freegamer review and videos

Qubodup @ freegamer has reviewed a couple of 3D RPG aspirants of the FOSS scene, among them jClassicRPG got a few nice paragraphs and in-game videos too! Thanks qubodup! :) Videos: travel & battle, character creation. (As a a side note: a few smaller annoying bugs and 'features' along with a tough memory-leak related problem has been resolved since last post, all in SVN. Still polishing a bit before rolling out the test release.)

New content and player lamplight

Yetis and igloo created by tidbit are marching gloriously into the SVN of jcrpg. :) As you can guess yetis live in igloo villages in the polar region.

Minelamp light switch (key 'L') is added, so you can see better things around you while walking in the dark. Currently unlimited use. More polishing here and there, cooperating with tidbit before releasing.

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.

More small features to ease accomodation

Usability and UI have been the primary focus for some time now. This time in a short way: player titled save games, better game slot info in load menu, colored icons for the populations of world map loaded from 32-bit depth 9x9 sized .ico files, busy screen for economy updates with multiple randomly chosen images, very basic scenario support with an intro text displayed in the new StoryPartDisplayWindow (scrolling, fading in). Also I've further tested under Windows Vista 64 bit, no crashes luckily.

Next two thing is addition of Calendar to the World Map and integrate content. Then release! :)

Extendable Tooltip box system and easier to use combat window

Polishing the UI is still the focus for a few days more. The addition of tooltip box is finished. Till now the character creation dropdown lists for Races and Professions got tooltip texts. It's quite easy to extend the tooltip system to most of the UI elements later if needed.

Another new feature made in: a new set of checkboxes were added to the turn act window (combat), which are reflecting if the given character's choice for action is valid or not for the turn. That way the player is able to spot which character's previous action is not doable in the current round, making it easier to see what's left to be set before starting next combat round.

Optimized text rendering READY!

Till recently I always were a bit uncertain how the previous 2D text rendering might work out on the long run. On screens with dense windows the FPS counter dropped down a bit too much for my taste. There are two different text rendering ways used in the game - one was used for the bottom log, the other for all the UI. The true type font renderer was used for all the UI elements - that renderer was creating a separate quad for each letters in a text. The monospace (bitmap based) text renderer was much nicer and more performant -- but it's working with its own font bitmap format only!

I looked at it and found that if I was able to create my own bitmap out of the current UI ttf font (Vinque), I could replace the slower method and use the low poly version instead. So two things followed by a big refactoring of the UI elements changed the whole UI into a faster performing sweetness. :D

First, I overrode the jME Text class (shape responsible for 2D texts) and thus overrode the default font bitmap path too. Second, I used FontForge to tweak the ttf font into a monospace font set exported into a new ttf set and using 'convert' of ImageMagick converted it into a bitmap. A little tweak with GIMP and voila, there goes the Vinque font and TextureState based font rendering of jME tuned for jClassicRPG. :) After that, a tideous process of reviewing all the UI element and window codes came. But it was worthy! On my Intel gfx card it can even double the FPS on the character creation screens! Saving a lot of polys and also scene graph elements, that's quite understandable. :)

Top button row icons ready, Character creation improved

Still working on the UI part, this time a lot of minor fixes and polishing of the mouse input was going on. Finally I decided to not wait for the top button icons to be contributed, instead 'do-it-yourself', created them by modifying different free icons or painting it myself. I hope you like it. You will be able to click them with the 'pointer mode' mouse, swap between the different windows - that is quite comfortable. :)

The other major upgrade is of the Character Creation part. Following the idea of TheAncientGoat @ freegamer, I changed the profession selection process. Instead of letting professions be chosen after tweaking the attributes to unknown minimums, now player can select a profession which automatically sets the minimum attribute levels that are required for the given profession. This makes it a lot more easier to select a profession. The other change is on the skill setting page - added a Reset button, which will reset the skill value set to the original values.

Next I can move back to enhancing the map. After that I will integrate the new 3D content (made by tidbit & TheAncientGoat). That done a test release is due - so there'll be a new release before moving on to the next chunk of bigger development goal (story/dialog/commerce system).