We got Ardor3D.com highlighted. Release: almost ready, dist builder script done

The freshly refactored site of Ardor3D engine contains jClassicRPG as one of its highlighted projects. It's grand to see our humble project on the site of the great engine. The release with Ardor3D is really close, I have even produced a test tar.gz with the recently updated ant task. I've repaired some fresh smaller bugs and integrated the remaining voicepacks contributed by Bunches, Rigardi and MaximB. Thanks folks! :) The planned date of release is next monday... hopefully it will be met. I need to test things on Windows and nVidia yet and then it's ready.

New Voicepacks contributed! Twitter for jcrpg. Migration to JME3 under consideration.

Hello again! Things are slowly-slowly creeping to a spinning up here, hopefully now that I'm less inclined towards actual gaming - finishing Witcher I'll get back to business, developing the game. Right now I'm starting to consider migration from jme2 to 3d-engine jME version 3 created by lead dev MomokoFan @ jme forum. I'm looking at the project and how complete and stable it is right now before deciding to migrate or not.

But other kind folks too are relentlessly keeping things going on. For now latest great additions are two male voicepacks created by Rigardi from Austria and MaximB from Israel (author of Linux Gaming News). Both packs are of great quality, Rigardi's pack is one for a sane and fair person, while MaximB created a 'Drunken Dwarf' pack. Now we have 3 voicepacks with the previously announced female pack by Bunches that will be integrated to the game soon. Thanks, guys! :)

For your information I've opened a microblog at twitter that will be the quickest way to follow jcrpg dev progress on my side. Follow me here: http://twitter.com/illespal. It may also feature tweets about other linux related things too, so don't be surprised if you get something like: "hey, new catalyst out, more things broken" or "woohoo, new kernel is faster than anything". ;)

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!

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......

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)

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!

Musical Focus

Me still composing full-free-time, so no updates regarding code, only goq669 is coding for the options menu thing when he has free time. Till today I've created four new tracks to serve as background music for each of the current climate belts. I'm planning to create 1 more for each belt, then I'll consider it a complete first iteration of composition for jCRPG on behalf of me. :)

New Music on Jamendo

Okay, so here we go! I've committed the new soundtracks to the SVN plus made it available on jamendo.com, the CC licensed music share site. Here you can listen to all the three new tracks created by me for the game. I have used rosegarden + dssi-vst wrapper (vsthost) + vst plugin to create and play the music (recording was done with sound-recorder). Integrating the music into the game is mostly complete though with some known replay issues, that I still have to investigate a bit more. Anyway, you can fight and do the character leveling with music playing the latest SVN version. :) PS: Consider it a Santa Claus surprise ! Good or bad surprise? Share your opinion here or on jamendo. ;)

Music creation update, carnivore plant

In the last post I mentioned that I've started to read about music theory and to compose some pieces. Well, since that I've not coded a single line for the game. It took away all my free time, but probably it was not worthless. Some tracks have been put together for combat, plus a victory fanfare thingy has been born. I'll clean up a few things, license it and will publish it here one of them soon and integrate them into the game. Meanwhile goq669 is coding to improve the configuration/options setting/storing/loading part. tidbit has created a brand new monster again, this time a carnivore giant plant! So things are going on their right way! :)

Main Menu Theme ready, and the 'fresh air' of License struggle

DarkStalion has just finished creating the complete version of the Main Theme for jClassicRPG! It's very well worth the listening, so don't hesitate to follow to his blog and grab it! I love it!

The big silence here at the blog for a longer period is due to the process that I'm currently in. The process of creating a new free & open source license for supporting easier free game development (easier from my point of view and with my considerations at least). There are already draft versions of the two planned flavors of it. Both are copyleft license flavors based on the Apache 2.0 license, appended with copyleft part. Copyleft means that it is required to distribute the sources of a work as well if someone distributes such work under the copyleft license.

The new licenses which are in the works offer patent license part, GPL compliance, non-conflictive nature, separative nature, copyleft nature, open source: the things that I consider important. I'm willing to use this new open source license for later releases of jClassicRPG to make it easier for those contributors to contribute to the project, who can't cope with some of the aspects of GPL-compliance for their media. Check this thread here about the creation of the licenses. (There's another lengthy but interesting thread about interpretations of GPL too here.)

There is two flavors of this new license we're creating: one is called Strong Flavor which contains stronger restrictions to make it stronger copyleft - redistributors of original work and derivative works has to make publicly available or distribute the source too. The other is the Weak Flavor, weaker copyleft - the redistributor only has to distribute or make the source publicly available if he distributes a new Derivative work.

If you're good at lawyer stuff, and willing to read it and suggest things, please visit the forums and reply!

PS: ah, after a half hour of thinking just after writing this post, we've concluded that the Weak Flavor is useless, so we've just dropped it (because redistributing a one copy distribution of a Derivative work would mean no source redistribution required only the very first time it's released, so it is basically very easily lost in the chain.)

Good News on Music Department

Recently (if you read the forums carefully you already know the name) Jasper aka DarkStalion has come to spend some time composing a main menu theme for jClassicRPG. He told that he'll help out and he now has returned with a fantastic piece of epic fantasy music. He's still working on it, but it's already 3 and a half minutes long. I'm a big fan of music like this for fantasy RPGs, and this one just fits so well. Jasper at his blog (which has other interesting contents as well) has shared the unfinished version so you can hear and comment on it. Go and check out!

Meanwhile another musician has contacted the project just today through one of my friend and he already sent some samples.

So hopefully soon we'll have new music in jClassicRPG!!

More Sound is Cool

I've been working a bit on adding looped environment sounds and their sources. Now mostly all kinds of places have a gentle background sound - town, waters, jungle, forest. A lot of other new single time played sounds were collected and added - walking in snow, dog barking, crickets in the grass. It's pretty nice now walking around and listening to changing sounds. I love it! :D The new sounds are from freesound.org with no exception. A great place indeed! Zphr's been working a while to make his wooden house model even better! Now it's less polygon and the same good look. He's done a great job again! This is all in SVN. There are only a few bugs on my list now that separates us from releasing... Hurray! :)

Nearing the next release

Well, although we're in summertime so I should expect low interest and low feedback still we're heading for the next release with ultra speed! Countless changes and improvements - again especially around combat. New sounds for spells, new UI graphics effects to easily spot who is doing things, flying 3D impact point counter for the enemies. Now you can quite easily follow the happenings of the combat with the cool turning encounter camera mode. :) Character sheet was improved too, added resistance point output to it. You can also try to leave a combat - in that turn you won't act, and if you survive enemy attacks you can escape. Neutralization social skills too have received real effect - you can neutralize enemies with social skills like Reasoning. :D Also some popups before starting a combat is added for better understanding of the situation. Zphr's actively helping out in the graphics part. Also Tranberry has created point bar graphics for the HUD bar elements! Thanks for them a lot!

Working on EncounterLogic Turn Act Phase playback

We're continuing the accentuated work on turn act phase! Several new things designed to make it a working system. Just to mention a few: added multiple animation type definition for MovingModels, boosted the EncounterLogic with a real turn plan listing choices that units and player made ordered by the EvaluatorBase speed evaluator code. Success of a given skill use is now calculated by EvaluatorBase too. Another new thing is Impact and ImpactUnit that is calculated by EvaluatorBase - modifies actor's points and target's points (like health, stamina) on success.

Based on results different sounds and animations (etc. attack, pain) are played now when available for the model/skill. It's starting to round up well, although this part just needs tones of work as you can imagine. Ugh, not even mentioning the particle system and such that will be needed for spell effects. Lots of work ahead. But it's FUN! Watching the enemy attacking and struggling when hit by player's party members - a visual turn based game logic is (will be) just right before the nose of player. :D

Check the screenshot for a preview - also a faint glimpse at Zphr's brand new fantastically looking animated boarman thugs (modeled in Blender again) and the text box in the bottom shows combat messages of the previous round... Thanks Zphr for doing a great-great job with the boarmen! I will post more about the boarmen when it will be more complete.

All in SVN!

Entity-O-Meter, new textures/models, climatic sounds

These are the new things for today. I couldn't stop adding some new features like environmental sounds for climate belts (some rarely played nice bird sounds while walking around, or eagle cry over the desert :) ), the new Entity-O-Meter (icons showing the detected groups (will be skill based if you can detect them or not)) and some refactoring for the houses in texture and model too (also added the steps created by theotherhiveking with a wooden texture on it). I'll check a few things yet but the prealpha release is due in a few days. I hope you like these news! :)

Environmental Sounds working

With using the quick TreeLocator class in Ecology it's easy to determine the entities/groups around the player, so I've added a doEnironmental call to the GameStateContainer which is called when Engine is ticking an environment event in every 16 seconds. Then it's looked up which groups are around and the EntityMember descriptor tells what sounds can be played (EntityMember's audioDescription is used for storing this information). I've added sounds for the human commoners, gorilla and wolf groups. Check the SVN if interested, you'll get sounds right after starting a new game.

Hard work put into UI - Character Creation maturing

Let the screenshots speak. I'm too tired at the moment after working on jcrpg's UI widgets and character creation screens for hours. :-) (There's been some nice sound additions for animals into the game committed into SVN. Check the latest SVN for howling wolfs and the wild gorilla and all the UI improvements for New Game subscreens.) PS.: Missing Charisma and Karma added to attributes this morning - before you'd complain. :-)