved now. Meanwhile tidbit has added cool new animations for the new humanoids (yeti and anatipion [which is walking, scorpion like people of desert]), all those got into the SVN too. Anatipions even have their own building models (done also by tidbit). Thank you!

More testing is under way. Even Windows 7 64 bit test version got its round after Vista64. (You'll have to be careful with Windows 7, like installing latest nvidia driver for nvidia cards, otherwise it doesn't work. Also it's recommended to use 32 bit Java under Windows, seems like 64 bit doesnt want to work with the supplied 64 bit lwjgl dlls.) Well, with my new mobo + CPU and my good 'old' 8800GTS, I've tried to boost the limits of view in game, game works nicely with a view distance of 100 now. Check screenshots.

Forums down due to freegamedev.net outage - backup forum is installed

Unfortunately a full system failure at the freegamedev.net machine results in a quite long outage in the forums services too. It's not yet sure if the forums can be normally restored. Let's hope it will get better, but in a week or more you can expect the forums to be down.

Brighter news is that the polishing of the release is progressing very well. Apart from adding a few more entity icons and probably sounds no other thing is planned to be coded, added before releasing.

EDIT: till it gets back, you can use this backup forum http://jcrpg.ath.cx/phpbb/

Bughunting, profiling, polishing

In brief: smooth camera turning added for combat plus zooming activated enemy title text for better understanding what's going on the battlefield; left over memory reference hunting to allow restarting/loading games multiple times without lag or OutOfMemory; new male character voice pack by qubodup added by qubodup personally, thank you; a dozen other smaller bugfixes; correcly working mouselook while moving; added starting-at-closest-shrine at starting new game; saving of Options menu settings implemented (now on you can use jcrpg.sh/bat instead of the special scripts for different detail levels and use Options menu to select/tweak the needed detal level and save). New content done by tidbit awaits integration (brand new humanoid base model and its home buildings). After adding those I'll start to give the really really final polishing to the release package (reviewing scripts and documents) and then......

freegamer review and videos

Qubodup @ freegamer has reviewed a couple of 3D RPG aspirants of the FOSS scene, among them jClassicRPG got a few nice paragraphs and in-game videos too! Thanks qubodup! :) Videos: travel & battle, character creation. (As a a side note: a few smaller annoying bugs and 'features' along with a tough memory-leak related problem has been resolved since last post, all in SVN. Still polishing a bit before rolling out the test release.)

New content and player lamplight

Yetis and igloo created by tidbit are marching gloriously into the SVN of jcrpg. :) As you can guess yetis live in igloo villages in the polar region.

Minelamp light switch (key 'L') is added, so you can see better things around you while walking in the dark. Currently unlimited use. More polishing here and there, cooperating with tidbit before releasing.

Content integration on the way, still more smaller feature upgrades

While TheAncientGoat's worpion monster and tidbit's Shrine model is now integrated along with a proper placement of it around the road blocks (btw, shrines help you resting, giving you relieve from monsters lurking around), I've run into other smaller things that needed care since long. So I couldn't resist to touch those codes - some refactoring, some new codes. Two major tasks were done regarding this: first the upgrade of the EntityOMeter with being type / distance / angle, second is the rewrite from scratch the player movement verification code (logical, not graphical!). This along with nicer code means that a half dozen skills are now worthy to level: mythology/ecology helps to recognize nearby creatures, survival/hide/secure will help you to evade/avoid them, tracking/architecture will help you to spot entities and tell distance, hide/disguise will cover your identity (this one not of much use yet), climbing/tumbling will let you pass over obstacled height (mountains, steep riversides). It's good to know that setting up your Behavior skills is turning those into 3 times more powerfull at skill checks (like when you try hiding, tracking etc.)! Another good news is that I've added a heap of tooltips to the skills. Things are slowly getting over the coding and content integration phase, steadily floating towards that overdue test release.

More small features to ease accomodation

Usability and UI have been the primary focus for some time now. This time in a short way: player titled save games, better game slot info in load menu, colored icons for the populations of world map loaded from 32-bit depth 9x9 sized .ico files, busy screen for economy updates with multiple randomly chosen images, very basic scenario support with an intro text displayed in the new StoryPartDisplayWindow (scrolling, fading in). Also I've further tested under Windows Vista 64 bit, no crashes luckily.

Next two thing is addition of Calendar to the World Map and integrate content. Then release! :)

Extendable Tooltip box system and easier to use combat window

Polishing the UI is still the focus for a few days more. The addition of tooltip box is finished. Till now the character creation dropdown lists for Races and Professions got tooltip texts. It's quite easy to extend the tooltip system to most of the UI elements later if needed.

Another new feature made in: a new set of checkboxes were added to the turn act window (combat), which are reflecting if the given character's choice for action is valid or not for the turn. That way the player is able to spot which character's previous action is not doable in the current round, making it easier to see what's left to be set before starting next combat round.

Optimized text rendering READY!

Till recently I always were a bit uncertain how the previous 2D text rendering might work out on the long run. On screens with dense windows the FPS counter dropped down a bit too much for my taste. There are two different text rendering ways used in the game - one was used for the bottom log, the other for all the UI. The true type font renderer was used for all the UI elements - that renderer was creating a separate quad for each letters in a text. The monospace (bitmap based) text renderer was much nicer and more performant -- but it's working with its own font bitmap format only!

I looked at it and found that if I was able to create my own bitmap out of the current UI ttf font (Vinque), I could replace the slower method and use the low poly version instead. So two things followed by a big refactoring of the UI elements changed the whole UI into a faster performing sweetness. :D

First, I overrode the jME Text class (shape responsible for 2D texts) and thus overrode the default font bitmap path too. Second, I used FontForge to tweak the ttf font into a monospace font set exported into a new ttf set and using 'convert' of ImageMagick converted it into a bitmap. A little tweak with GIMP and voila, there goes the Vinque font and TextureState based font rendering of jME tuned for jClassicRPG. :) After that, a tideous process of reviewing all the UI element and window codes came. But it was worthy! On my Intel gfx card it can even double the FPS on the character creation screens! Saving a lot of polys and also scene graph elements, that's quite understandable. :)

Top button row icons ready, Character creation improved

Still working on the UI part, this time a lot of minor fixes and polishing of the mouse input was going on. Finally I decided to not wait for the top button icons to be contributed, instead 'do-it-yourself', created them by modifying different free icons or painting it myself. I hope you like it. You will be able to click them with the 'pointer mode' mouse, swap between the different windows - that is quite comfortable. :)

The other major upgrade is of the Character Creation part. Following the idea of TheAncientGoat @ freegamer, I changed the profession selection process. Instead of letting professions be chosen after tweaking the attributes to unknown minimums, now player can select a profession which automatically sets the minimum attribute levels that are required for the given profession. This makes it a lot more easier to select a profession. The other change is on the skill setting page - added a Reset button, which will reset the skill value set to the original values.

Next I can move back to enhancing the map. After that I will integrate the new 3D content (made by tidbit & TheAncientGoat). That done a test release is due - so there'll be a new release before moving on to the next chunk of bigger development goal (story/dialog/commerce system).

Fixing Windows mouse issues, Vista 64 bits note

I have just fixed two issues related to Windows + the new mouse input. First, cursors under Windows rather be 32x32 or displayed corrupted - googled it up after a series of experimentation in Gimp with no success. Now all cursors resized to 32x32, to let it work as fine as under Linux. Second, main menu mouse input didnt work under Windows - solving it was to prepare the code for Windows specific file path separator. All committed into SVN repo.

MysticSkript visited us on IRC chat and told about a problem related to running latest release under Vista64bit. I figured out just today that the solution right now is to use x86 (32-bit) Java installation if you want to run the previous release. (SVN version should work with 64 bit Java and Vista64 tho' I haven't tested it yet.)

Enhancing the UI experience

Now that mouse support is in, I have looked at the possible ways to use the mouse over the default ways of input on the keyboard that are now already possible by using the mouse. Of two major thing the first to have a ButtonRow on the top of the screen, which let's the player toggle the different windows and to start/stop camping (resting). The second thing is to let the player use the character portraits to raise the Inventory or Character sheet for the given character. Both of these are now in the SVN repo. Check the screenshot! :) I plan to add unique image buttons for the top ButtonRow's instead of the text. Also a nice background for the strip. Nicely done contributions for these two would be mostly welcome! (The image buttons for: MainMenu, Map, Camp, PartyOrder, Behavior [party members background skill selection for use while walking in normal mode], Act [do things like use an item, drink potion], Search [look for opening a door, trap, chest]. For size, look at the screenshot.)

[Updated] Mouse support READY!

Currently I have narrowed down my attention to the process of providing full mouse support for the UI. I've added mouse event processing to 70% of the UI elements already, and also cursor replacement, different cursor types for normal/scrolling/tuning values etc. Still more is to be done, the remaining UI element classes awaiting, along with the addition of new Close signs for the windows that lack them, reviewing the UI mechanisms of the already present windows. And of course more and more testing. :) Things are in SVN, so anyone interested can help in testing as well.
Update: spending some more hours on the matter today, now it's time to announce: the mouse support dev is completed and committed to SVN!

Wiki moved, addition of mouse support for the UI started, contributions

Due to the previous mediawiki (self installed) being dogslow (every page loading takes +5-10 seconds just waiting for something, probably DB or some name resolution?) I have decided to revisit the idea of using MediaWiki hosted natively by sf.net for the projects. I've gone through all the content, copied the remaining changes to the new MediaWiki. From now on please use that one (all the links I've tried to replace, so you just have to follow those links). To edit it, you will need an sf.net account, and probably permission from me. I'm not sure how this part works on sf.net hosted mediawiki. We'll see! :)

Yesterday after incroporating mkienenb's new patch for starting the addition of menu mouse handling, I've found some time to tweak it and make it work with the InputBase class of the InputWindows, with a special kind of picking for the UI element based on Mike's advice - to check the WorldBound of the given Spatials under a window's root node. At least buttons are working now! We will keep on working for an all encompassing UI mouse support (dropdowns, inputs, value tuners and all the stuff). You can expect it to work in the next release. :)

Meanwhile tidbit is helping with a lot of different new content. Yeti, igloo, snowy road texture for the arctic region is ready for integration (animation still needed, if interested in that part visit our forum/wiki/irc for more details). He's just finished a new series of Shrines to be integrated as part of the road networks later. TheAncientGoat - another helping hand from the FreeGameDev community - has created a new unique monster (something like a horrifying larva/insect/spider mixture) and posted it on the forums. So lots of things happening in the contributions forum! Check the topics out for preview images! :D

Path development ready

After tweaking the worldmap display (thinner lines of road with direction) and adding some bends to the road network I started to fiddle with some better algorithms for road generation - instead of simple lines drawn between the populations an A* algo should find the most efficient path to build a road upon. With the help of the superb slick 2d java library I managed to add a fully featured, cost based, fast road network generation - the class World of jcrpg implemented the TileBasedMap interface of slick pathfinder. Kudos goes to slick2d! ...and thus ended the first iteration of road network development in jcrpg! :) Check the screenshots to see how it looks on the world map! :) (PS.: Updated 1st screeny, nicert gfx now in SVN.)

Turning, bridging that old dusty road

While I've been working on to make the roads better fit its purpose (turning points added to generation and display, removed wooden steps replacing those by simple road) tidbit created a brand new road texture for it. Now it looks quite appropriate! :) Also the unusual yeti is complete, textured and rigged by him! Thanks for those! Attached are the new screenshots of the road (note texture splatting is on on the 1st, which kindof eats resources, luckily my intel gm965 works with it with smaller/bigger hickups).

What remains is to finalize the selection process - what counts as big towns - and wether should there be more than one graph of roads (separating enemy countries like not building roads between them). This latter idea is more probable to be dropped - in general even not friendly countries used to have road connections. Eh, and another smaller task will be to make the map correctly display thin lines of the road with turns and crossings. Then I can go on and start the labeling of the world map! Yay! :)

Something crosses?

Hah, with some very basic tweaking of the Economic class melted with some parts of the EconomicGround class and the River's WorldSizedFlowDirection thingy (a kind of bit switch map, 4 bits for each world map block and the for directions (currently a block is 40x40 sized areas)). The mixture is called RoadNetwork! Right now the roads go in a cross in the middle of the block where road directions are defined. Nothing complicated, still now it's being represented in the 3D view as well. :) I will improve it later on.

The IRC channel (you can find a webchat link to it above at Chat menu element) seems to be quite useful, we gather there day by day, chat and try to be constructive. :D mkienenb from New York has shown up there as well and helped out with some good ideas and code patches along with some editing of the project Wiki's brand new user guide part created by him. Meanwhile tidbit started to work on an polar monster called 'yeti'.

Update on the roads

Yeah, I've tried to come up with something regarding roads. Now it's getting into shape! Certains towns of bigger size are now interconnected. Each town with two of the closest big cities. A web of road will get you into all the bigger towns. Currently it's very early but at least some kind of very simple path drawing is already in, using the WorldSizedFlowDirection class (already used for rivers and their directions). The WorldMap is already showing something of it, but the 3D view and abstract cube architecture is not yet aware of the roads. :) The screenshot shows the randomly generated world, with a few bigger towns connected with the reddish colored road.

jME and lwjgl updates in SVN

I'm currently catching up with what has been going on in the jMonkeyEngine development. It's still a rather active community there, I'm glad to see - patches are incorporated in the jme svn, dependent libraries updated. So I took the time and updated jcrpg's dependencies.

Next thing I must have a look at before the planning is to debug a recent in game text related bugreport - fonts are getting totally unreadable with some GPUs under Windows. Have any of you experienced the same thing (messed up fonts in-game) with latest release - if so what GPU/OS do you have?

PS: Just attached the bug's screenshot. Anyone else with it?

Project IRC channel launched

Just in the weird case you wanted a separate jcrpg channel on freenode... here it is! I felt like experimenting with the IRC bots (like eggdrop, which is kind of pretty usable) and thought it would be a good idea to have a jcrpg dedicated irc channel for the times to come. So the parameters:

IRC server: irc.freenode.net
Channel: #jclassicrpg

See you there!

Considering possibilities

Hey there, long time no post here! I've been on a long discursion into the lands of music - composing a lot of tracks mainly for a fellow FOSS project scourge. That is a great roguelike 3D game. Also a few tracks for parpg the post apocalyptic RPG. As time passed I felt like I should return - anyway as currently I'm the only coder and manager of this project, not much happened to it. :)

Now I've reached a point when I can again concentrate on jClassicRPG. I'm currently considering the next things to do regarding the project. I'm checking what's going on in the jMonkeyEngine community (looks like a lot, a new 3.0 is under construction), and also wanting to create a kind of new roadmap. I'm planning to boost the quest/story/dialog/NPC (persistent characters in jCRPG terminology) part of the game in the next iteration along with adding a kind of roads to the world and better map to guide you in the zones/towns of the world. This will be the first priority.

After all this means that I want to take a kind of shortcut to have an earlier prototype of a 'playable' game and to foresee what the real shape of the game architecture might look like. And to be able to create some kind of more concrete concept for media content (3d,audio,structures) as well. The project needs this shortcut for another reason as well - to let the interested people use it as a way to create some kind of story (tho' not in the usual way as story modules are planned to be injected into the world generation [you won't define a full world with all the places, just certain elements of a story to be weaved into the randomly created world]) and add content for them in an earlier stage that I was planning before - this might catalize the community of the project. This is a slight deviation from my original plan where I was working on implementing a living world which would generate quests and story by itself - but that still might fit into the system in a later stage of development.

I'd like to see some more feedback regarding the usability of the months-ago released previous version as there's been really few replies regarding the call for test. (Well actually there was some useful feedback, thanks them, but it wasn't too much.)

Jasper Brownrigg has returned (he created our beloved main theme) with a nice new soundpack for character voices. I've committed it into the SVN already. Thanks Jasper!

Also jClassicRPG turned two years - just two months ago, eh. :) Happy Birthday! ;)

The 'Spring Greeter' release comes to life

Yes, we're ascending to the next level of our destiny through the obstacles of the great dev-eater beast of Tiredness and Desperation. We have entered the sanctuary of the miraculous Release again. Here we stand astounded and in silence, holding back breath. We are aware that something great surprising and of elemental effect may happen anytime. As we are there awaiting for some never-ending minutes, a booming sound starts to cite something strange, slowly - pressing each word. Listening carefully we try to memorize what's being told:

"
- New monsters and animals (by tidbit)
- New area type Maze (models by tidbit), maze generation
- Audio system enhanced, zone dependent music playback
- Main theme music added (by Jasper Brownrigg)
- Battle and background music for climate zones (by Pal Illes)
- Cave background music (by Marcus Rasseli)
- Storage unlocking/looting interface added, chests with traps and fix loot added to maze area
- Enhanced world map (F1)
- A heap of new portraits (by Grumbel, and public domain organized by qubodup)
- Voice profile selection for character creation with one new male sound-set (voice act by Magnulus)
- Support for normal/spec mapping for static models
- Options menu settings (by goq66)
- Optimized loading/rendering algorithm, moving to jME 2.0
- Texture atlas technique, shadow mapping, DDS textures added, memory optimizations
- Many bugfixes (e.g. game fixed for use on Intel gfx under Linux)
- Quicker loading of game, addition of 'Please Wait' panel
- Tested video drivers under Linux now include nVidia, AMD/ATi, intel
"

Right after finishing these words, a glowing globe elevates from out of the darkness of the Sanctuary. Yeah, now you know what awaits you, jcrpg's next sneak-peek enchantment is in your hands like a crystal ball. It may be that it helps you to look into a distant Future... so let the Trial begin!

Great Heroes, come and test your wits - play the game or create your own tormenting beasts! It's high time - because combat is ready to begin NOW!

Candidates for Testing and Modeling - don't hesitate!

PS.: Voice acting for the different player character voice profiles are highly welcome. Details here. As usual 3D art is just as welcome. Visit the forum for details.

Further care for the world map and new music

After fixing the recent Intel woes I've been working to make even easier to percept what's depicted on the World Map (raised by pressing F1). Now it consists of a lot more pixels in size, takes up a larger percentage of your screen and your position sign and the town signs are not fully covering the geography coloring, so you can have an idea what kind of area you and the towns are. Still there's a lot of room for improvement, but for this release this will suffice. I'm considering the last steps to shape up the next test release package, so hopefully it will happen soon! :)

Meanwhile Marcus Rasseli our new music contributor's mountain cave music has been integrated! Thanks Marcus!!

Intel video driver 3D issues under Linux

Currently I'm busy with resolving the recently detected Intel openGL + Linux related issues of jClassicRPG. I'm progressing well, I could identify a way to prevent instant and notorious crashes with xf86-video-intel driver under jME. Also I've detected that DDS support is a missing feature in the driver, so I'll have to add alternative textures for the ones in DDS format and add some tricky resource locator configuration to override them when DISABLE_DDS is specified in the configuration file. I'm happy that now I'm able to test the game with Intel driver as well, though performance of the GM965 is quite mediocre compared to those of the Nvidia GF6200Go (of course it's not a surprise, these video chips are known to be less performant 3D wise).
PS: patching the jME TextureKey and TextureManager to fall back to png/jpg if DDS is disabled, and adding fallback textures as well, I've finally brought up the project to shape with intel graphics...though it still is a lot more unstable than on any card of the two other major brand of video cards - probably due to the overload of 3D and driver problems?!

Total facelift of jcrpg's project webpage by Tranberry

YES! Tranberry our great 2d gfx designer at freegamedev.net community did it again! A total face-lift of the previously very simple webpage of the project at sourceforge.net. It's still static, but the design is just superb quality by my opinion! It's with fancy html+css combo. Go and check it here. (On a side note, I'm still tweaking the codes before the approaching release, so soon it might happen!)

Monster 'Evilrip' integrated, new creature sounds in SVN

The recently contributed monster by tidbit baptized as Evilrip, a two legged, armless, reptile-like winged fury is now haunting the halls of Chaos Mazes! The other monsters previously added (Plant'o'bite and Scorp'o'holder) and Evilrip recently have found the Fountain of Tones so now they have their unique threatening voice... the poor adventurers that get near to them will hardly forget the sonic experience! ;-)
PS: Recent reports tell that boarman tribes are hit by economic issues, so at some populations the citizens started to build huts instead of the well built, but expensive and resource eating wooden houses. Although it's clear that this new technological unit (invented by tidbit) might catalyze their expansive politics, if they ever had such.

Polishing, ironing out bugs, recent donations

I was concentrating on testing the new features and fixing the bugs that got into the code. At the moment I'm in the process of fixing the world map thingy which seems to be incorrect regarding the geography representation. I plan to iron out some remaining bugs while freezing the addition of new features into the game till the release of the next prealpha test package. Recently mvrasseli has come to the forums of jcrpg and has started to work on a new piece of music for the mountain caves. You can check the progress here.

Good news is that the latest donation campaign is starting to spin up with two recent donators (Juan and Josh, thanks!) sending some coins (till now a total of $30), catalyzing the 'Free the CC-BY-SA-NC soundtracks to CC-BY-SA' thing that is going on. After these now $20 is requested to free the first track from the NonCommercial term. I've added a little section, so that you can see the virtual budget of the project on the left side now under the 'Project Budget' panel.

PS: World map fixed. Now positioning is correct and I managed to fix the population pixels too. White shows normal villages, yellow shows dangerous maze populations - check it on the screenshot. :D
PS2: First $50 reached, tomorrow I will relicense the first track (The March On Ice) under CC-BY-SA (it's too late here now 11PM :)).

Functional unlock UI + trap damage calculation, voice profile, contribs

The unlock UI now is fully functional calling skill checks and damage calculation, and if successful inspection and unlocking is done the salvaging can be done with the additional looting window. I'm still working on the effect playback for the sprung trap. I've cut out the damage impact calculus of combat to a commonly usable method in EvaluatorBase. The visual/audio effect playback and text log messages has been also cut out for common use in EncounterLogic class. It's mostly working well, you can see and hear damage being done on your characters.

Meanwhile tidbit has created another unique monster for the mazes (not yet integrated, but that will happen soon). It has wings, no arms, and deadly tail attack as well. Another contribution was done by Magnulus, a starting voice actor from UK - he created a set of humanoid character sounds (combat, heal, greeting and such), which is already integrated into the game. This made me to add the voice profile selection to character creation, another pending feature which is now complete. :) If you happen to want to contribute player character voice acts it's much welcome, here you can find a guideline what sounds are needed. Another good thing is that a selection of the portraits pack created by Grumbel for adonthell was adopted (cropped and in some cases modified the shoulders to fit into the square form) as player character portrait choices.

[EDIT] 8 new jcrpg soundtracks on Jamendo - waiting for a $340 of donation ($60 received).

As you might remember recently I've published 3 tracks of the game on jamendo.com. The time came again now to release the 8 tracks newly created in the past weeks, and the Holidays. I've been working on these for over 2 months in my free hours in the night. It was refreshing and fun to create them. Hopefully you'll find them enjoyable. All the tracks are released under the Creative Commons-Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial 3.0 license (CC-BY-SA-NC), so you are free to download/copy/spread/use/modify it freely as long as you attribute it to me, use the same license for derivations and don't use it for commercial purpose (yes, NonCommercial, but read on, as that term I propose to remove if some circumstances are met). So there's two tracks serving as the background music for each of the current 4 climate zones of the game. They are all created to resemble symphonic genre, mostly calm or slow, and the overall length is around 30 minutes. (Optionally you can browse them in the SVN repository here.)

The instrument library used for the 8 tracks gives it a really big boost. Before creating them I've decided to use the East West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra Gold Edition, following the advice of Jasper Brownrigg who created the fantastic main theme for jClassicRPG using this library.

But choosing the EWQLSO Gold Edition was not the cheap way to go, it cost me $495 for the library + iLok key ($39.95) + shipping costs ($58, yes, i had to pay that much, the shop uses FedEx priority package only for shipping to my country), a total of $590 + VAT. That's a bit of a reason why I've decided to release the new tracks under a license with the NonCommercial term. But the deal is the following: if some of the unselfish people around who eventually like these tracks donated to encourage me and also to free the tracks ($50 per one track = 8x$50 = $400) I would re-release the tracks without the NonCommercial term. This call for donation is not about the price of the sound library, but the work I've put into the creation of the tracks and that if people like it enough or not to capacitate them for financial steps towards the project. I plan to create more tracks, at some point it might come that not just for jcrpg but for other projects as well. While I'm treading on this new road it would be really encouraging to have some of you donate to this cause! :)

So at this moment of publishing the first version of this blog post, the virtual budget of the project is -$400. Every time the sum reaches a new $50 limit (50,100,150...) I will free one of the tracks (in the order of the album track list). Upon every donation I will update this post to reflect donations, add donator names as comments (if the donator agrees), and also I will add donator names to the list in the game SVN, and later game releases. Donations are possible through PayPal here (that is just a positioning link, you still have to click on 'Make A Donation' button on this blog page).

Constructive criticism is much welcome!

UPDATE1: First donation for soundtracks received from Juan Carlos 'Furor' (Spain)
UPDATE2: Donation received from Joshua Slack 'renanse' (USA)
UPDATE3: Donation received from Bri 'Dragonbait' (USA)
-> sum of $50 reached, first track of the album (Arctic2.ogg, The March on Ice) is now CC-BY-SA.
UPDATE4: Donation received from Thomas (Germany)

Scorp'o'holder the beast forged in Chaos - by tidbit

A frightening new chaos monster has been born which is the mixture of spiky tentacles and a magical spheric body. The prototype idea of it's build-up slipped out on a foreboding afternoon from the head of tidbit: slimey, monstrous and all-mighty. and now spreading, gonna rule the halls of Chaos Maze later. Currently one of them was left homeless, wandering around in the jungle. One crazy painter who were brave enough depicted the poor one and sent the picture to us. Check it out! Meanwhile the Battle of Codes and Bugs rages on. Some fighters reported they could loot some chests in the depth of the mazes, but that still needs confirmation. ;)
UPDATE: Another dangerous habitant of the jungle was depicted and sent to us. We hope that the artist is still alive and not eaten by one of these Plant'o'Bites (another creature of tidbit).

Working on Lock Inspection Window

I've finished to bugfix the sound system, so now I'm back to the interrupted task of Unlocking Window. You can use key 'O' now to raise up the window, and then you have a bunch of possibilities: inspect/magically sense trap, disarm with physical skill or unlock it by spell, force if you are brave enough. If it's cracked, you can open it. :) Check the shot made of the new window. It's not functional yet, it's just a prototype. All in SVN if you want to check it. What do you think about it?

Back To Coding - AudioSystem

All compositions are ready, two for each climate zone. So now I'm back to coding, at the moment trying to add background music in game playback to the AudioSystem class and its dependencies. It's going nice, but a serious problem with it is still blocking the road. Playback and change of tracks by zone is working well, but after a while of walking around background music doesn't play at all. Seems like a problem with the underlying library openal + jorbis. I will investigate it further and after that I'll try to finish the treasure chest codes, getting close to a long awaited release. :)
UPDATE: It's getting better, seems like I could identify the issue: OpenAL Sources (practically sound 'channels') are not freed/reused correctly if I try streamed and preloaded content playback on reused Sources after playing the other way on it before. I've modified JME's openal audio system to separate them. I'm testing it further, so far seems to be better now!