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......