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......

Scorp'o'holder the beast forged in Chaos - by tidbit

A frightening new chaos monster has been born which is the mixture of spiky tentacles and a magical spheric body. The prototype idea of it's build-up slipped out on a foreboding afternoon from the head of tidbit: slimey, monstrous and all-mighty. and now spreading, gonna rule the halls of Chaos Maze later. Currently one of them was left homeless, wandering around in the jungle. One crazy painter who were brave enough depicted the poor one and sent the picture to us. Check it out! Meanwhile the Battle of Codes and Bugs rages on. Some fighters reported they could loot some chests in the depth of the mazes, but that still needs confirmation. ;)
UPDATE: Another dangerous habitant of the jungle was depicted and sent to us. We hope that the artist is still alive and not eaten by one of these Plant'o'Bites (another creature of tidbit).

Zphr's BoarMage ready to kill + Encounter Grounds :)

Zphr's übercool new Boarman Mage model is ready to rock the battlegrounds of jcrpg! It's completely suitable for a great battle - shooting fire sparks at you if you don't put them to sleep with your Fumes Of Twilight alchemy spell. :D

Another big change has been invented! Discussing encounter visualization with Zphr, we ended up with the idea to introduce Encounter Grounds. The tiled labyrinths and cities where you'll be walking around won't be enough empty and clear space for a goodly visible scenario, so it's a reasonable solution to have a separate 'walked zone' dependent Encounter scenario. Your view will be switched to a 'battle' ground like in many other classic games you were - but still you won't walk on that scene either, we still have the first person view and 'battle line' philosophy of Wizardry 7 and predecessor, instead of the 2d walk-around of other games like the Gold Box series AD&D game. The encounter scenario generated will depend on your actually walked ground's climate/economic zone. I've added a test screenshot with the jungle Encounter Grounds AND the BoarMage. Enjoy! :)

Meanwhile there's now a camera changing method too, in encounter mode, the camera will switch to the actually acting unit and after act the target unit. Cool, isn't it?

New animals in the fauna - models by wciow

A nice pack of models made by wciow at glest.org was added to the fauna of jcrpg. Thanks to wciow for allowing free use of it for the people. The Deer, the Heron and the Wolf was picked out of the models. The fauna of jcrpg is strengthening well! :) (On a side note, I've decided to replace old wolf model by theotherhiveking because the old one does not have a good texture, I hope someone will create one for it later although)

While adding them to the code I've fixed some minor bugs. Pre encounter window was not reset after the encounter (causing a crash to desktop on new encounter with less groups) and removed the unnecessary use of audio-system when audio is configured switched off in config.properties (which was a bug especially using a Linux where audio device can be busy and you couldn't start jcrpg although you switched audio off). So I'm a bit back in the business. I plan to catch up with the population thing with fresh ideas I've gathered during my coding-free period. :)

Beware! Bears in SVN.

Archenemy @ jatekfejlesztes.hu (a Hungarian game development site) has contributed his bear creation to jcrpg under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. It's a really nice wild bear with a moderate blood thirst. I've modded the texture of it to make a polar bear version out of it. Check the shots! :-) Meanwhile slow progress in Party Behavior window. Pressing F2 will bring it up. You can check a very preliminary version of it in the SVN.

Local Map born

For the ease of wandering around the on screen world map has been substituted by the newly coded LocalMap. This one shows the nearby terrain of the same height level the player walks on. You can easily spot blocking trees and water around without turning. Later this one will be rather useful inside - let's say - a labyrinth or currently inside the mountain caves. ;-) Meanwhile the fox has been added again to the possibly spot and encountered animals. It was created and contributed by KhaaL@freegamer. Again, this all is inside the SVN repository.