Forum URL change. Music contrib

After my dyndns.org account expired unfortunately, I had to reregister, and no way to create ath.cx domains anymore. :( Anyway I've chosen the shortest URL possible which is now http://jcrpg.dyndns.org/phpbb/. Forum has been updated to phpBB3 3.0.7-PL1 too, as the whole server has been dist upgraded recently, and it rendered the previous db instance incompatible. Luckily an update db helped, so all the things are up and running again as before.

mvrasseli has visited us again and started to create a great new combat music track for jcrpg. Check updates here.

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.

Content integration, preparing for release

As the tasks related to migrating to Ardor3D are all done I've started to work towards the release. Out of two remaining content integration task just completed one: new shop and guardpost buildings (by tidbit) are now placed in towns of humans and boarmen. I still need to integrate those voicepacks that landed the contribution depot some months ago. Project soon to celebrate its 3rd birthday, hopefully with a brand new test release. :)

Forging a perfect weapon takes a lot of time

It takes a heap of time to get the things really polished and perfectly working. I've stumbled upon a dozen of smaller things that block the way. 80% of them eliminated, so the code is getting into shape. A few still left on the list but I hope to get those done in the next week or so. Well, just to name one heavier problem that took hours to conquer was Terrain reloading... starting at a different point than new game's origo rendered it ruined..now it's origo is the saved coordinate of the player and that way it's working flawlessly.

tidbit is restlessly helping out the content side. This time a new guardpost has been raised from the ground. Thanks tidbit!

I have some bad news, some newly inserted 'assert' codes in the current stable and development version of Intel GPU driver for linux (gma965 that I know of) is making the game stop just upon starting... I hate to say, but without removing those assertions directly in the driver game won't start for you. If removed, it works okay... ATi and nVidia drivers are both working nice under Linux/Windows - except ATi's framebuffer doesnt render texture shadows (Rikard @ ardor3d pointed me to some sites were people had the same issue, thanks), so you can assume that the shadows of the foliage won't be rendered (under both Win/Linux). nVidia is perfectly fine again.

New buildings by tidbit + further testing/bugsquashing with Ardor3D version

Pleased to inform you that in the recent weeks tidbit created some nice new 3D content, namely new buildings for a temple and a shop. Thanks! Meanwhile I've been pushing the tests/validation of the ported code, squashing some upcoming problems and bugs. It looks like it is steadily becoming more and more finalized. Latest improvement was the restructuring of the directories containing textures and creating a separated media-raw hierarchy which servers as convenient base for batch converting images to the different detail levels and ultimately to DDS file format. I'm happy to tell that now 98% of the images are converted to DDS with mipmaps with AMD ATi's Compressonator and that all of these finally got their proper detail level versions (high/middle/low/low_png) obsoleting most of the textures found in the 'common' category. The DDS part was hiding some traps for me, for now I had to change to use the Compressonator instead of the GIMP DDS plugin as that one was generating DDS with missing mipmap levels somehow - interestingly it was okay under Linux + ATi, that way I didnt notice until I tested it under Windows where it presented small gaps in the texture. (Another thing that I should rant about is Intel's driver -- works under Linux but the UI part crashes under Windows + Intel GPU... this is still unresolved, funny thing is that if I downgraded to a 3 years old Windows Intel GPU driver the crash went away.)

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!

Update, Female Voicepack still needed

Recently the water around jCRPG became a bit calmer than in the last few monthsit had been. For a while it's predictably staying so -- as in the month behind I was relaxing and for the next couple of months I'll be quite busy in my spare time.

Still there's some update realized by getter77 who took the precious time to fix some of the less well-done parts of the texts. Thanks Brian for helping out there too! :)

Meanwhile, if you happen to be able to help out with a female voicepack, don't hesitate, we still have very little to zero female voicepacks. :) Details here.

Feedback regarding the previous release is still much welcome, just as donations.

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.

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......

Content integration on the way, still more smaller feature upgrades

While TheAncientGoat's worpion monster and tidbit's Shrine model is now integrated along with a proper placement of it around the road blocks (btw, shrines help you resting, giving you relieve from monsters lurking around), I've run into other smaller things that needed care since long. So I couldn't resist to touch those codes - some refactoring, some new codes. Two major tasks were done regarding this: first the upgrade of the EntityOMeter with being type / distance / angle, second is the rewrite from scratch the player movement verification code (logical, not graphical!). This along with nicer code means that a half dozen skills are now worthy to level: mythology/ecology helps to recognize nearby creatures, survival/hide/secure will help you to evade/avoid them, tracking/architecture will help you to spot entities and tell distance, hide/disguise will cover your identity (this one not of much use yet), climbing/tumbling will let you pass over obstacled height (mountains, steep riversides). It's good to know that setting up your Behavior skills is turning those into 3 times more powerfull at skill checks (like when you try hiding, tracking etc.)! Another good news is that I've added a heap of tooltips to the skills. Things are slowly getting over the coding and content integration phase, steadily floating towards that overdue test release.

Turning, bridging that old dusty road

While I've been working on to make the roads better fit its purpose (turning points added to generation and display, removed wooden steps replacing those by simple road) tidbit created a brand new road texture for it. Now it looks quite appropriate! :) Also the unusual yeti is complete, textured and rigged by him! Thanks for those! Attached are the new screenshots of the road (note texture splatting is on on the 1st, which kindof eats resources, luckily my intel gm965 works with it with smaller/bigger hickups).

What remains is to finalize the selection process - what counts as big towns - and wether should there be more than one graph of roads (separating enemy countries like not building roads between them). This latter idea is more probable to be dropped - in general even not friendly countries used to have road connections. Eh, and another smaller task will be to make the map correctly display thin lines of the road with turns and crossings. Then I can go on and start the labeling of the world map! Yay! :)

Something crosses?

Hah, with some very basic tweaking of the Economic class melted with some parts of the EconomicGround class and the River's WorldSizedFlowDirection thingy (a kind of bit switch map, 4 bits for each world map block and the for directions (currently a block is 40x40 sized areas)). The mixture is called RoadNetwork! Right now the roads go in a cross in the middle of the block where road directions are defined. Nothing complicated, still now it's being represented in the 3D view as well. :) I will improve it later on.

The IRC channel (you can find a webchat link to it above at Chat menu element) seems to be quite useful, we gather there day by day, chat and try to be constructive. :D mkienenb from New York has shown up there as well and helped out with some good ideas and code patches along with some editing of the project Wiki's brand new user guide part created by him. Meanwhile tidbit started to work on an polar monster called 'yeti'.

Considering possibilities

Hey there, long time no post here! I've been on a long discursion into the lands of music - composing a lot of tracks mainly for a fellow FOSS project scourge. That is a great roguelike 3D game. Also a few tracks for parpg the post apocalyptic RPG. As time passed I felt like I should return - anyway as currently I'm the only coder and manager of this project, not much happened to it. :)

Now I've reached a point when I can again concentrate on jClassicRPG. I'm currently considering the next things to do regarding the project. I'm checking what's going on in the jMonkeyEngine community (looks like a lot, a new 3.0 is under construction), and also wanting to create a kind of new roadmap. I'm planning to boost the quest/story/dialog/NPC (persistent characters in jCRPG terminology) part of the game in the next iteration along with adding a kind of roads to the world and better map to guide you in the zones/towns of the world. This will be the first priority.

After all this means that I want to take a kind of shortcut to have an earlier prototype of a 'playable' game and to foresee what the real shape of the game architecture might look like. And to be able to create some kind of more concrete concept for media content (3d,audio,structures) as well. The project needs this shortcut for another reason as well - to let the interested people use it as a way to create some kind of story (tho' not in the usual way as story modules are planned to be injected into the world generation [you won't define a full world with all the places, just certain elements of a story to be weaved into the randomly created world]) and add content for them in an earlier stage that I was planning before - this might catalize the community of the project. This is a slight deviation from my original plan where I was working on implementing a living world which would generate quests and story by itself - but that still might fit into the system in a later stage of development.

I'd like to see some more feedback regarding the usability of the months-ago released previous version as there's been really few replies regarding the call for test. (Well actually there was some useful feedback, thanks them, but it wasn't too much.)

Jasper Brownrigg has returned (he created our beloved main theme) with a nice new soundpack for character voices. I've committed it into the SVN already. Thanks Jasper!

Also jClassicRPG turned two years - just two months ago, eh. :) Happy Birthday! ;)

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!!

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.