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.