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'.

Update on the roads

Yeah, I've tried to come up with something regarding roads. Now it's getting into shape! Certains towns of bigger size are now interconnected. Each town with two of the closest big cities. A web of road will get you into all the bigger towns. Currently it's very early but at least some kind of very simple path drawing is already in, using the WorldSizedFlowDirection class (already used for rivers and their directions). The WorldMap is already showing something of it, but the 3D view and abstract cube architecture is not yet aware of the roads. :) The screenshot shows the randomly generated world, with a few bigger towns connected with the reddish colored road.

jME and lwjgl updates in SVN

I'm currently catching up with what has been going on in the jMonkeyEngine development. It's still a rather active community there, I'm glad to see - patches are incorporated in the jme svn, dependent libraries updated. So I took the time and updated jcrpg's dependencies.

Next thing I must have a look at before the planning is to debug a recent in game text related bugreport - fonts are getting totally unreadable with some GPUs under Windows. Have any of you experienced the same thing (messed up fonts in-game) with latest release - if so what GPU/OS do you have?

PS: Just attached the bug's screenshot. Anyone else with it?

Project IRC channel launched

Just in the weird case you wanted a separate jcrpg channel on freenode... here it is! I felt like experimenting with the IRC bots (like eggdrop, which is kind of pretty usable) and thought it would be a good idea to have a jcrpg dedicated irc channel for the times to come. So the parameters:

IRC server: irc.freenode.net
Channel: #jclassicrpg

See you there!

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! ;)

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.