'Almost Pristine' Release

Yes, we're ascending to the next level of our destiny through the obstacles of the great dev-eater beast of Tiredness and Desperation. We have entered the sanctuary of the miraculous Release again. Here we stand astounded and in silence, holding back breath. We are aware that something great surprising and of elemental effect may happen anytime. As we are there awaiting for some never-ending minutes, a booming sound starts to cite something strange, slowly - pressing each word. Listening carefully we try to memorize what's being told:

"
- Ported to Ardor3D engine, to resolve stability issues
- New buildings (by tidbit)
- New voicpacks (by various contributors)
- Bugfixes
- New secondary terrain added for large view distance
- Corrected Shadow and Depth of Field effect
"

Right after finishing these words, a glowing globe elevates from out of the darkness of the Sanctuary. Yeah, now you know what awaits you, jcrpg's next sneak-peek enchantment is in your hands like a crystal ball. It may be that it helps you to look into a distant Future... so let the Trial begin!

Candidates for Testing - don't hesitate! And don't forget to report back at the forums, trac or IRC chat channel.

If you wish to make the dev happy, don't forget to donate some bucks to the project through paypal (at the left side of the blog, the links positions your browser there). It will help to keep the enthusiasm high and reassure the exhausted developer. It still needs ~-$327$ (see Project Budget on the left side of the blog) to have a 0 budget regarding the music creation costs.

Please note, that the project greatly lacks female voice packs, so if you happen to be a kind lady, please stop by and create a voice pack for the game. :)

Next step in the project plan is to work out dialoges/trading/quest system, so after this technical release, we'll concentrate on gameplay elements again.

Under Macintosh you will need to run the jClassicRPG.sh from console as clicking it might not start it if your OSX is not configured to run it as script. Please note that most probably game won't run with Intel video cards as recent Intel GPU driver releases under Windows and Linux caused the game to stop working.

Minor Fix release is out

Head to the downloads at sourceforge.net. If you already downloaded 20091104, download the 20091104-fix zip only. If you didn't, you should download the full pack (20091122). Link.

Please give more feedback, bugreports, so that we can try to take care of the problems! :)

The 'Head Chop' Release

Yes, we're ascending to the next level of our destiny through the obstacles of the great dev-eater beast of Tiredness and Desperation. We have entered the sanctuary of the miraculous Release again. Here we stand astounded and in silence, holding back breath. We are aware that something great surprising and of elemental effect may happen anytime. As we are there awaiting for some never-ending minutes, a booming sound starts to cite something strange, slowly - pressing each word. Listening carefully we try to memorize what's being told:

"
- New monsters/humanoids (by tidbit, TheAncientGoat)
- New animations for some beings (by tidbit)
- New town types (anatipion and yeti by tidbit)
- New buildings (by tidbit)
- New character voicepacks (by getter77 and qubodup)
- Generated Road System added
- Mouse support added (based on patches by mkienenb)
- Camera set to smooth turning in combat mode
- Options menu completed
- Very basic scenario support with seed choosing at New Game
- Intro text for scenario added
- Behavior skills are now used in perception
- Easier to use character creation
- World map window enhancements, graphics, town icons
- Enhanced shaders and more normal map textures
- Displaying percept beings in 3D in walk mode with fade shader
- Top button row for accessing windows
- Tooltip system added
- Optimized font rendering for UI elements
- Lamp light added (key L)
- Buffer pool debug OSD (key T)
- Many-many bugfixes, optimization, reference leak fixes
"

Right after finishing these words, a glowing globe elevates from out of the darkness of the Sanctuary. Yeah, now you know what awaits you, jcrpg's next sneak-peek enchantment is in your hands like a crystal ball. It may be that it helps you to look into a distant Future... so let the Trial begin!

Candidates for Testing - don't hesitate! And don't forget to report back at the forums or IRC chat channel.

If you wish to make the dev happy, don't forget to donate some bucks to the project through paypal (at the left side of the blog, the links positions your browser there). It will help to keep the enthusiasm high and also let the remaining audio tracks to become free (CC-BY-SA without the non-commercial attribute). It still needs ~340$ (see Project Budget on the left side of the blog).

Please note, that the project greatly lacks female voice packs, so if you happen to be a kind lady, please stop by and create a voice pack for the game. :)

The 'Head Chop' Release Is Out

Spread the good news. I have no time for a proper blogpost now, tomorrow I''ll do it. Anyway here is the link to the download zip: http://sourceforge.net/projects/javacrpg/files/jClassicRPG/svn_20091102/jcrpg-20091102.zip/download . Instructions still here: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/javacrpg/index.php?title=Download . Use the jcrpg.bat under Windows. chmod +x jcrpg.sh under Linux. ;)

The 'Spring Greeter' release comes to life

Yes, we're ascending to the next level of our destiny through the obstacles of the great dev-eater beast of Tiredness and Desperation. We have entered the sanctuary of the miraculous Release again. Here we stand astounded and in silence, holding back breath. We are aware that something great surprising and of elemental effect may happen anytime. As we are there awaiting for some never-ending minutes, a booming sound starts to cite something strange, slowly - pressing each word. Listening carefully we try to memorize what's being told:

"
- New monsters and animals (by tidbit)
- New area type Maze (models by tidbit), maze generation
- Audio system enhanced, zone dependent music playback
- Main theme music added (by Jasper Brownrigg)
- Battle and background music for climate zones (by Pal Illes)
- Cave background music (by Marcus Rasseli)
- Storage unlocking/looting interface added, chests with traps and fix loot added to maze area
- Enhanced world map (F1)
- A heap of new portraits (by Grumbel, and public domain organized by qubodup)
- Voice profile selection for character creation with one new male sound-set (voice act by Magnulus)
- Support for normal/spec mapping for static models
- Options menu settings (by goq66)
- Optimized loading/rendering algorithm, moving to jME 2.0
- Texture atlas technique, shadow mapping, DDS textures added, memory optimizations
- Many bugfixes (e.g. game fixed for use on Intel gfx under Linux)
- Quicker loading of game, addition of 'Please Wait' panel
- Tested video drivers under Linux now include nVidia, AMD/ATi, intel
"

Right after finishing these words, a glowing globe elevates from out of the darkness of the Sanctuary. Yeah, now you know what awaits you, jcrpg's next sneak-peek enchantment is in your hands like a crystal ball. It may be that it helps you to look into a distant Future... so let the Trial begin!

Great Heroes, come and test your wits - play the game or create your own tormenting beasts! It's high time - because combat is ready to begin NOW!

Candidates for Testing and Modeling - don't hesitate!

PS.: Voice acting for the different player character voice profiles are highly welcome. Details here. As usual 3D art is just as welcome. Visit the forum for details.

The 'Vigilante Eye' Release

Yes, we're ascending to the next level of our destiny through the obstacles of the great dev-eater beast of Tiredness and Desperation. We have entered the sanctuary of the miraculous Release again. Here we stand astounded and in silence, holding back breath. We are aware that something great surprising and of elemental effect may happen anytime. As we are there awaiting for some never-ending minutes, a booming sound starts to cite something strange, slowly - pressing each word. Listening carefully you try to memorize what's being told:

"
- Turn based playable Combat phase added
- New animated models (boarmen thug and mage by Zphr)
- New house and town models (by Zphr)
- New static monster model (kobold by Surt)
- Total redesign of jungle plants, new plants for continental,
- New Encounter Ground system that separates the encounter scene
- Inventory enhanced (equip,attach,give,drop)
- New Loot Window after combat
- Character leveling
- New ground tile generation system with smoothed ground
- New 2D elements, some refactored UI images
- Optional support for secondary ground textures
- Optional texture splatted ground tile blends
- New spells, skills, items, artifacts, objects
- Bard instrument concept available with one implemented item
- Particle system with lights for spells added
- Support for continuously playing sound sources like waters, forest ambient
- New environment & humanoid sounds added
- New Body Part system that enables critical impacts
- Optimizations: tree trunk batching, cutting of non-visible interior parts, more locking
- Bug fixes
- Far view mode is disabled till fixing it for the new ground system
"

Right after finishing these words, a glowing globe elevates from out of the darkness of Sanctuary. Yeah, now you know what awaits you, jcrpg next sneak-peek enchantment is in your hands like a crystal ball. It may be that it helps you to look into a distant Future... let the Trial begin!

Great Heroes, come and test your wits - play the game or create your own tormenting beasts! It's high time - because combat is ready to begin NOW!

Candidates for Testing and Modeling - don't hesitate!

PS.: Just this moment I decided to reupload the release with a bugfix - it was a major problem with non disappearing 3D models. The old one I've deleted so from now on the new and only one is the good one.

The "Anniversary Boom" release attacks!

One whole year, 365 days have passed since leaving the safe harbors of non-game-developing times. It's been a long one, with many joyful and many painful moments. At start I thought that one year will take much further in completeness but 15 releases did not brought its fruit that easily - every corner brought new ideas and new things to code with hours to spend on them. As progressing from thing to thing it became more and more relevant that the undertake, the scope of the project needs a whole lot more of work hours than projected at start. But every step taken made the progress more and more unstoppable, rounding up such a concept in my mind that lures it further and further to completion. Every step taken made the vision clearer and me more eager and curious to turn the vision into reality. And so we progress further every day.

The big revelations while doing the design and development through the months - as far as I remember - were the following things...first the Magnification of the stored world into bigger blocks using hashing and other surface calculus algorithms to fill up the world with detailed content on the fly. This brought the possibility of relatively large lands to store in little data. Second came the idea of "Magnification" of living things into Entities, groups of beings with a common intelligence and keeping EntityMembers as special persons with more detailed personal intelligence - this will make large populations available even with less memory and cpu consumption, and bring a real edge to the things happening around the player..you won't mess with a whole population of 200 members around, "you'll try to keep a good reputation" if you want to live in the town one might guess. Yet powerful NPCs (special members of an Entity) can serve as a hook to these groups who can serve as a strengthening channel between player and a community. And these masses can serve as basis for big scale historical happenings between rivaling Towns and so on...who knows what other possibilities yet. Third came the idea of adding a set of Social skills to rule the problems of life in the game by more peaceful means - social skills with act forms like spells in a magical book yet different, Reasoning -> Deduce like Elemental Magic -> Shocking Grasp :) - which gives more color to the encounter situations with the help of such points as Morale and Sanity along with normal Health, Stamina and Mana Points. And fourth came the idea of dynamic relations and dynamic economy with Ecology and Economy updates which will bring a dynamic progress to the world of jcrpg - a turn in the game when whole town districts may change their face, new buildings and streets, new agriculture around. Along with these things we cook the cool things what the legacy of classics like Wizardry, Bard's Tale and lastly Dune 1 (because of its group based + personal "strategy-rpg" likeness) - multi-member party, turn based encounters, strong skill system, 6 direction only movement, 3D tile based graphics. Well, well many of these things are really partially complete, but these ideas serve well a game that I would like to play. And probably will...

Especially because such a big and good community like Freegamedev.net was and is helping this thing to get ahead! Many names could be named who helped to keep up the things and my faith on the way, all of those great people's name are carved on the walls of the Hall of Fame of jCRPG... Thank them a lot again! :)

So here we are on the road of development, standing at the time of first anniversary... let this be celebrated with a new release! A big lot of new things are pushed into this one, all of them of much importance. Check it out downloading, testing, commenting, bug reporting and so on and so on. Oh, and probably feel free to be the first person ever to donate to the cause of this project through this Pal of Pay at the top of the blog. ;-)

Highlights:
"New UI windows for Encounter Phase, Turn Act Phase, Character Sheet (F3 key) and Inventory (F4) were added. New Population generation algorithms (GrownInfrastructure, DefaultInfrastructure) were added along with new integration level of named Towns for friendly populations to unite in. Economy Update Turn implemented for growing or declining population changes. Basic level Entity relations and Entity states (level and points) and Entity fragments (roaming entity groups) were added. A few Objects for inventory were added. Skill system further implemented with object dependencies and Skill Act Forms (like some spells and some combat forms etc.).
New animals heron and deer were added and wolf replaced (glestanimals of wciow at glest.org). Smaller bugfixes, optimizations (culling works again now correctly). This is the First Anniversary Release!"

Downloading here, forum here.

PS: if you've downloaded it before this post you should download it again, I've found two major problems in the previous tar.gz, so I re-uploaded it!

The "Nightside" Release is out - call for animators

Check out the downloads, ungzip, play and report back with your experience here or at the forum. As things go further and further we are nearing a state where more and more 3D models and their animation is becoming tremendously needed in the art department! There are already several models (e.g. bear, wolf, fox, spider) that's in need of rigging and animation or there's the already rigged human model pair that just needs animation. So if you want to help out, join the effort! A great opportunity to practice animation and it would mean a lot to the free game development community and jcrpg.

Highlights:
"New animals as bear and spider were added. Humanoid groups were introduced with the humans and their basic economy. Basic populations and houses added for human groups. New sounds for animals and humans along with environmental effects depending on nearby beings and climate. Party Behavior and Pre-encounter input screens were introduced. On screen display extended with the 'Entity-O-Meter' which shows nearby groups' icons. New portraits and models by Archenemy."

Next steps will be to further sophisticate the encounter part, the UI, the ecology (especially for humanoid and with that the economy too), bring in the skills to the world, the EntityMember and PartyMember leveling, inventory and object system, and some kind of dialog system. This will round up slowly a fully playable experience. If you feel like you want to make the project a bit more manageable consider donating some bucks.

The "Contributionary" Release

Highlights:
"UI graphics were completely redesigned including main menu, character creation widgets, on screen display. Some new character portraits were added. Code optimization for 3D and loading performance were done. World and Ecology generation configuration through XML file were developed. Some mushrooms and other vegetation appended to flora and fox re-added to possibly met fauna.. Local map was implemented and added replacing mini world map on the HUD. Sky-sphere lighting bug was fixed along with other minor bugs. Turning around camera rotation was expanded with view position changing to add a better view of the faced things around."

This was largely possible because people like Tranberry and Emmanuel contributed so much to the project. Such people keep going the free open source gaming projects go ahead, so a big thanks go out for all of them - after their name being carved on the stone tablets of jcrpg Hall of Fame!

Download test and report back here or at the forum! Also if you feel like having talent to model and contribute 3D animals or paint nice portraits, 2D small vegetations (like the mushrooms) to show the open source world how good you are at that - the Hall of Fame is just waiting for you too. All contents are going under CC or GPL license so other projects can benefit of them as well. See you at the forums! ;-)

The "Winter Killer" release is out

Highlights:
"Main menu added with working Save/Load/New Game options. Sounds and in game music added along with the new Audio System. Character generation screens with many skills and classes along with currently 4 new races were added. Party setup for new games is working now. On screen party portraits view to visualize your party was added. A set of portraits was added for use with the character generation."
Download, test and report back here or at the forum. :-)

The "Animal Outside" Release

It's been a while. Well, I've stabilized positioning of encountered beings, put some turning to face the player in it and fixed some things here and there like adding an encounter acknowledging dialog (first primitive interactive menu in the game :-) ). So I thought it's time to unleash it. There's plenty of things to code that opened up while connecting things together in Ecology/Entity*/J3DMovingEngine/PlayerTurnLogic classes, so hard work ahead...closing up on encounter choices, skills, handling danger and combat situations...

Headlights: "Ecology System and ecology generation with 3 type of animal packs (gorilla, wolf, warthog) was added, Encounters' system draft version was implemented, World geography generation was boosted with Cave and River addition, Animated /rigged model loading (Gorilla), Text box log and choice box window added to UI elements, World map colorization was extended, 'UI ruining shadows' bug fixed."

Download, run and report back! ;-) See ya!

The "Many Things plus Farview" release

Headlines:
"Base geographies (Mountain, Plain, Forest) were refactored to point height calculated tile generation. Cave and River were rewritten to be compatible with the modified base geographies. Farview mode was refactored and beautified based on new geographies. New configuration parameter called RENDER_DISTANCE_FARVIEW was added. World generation was extended with rivers and caves. The demo game is now running in the generated world." Download, test and report!

The "Base UI" Release

A long time passed since the last release and looking at the changes in the last few weeks I decided to pack and push out one new - though the World Generator is in a rather primitive stage of development. The release is out, world generation is done when you start jcrpg yet you will enter the old one already known and put together previously by me without the new generator. Headlights: "UI base elements were added: load icon, compass, time meter, world map, HUD panel. Internal Flora is now configurable through FloraGenerators. Example internal flora in the Cave. Initial version of the World Generator is added. The World Map UI element shows a world generated by it. Updated JME libraries from CVS." Download it here! Hope to see you around commenting here or the forum. (This time it's gzipped for easier handling.) The screen shots depict the new compass/time block and loading icon plus the map. (The small yellow dot [Sun] shows the passing of local time where you stand, it is going around the compass.)

Minor special release

I've decided to release this small changes, bugfix version for the public on this happy day. :-) Highlights: grass vertex shader fix for intel integrated video card low temp limit, new animal models (gorilla, fox etc.), advanced lake with depth, waters with better looking coast, fix for small billboarding bug added. Check here. Freegamer is evolving day by day. Jcrpg blog has been included in http://planet.freegamedev.net/ which unifies blogs of free opensource game development.

Flowing to release

Finally managed to put together one new aquatic test release! It contains Sirgazil's warthog near the wolfs and some other new things. :-)

Headlines: bumped terrain tiles, river and lake water geographies, optional far view mode were added. JME's water render pass applied on water surface with reflection (optional, switch off for less stress on GPU/CPU). Grass is added to the mountain slopes too and the grass vertex shader is improved.

Download bz2 available at sourceforge. If having problems with the unpacked files under Windows with winrar, check this forum thread.

The Cave the Batch and the Shader

Release time! :-) Highlights:
"Optimization release with addition of the new Cave geography. Many parts of 3D core was optimized. Vertex/fragment shaders were added for grass/foliage wind effect. Geometry batching was added to terrain tile/model/grass/foliage loading. Cave inside the mountain is now available."

Downloads at the usual place: link. Feel free to post comments on your experience, bugs, performance, anything. ;-) You will need about 300MB free RAM to run it.

Patch it to go

Two days after the release I've received report of jerky movement in the snapshot. I couldn't stand without trying to repair it. Yeah, I could really find some new things to optimize. Now models out of camera are not added to the scenario, they are put there when turning. This is not JME's culling, but my calculation upon turning (in J3DCore.renderToViewport). The patch also contains the new smooth tree models. Download the patch at sf.net.

With this patch I could even get a very decent view distance of 35 cubes with load distance around 60 cubes (VIEW_DISTANCE=70, RENDER_DISTANCE=120) working on my 8800GTS, AMD64 X2 4800+ with a memory use around 500MB+ (although with a rather slow turning, big load time, but very usable moving forward/backward). For that of course I had to raise the heap size -Xmx parameter in the jcrpg.sh (or jcrpg.bat under Windows) to around 350MB (-Xmx350m). Anyway the optimal VIEW_DISTANCE is around 30-40 and RENDER_DISTANCE can be set to the double of these values. Take care of the -Xmx parameter in your jcrpg.sh/jcrpg.bat if you receive OutOfMemory or Heap is full. If you have less memory for testing set smaller VIEW_DISTANCE and RENDER_DISTANCE in the config.properties file.

Hooray for the bz2 - release

Yeah, another pre-alpha snapshot is out for you to test. Refactoring, optimizations, new partly billboarded models, new jungle design, other minor changes done. One week spent with finding bugs, testing and reorganize scenario building mechanism. Check out the results on sourceforge.net, and report back on performance, bugs, issues, experience, anything! While I was busy with the core of jcrpg, Harek our old visitor and Benoit Callebaut, a new one around jcrpg has contributed again some new things. Benoit has sent me an axe and a hammer and other useful things. He also put some models on freegamer jcrpg contribution topic. Thank you, people! Help is very much needed and appreciated now and later! :-) We all will meet once in the Hall Of Fame of jcrpg. (Which will be updated soon!)

All things put together

Yeah, it's release time again. Highlights: "many changes ranging from memory bug fixes, optimizations through new bloom effect, billboarded sinusoid moving vegetation to model casted shadows." Download from sf.net if curious. Hope you will like it. Check your config.properties if problems with performance!
P.S.: Don't forget to report back your experience! ;-)

Did I say Release?

Yeah, again, 20070719... the headlines: "Optimization, added textured dense ground flora (e.g. grass), configuration file for performance related settings, some new models, and distance based fadeout fog." Go to sourceforge, and have a try! :-)

P.S.: A quotation from myself: "Second, pre-alphas are released to let people test and report such things as performance, opinion etc." Please consider reporting me! ;-)