No luck with the new driver release (im using the testing repo of Arch to grab it for my notebook): gma965 still crashes: java: brw_wm_surface_state.c:591: brw_update_renderbuffer_surface: Assertion `brw->has_surface_tile_offset || (tile_x == 0 && tile_y == 0)' failed.
As the tasks related to migrating to Ardor3D are all done I've started to work towards the release. Out of two remaining content integration task just completed one: new shop and guardpost buildings (by tidbit) are now placed in towns of humans and boarmen. I still need to integrate those voicepacks that landed the contribution depot some months ago. Project soon to celebrate its 3rd birthday, hopefully with a brand new test release. :)
Time spent on squasing the few remaining bugs and adding parameterization to the starting view distance of the new clipmap terrain (which made possible the usual arbitrary setting of the old tiles view distance) means that all of things related to the Ardor3D based release are in place now. I still want to do some profiling and updating the content hieararchy before commiting the stuff and rolling out the release. Stay tuned... :)
I've been messing with the Depth of Field render pass today, porting it from jme2 to Ardor3D. Finally it worked out quite nicely! Could find my previous fault I made when ported an ogre3d example to jme2 - near blur wasn't working. The new ported version is fully functional and a tad bit more optimal as well as the depth buffer generated by drawing the root pass is used instead of generating a new one. Focal plane, nearblur and farblur depth are all parameterized. I'll polish it a bit more. Thanks Rikard of the Ardor3D team for helping the process with many useful pieces of advice!
Pleased to inform you that in the recent weeks tidbit created some nice new 3D content, namely new buildings for a temple and a shop. Thanks! Meanwhile I've been pushing the tests/validation of the ported code, squashing some upcoming problems and bugs. It looks like it is steadily becoming more and more finalized. Latest improvement was the restructuring of the directories containing textures and creating a separated media-raw hierarchy which servers as convenient base for batch converting images to the different detail levels and ultimately to DDS file format. I'm happy to tell that now 98% of the images are converted to DDS with mipmaps with AMD ATi's Compressonator and that all of these finally got their proper detail level versions (high/middle/low/low_png) obsoleting most of the textures found in the 'common' category. The DDS part was hiding some traps for me, for now I had to change to use the Compressonator instead of the GIMP DDS plugin as that one was generating DDS with missing mipmap levels somehow - interestingly it was okay under Linux + ATi, that way I didnt notice until I tested it under Windows where it presented small gaps in the texture. (Another thing that I should rant about is Intel's driver -- works under Linux but the UI part crashes under Windows + Intel GPU... this is still unresolved, funny thing is that if I downgraded to a 3 years old Windows Intel GPU driver the crash went away.)
I can proudly report that conversion of code to Ardor3D is fully completed! Water reflection, particle effects, load/reload is now working nicely. Next comes testing and profiling, further stressing stability and memory consumption before I consider the whole story to be finished regarding Ardor3D. I have some performance regressions, but I couldn't yet correctly set up the use of DisplayLists with Ardor3D's SceneCompiler. BTW water reflection looks nice...
I'm still messing with the new possibilities Ardor3D terrain system adds to the pool, meanwhile I've finally ported my special micro heightmap based tile to terrain batching system to Ardor3D. It was a bit of a work, but now that I've taken care of a heap of other smaller things in the code, static parts are starting to look like they should. :) With further help from Josh and Rikard @ ardor3d I could integrate new things and resolve bounding volume issues. Now culling is working perfectly, and thus FPS rocketed to around those values I was used to under jME2, or even higher. Also I'm experiencing very good stability, so far no native part crashes neither on my Intel GPU nor the ATi GPU notebook. The memory it needs to load the initial state isn't bigger than it was with jme2, maybe even less.
After porting the old tile to terrain system I had for jme2, i'm starting to think about combining the GeometryClipmapTerrain of ardor3d with my terrain system, that way I can prevent my head from a series of aches related to object placament and such... Well, you can check the screenshot of the current state of the art - in the background you can spot how the new clipmap terrain fits (not too nicely yet) with the old detailed terrain in the foreground.
If I can manage to combine these too, we'll have the best of both worlds, new and old: almost infinite view distance for the terrain (at least the mountains and plains even if not the trees and buildings) plus the detailed view of the surroundings. The FPS / memory hit is not high/minimal with the ClipmapTerrain so far, so it's worthy to try.
Nice progress is going on here with converting the project to Ardor3D engine. I've ported Obj loader of JME2 to Ardor3D. With a lot of help from Joshua (lead dev of Ardor3D) finally I could repair the remaining problems with the migrated Geometry batching too. That two made the static object rendering mostly complete. Also the partially billboarded trees are working now. After that I managed to integrate the GeometryClipmapTerrain of Ardor3D to replace the current awkwardish method how terrain was created in jcrpg's jme2 version. Still it's very basic integration: needs a lot of tweak like texture generation, dynamic loading and even alpha holes. I've created an extreme view distance screenshot for you, but it's really not for normal use, ate a lot of memory and gave low FPS - there's need for Level Of Detail based on distance for the trees and such to make it usable later. Anyway, check the screenshots (one with very high distance, one with normal. :)
I'm moving my development to a notebook with ATi GPU. First it was a bit of a PITA, and I was really scared how things were starting to look (officially unsupported videocard (HD5650mobility)), but finally... Freshly installed Arch Linux 64-bit, a little bit of manual xorg.conf editing and slowly everything got into place. The game runs nicely with openjdk6 and latest Catalyst 10.1 (from the Arch AUR build repository).
I'll try to spot the bugs in the currently used shaders under ATi and start to hunt down some other problems if they appear. If things get ok
ay I'll start to work on designing the story/dialog/trade thingy to come so we have some goals for our next milestone, the alpha stage jCRPG.
PS: For those curious, with this card the game (high settings, shaders, 1322x768) performs around 130-160 FPS under Linux/Catalyst. Not bad, eh, from Java? :)
Good news feature- and contributionwise. A quick feature idea born out of 'nowhere', as with the further development of the Entity'O'Meter and skills the code is now able to be aware who you can really percept/recognize, that way it's really straightforward to display those in the 3D world too! And that's already working well and committed to SVN. A little bit more care for the unit placement code and it's ready. I even wrote a little shader that modifies alpha channel of the fragment color to let the appearing units fade in and out instead of instantly popping up. Shaping it nicely. :) Check the owner of the house (the test NPC gorilla for all the humanoid towns :D) on the screenie.
Meanwhile our fearless 3D staff (embodied by tidbit) is ruthlessly treading on the path of The Federated Anima
tion of Mostly All Beings in jCRPG. That means 3 new monsters got animation (idle,attack,damage): harpy, plant'o'bite, lizard. Big thanks to tidbit again! Also getter77 is providing nice new soundpacks to spice up the experience. It will be fun to play with the psychotic, the evil or the nice guy voices just contributed by him. :)
While the freegamedev.net forum is up again and the recovery of the posts and data is underway, the backup forum is still available. I want to keep the separated forum as a mean of alternative even after things get okay on the original forum, but I still think keeping jClassicRPG as a part of the fgd forum community is an important goal.
PS.: further refining placement, a test shot with a group of angry boarmages around. ;)
Polishing, polishing, polishing - that's what's being done right now. And nice contributions by our new
community member getter77, an aspiring and talented game developer. Right now he has created a pair of male voicepacks (1 for psychotic and 1 for bully personality). Thanks getter77 (aka Brian)!
Meanwhile I've fired up gimp-normalmap + gimp-dds plugin again on my laptop, and started to spit out a dozen of normal/height/spec maps for the already present building/road/tree textures. The result is
awesome. The heavy use of such mappings culminated a series of interesting bugs/detection of missing features of the shaders. Most of these problems are now resolved, also a new level of normal map shader detail is added to the Options menu (detailed shader can handle 2 lights blended). Also fog is now supported by those shaders - and the shadow render pass is also fixed to work correctly with those. Check the screenshots for shaders/mappings in action! :) On the second one you can catch tidbit's new stone base square for the anatipion towns. Release is very near now...
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.
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! :)
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 p
ainter 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).
Working to add storage point generation to economics. Currently this means that I coding in the labyrinth part to scatter around chests in the depth of the mazes. :) It will lure the player in probably! :D The economics will know about their number of storage points. Also they are generating the world coordinates by overriding the base getStorageObjectPlaces method of Economics superclass. The storage points are where the so called Entity Common Wealth (the usable properties of the group that are not currently equipped on members) will be stored in different quantities in different storage objects (currently only chests). This implies that you will find only things in those storage objects that the group is possessing - or possessed til you've put your hands on it. :D
goq669 the new developer who joined to help out in some tasks is working on some enhancement of the UI part creating a SimpleLayout for easier page definition. Also he has started to work on the Options submenu of the main menu. It's going to serve for modification of game settings obviously.
Also I've integrated some old contributions (eyebat monster by Scofield and shortsword by andycon). Also added a model found on quadropolis created by deathguppie with CC-BY license, hellpig2. Luckily it's animated and in md5 format. :) Thanks for your precious work all out there!
PS: Forgot to mention a bunch of new audios were added as well. All in SVN for the testing. :)
A short list what's being done: I've been working to provide normal maps for already used textures with gimp's normal map plugin. It's not as good as I would like it, but it's usable with some experimenting. A few bugs (like slowly flying arrow/knife bug) on the list has been hunted down meanwhile. Parallax Shader has got some improvement like pointlight/attenuation support. Also tidbit has provided his nice new model green lizard (labeled 'Lizzie' on the forum :)) with a texture and after some community feedback and eyeballing it has become a part of the SVN repository! :) Thanks go to tidbit, and ppl on the forum!
If you happen to be good at 2D texture creation (for 3d models), and/or have talent or already created normal/specular map textures for some generally usable textures + you would like to help jClassicRPG then it would be highly appreciated if you help the project with some new wall etc. textures with normal/specular maps.
Also animators would be much welcome as we have multiple models that would need rig and/or animation! Come visit to forum for more info.
Been working on upgrading static batch elements with some shaders currently to make the maze parts looking good. Started with a new column with diffuse / normal map textures by Zphr. He used blender to model a high polygon column and then with the help of blender's baking and normal map facilities he created the diffuse texture and the normal map texture, and made a low poly undetailed version of the column. (After that seeing that the shader needs a specular map, I've created a very simple one out of the normal map texture by making it black and white and adding a bit of contrast to it.) Basic versions of a normal and a parallax shader of jME has been tailored to integrate into jClassicRPG. Check the screenshot, how low polygon walls and column can be made look more like high poly models with GLSL shaders.
Thanks to the generous first two donators of jClassicRPG I bought the AMD video card. It's a good working card, 2D is functioning now very nicely under Linux with the fglrx driver, but I have had no luck with the 3D part yet, so still struggling to fire it up...I bet it must be something related to some installer / configuration problem + the fact that I've previously installed nvidia drivers manually on that PC. (I even tried EnvyNG to no avail yet.)
Meanwhile I was programming the basics of so called GeneratedEntityMember leveling up, which should be called monster leveling for easier understanding. The creature's level (that are not PersistentMemberInstances = NPCs) will be depending on the group's level they belong to. Be aware: the boarman thugs and mages are appearing before you now skilled and with boosted attributes! :D - according to their level. All in SVN along with some concurrent use of hashmaps fix!
PS: okay, 3D is working now! I had to reinstall xorg parts (nvidia driver stole libglx.so :)) and do some reinstall of fglrx driver. But unluckily jcrpg crashes jvm upon staring with that card + driver. I haven't seen such thing. I'm trying to solve this new mistery now with the help of jme forums.
With help of our great modelers we're progressing in adding new contents to the labyrinth. While doing so I've created my first more complex texture for tidbit's treasure chest. I've exported the outline from blender and used gimp to cut something together. :) The maze code has been improved to contain the new Greek style columns made by tidbit.
Some fixes here and there plus the new Use Skill/Item window (key F6) are committed to the SVN. The trick was (as I've learned today it's something already done in an old c64 game Mars saga) to use a UI where all the characters are listed and you can set what you want to do with them separately (like in the combat window), and fire all the events in a single event. If you do so it will play like a combat round, all the effects and logs are the same, as the same function is called as in combat. It works nice and now it's possible to drink some potions, cast some spells on the party. :) You'll surely find it weird as modern games doesn't handle UI like that but personally I think it's quite comfortable - because you don't have to repeatedly select chars and it also remembers last choices.
Slowly progressing towards a more complex and better looking maze. It's already easy to get lost - though you can always find a way out, as generation code is sooo lighthearted on the player. :) But heading the right direction. Little coding to include the doors into generation. tidbit's door models and texture and Zphr's new wall texture addition rounds up a real classy classic atmosphere. Thanks go out to them again! :)
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