First Particle Effect, EntityMemberState (HP,SP,MP and such) + many updates

Well, we're progressing at steam power level, my RPG-fan friends! We already have a thing we can proudly call a progressing and functional combat. You can die, you can have a Game Over, you can run out of Stamina so you have to wait, or run out of Mana so you can't cast spells. Yes, we have now an extensible effect program thing for the Skill Act Forms (spells, shots etc.) that uses J3DMovingEngine to handle jME based particle effects! Check the screenshot.

Also there's now a Camping button. If you press button 'C' in normal mode you switch to a camping mode with quicker passing time, Interception switched off, replenishing points like health and stamina (until you press C again or an AI initiated encounter surprises you at the start of the turn). The list of new things is not finished yet: we've just introduced Resistance values against skill act form impacts: Pierce, Bludgeon, Chemicals, Cold, Fire and Mental resistance for now! A new font is also replacing simple Verdana for a better more RPGish typography.

Well, yeah, we have now Experience Points as well, and it is accumulated upon each use of a skill! If you can get enough now you can even do a leveling of you experienced character! It's done with the help of the new shiny Character Leveling Window where you can pump some attribute points (which can raise Health, Mana, Stamina, Sanity, Moral points as well) and some skill points - which may lead to addition of new Skill Act Forms to you character if you've hit the right skill level needed for them.

Zphr is still working heavily on new 3D contents for jcrpg. The Boarman Thug is mostly complete with pain and death animation! He's working on a Boarman Mage currently. You've a more complete shot here about the tough thugs!

Much progress, working ahead to version 0.1 steadily. So loyal jcrpg people, get on and do some trumpeting around about jcrpg on forums you are at. We're about to get some serious innovated classic-RPG fun here! :D

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!

Boosted, boosted encounter code

Dozens and dozens of little and bigger changes are being made to the encounter code, especially the part which abstracts the description of encounter unit topology - lineups in encounter information (containing all information of units and topology of the encounter), encounter unit (common superclass for EntityFragment [roaming groups] and PersistentMemberInstance [NPC]), encounter unit data (for representing a unit with more detailed data in a given encounter, temporary data like generated member instances, current lineup line) -- lotsa lotsa changes I'm not patient enough currently to describe (most of them are a lot of helpful classes to make encounter logic code's calls more uniform, adding generalizer helper classes etc.) ...

Well, the most important change that has been made is that now EntityInstance groups are refactored to contain only one type of units each, thus in an encounter a group can be represented with only one 3d unit (like in Heroes of might and magic for example). In 3d view now you'll see a 3d unit with billboard labels describing unit lineup line/type and current size to help easy measurement of encounter/combat situation. Check the screenshot. So lotsa changes, yeah! :-) And still working a lot now on the turn act phase logic + its visualization. Tough designing and coding times.

Also to make it a little more nicer, I've added partial transparency for the encounter and turn act phase windows - you can see the units behind the window giving a more aesthetic look, probably.

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!

Character Sheet - first draft but working version

As you can see I've decided to put much info into one page with the help of drop down lists again. It's good enough for a first version, isn't it? All other character data have received place on the sheet, and still room for more values later. Also point bars (health, stamina, morale, sanitz and mana) are present beside the HUD character portraits - with some minor problems with update yet. All in SVN. You must create new characters and a new game - changes made to the character classes require it!

Inventory Window in the works - 4 days left till jcrpg birthday

Coding, coding when possible. Few hours in the night, yeah, trying to squeeze minutes out of the small free time I'm left with. And just passed another day - 4 left till the jcrpg birthday release! :-)

Regarding the inventory I cast my vote for a preorganized (not player organized) categorized inventory. As you can see, I've already added categories and multiselect dropdown lists for items. You can multi select items and later the window will have options like move objects to another party member, drop selected items and such. I've also added small icons to the multiselect list representing the item. I bet it's classic yet easier to use because of the categories. Always sorted, always categorized but a classic look.

Abstract Inventory, Objects and Object dependent Skills

These are the things for today: Inventory, objects, weapons, inventory dependent skills and skill dependent objects -- some weapons with some basic parameters (attack modifier, defense modifier, damage, speed) were created. Objects can specify "use skills" and level of that skill so only those can use them that have those qualities.

I've appended Object selection to the Turn Act phase window too, so that you can select in every turn what object you want to use with an object dependent skill. Also only those object dependent skills show up in the skill select for which the person have a usable object in inventory.

Important thing is, that I've decided to leave out the "equipping round" for weapons. You don't have to equip weapons to your characters before using it in a round, you can use them anytime you want. (It's more convenient and less frustrating), yet don't forget your enemies neither have to make an equip round for changing weapon! :) The Wizardry series had this equip round which finally I've decided to leave out of jcrpg.

Now we'll need an Inventory window too along with a character data sheet... I hope to get to implementing those soon(er or later).