[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!