Testing things with ATi catalyst 10.1

I'm moving my development to a notebook with ATi GPU. First it was a bit of a PITA, and I was really scared how things were starting to look (officially unsupported videocard (HD5650mobility)), but finally... Freshly installed Arch Linux 64-bit, a little bit of manual xorg.conf editing and slowly everything got into place. The game runs nicely with openjdk6 and latest Catalyst 10.1 (from the Arch AUR build repository).

I'll try to spot the bugs in the currently used shaders under ATi and start to hunt down some other problems if they appear. If things get okay I'll start to work on designing the story/dialog/trade thingy to come so we have some goals for our next milestone, the alpha stage jCRPG.

PS: For those curious, with this card the game (high settings, shaders, 1322x768) performs around 130-160 FPS under Linux/Catalyst. Not bad, eh, from Java? :)

Female Voicepack contribution by Bunches and Donation!

Good news in the new 2010 year! Project got a few new members on the forum! Long time lurker and tester Bri (aka dragonbait) joined us there and right after Bunches came who I had known from bit'o'moander (unquie classic RPG related forum) and chimed in with a supercool new voicepack - our first fully-fledged female voicepack ever! Many thanks to Bunches! :-)

Right after these great events just today the project received a new donation that will help to cover more of the pending costs (related to music creation). Many thanks to Greg Wilcox from the USA!