Local Map born

For the ease of wandering around the on screen world map has been substituted by the newly coded LocalMap. This one shows the nearby terrain of the same height level the player walks on. You can easily spot blocking trees and water around without turning. Later this one will be rather useful inside - let's say - a labyrinth or currently inside the mountain caves. ;-) Meanwhile the fox has been added again to the possibly spot and encountered animals. It was created and contributed by KhaaL@freegamer. Again, this all is inside the SVN repository.

Contributions, contributions, contributions

Well, o, well, free game dev community is doing a really good job and it's getting better every day - jcrpg benefits a great lot of it. So thanks for all you people who contributed around! :-) Leonhard for his shiny new portrait (already in the last release, and one in the works), Tranberry for a fresh new main menu and a bunch of jcrpg related logo versions, texts and banners, plus the icon images made yesterday. I'm really starting to believe in the power of the open source game development community - what could be done to an operating system, can be done to the gaming if we do it seriously even if having much fun while doing so. There are already a plenty of open source games out there in continuous betterment, some going back to years... so it's a fun thing to ride this tide.

Hard rocky road for jcrpg too but I'm starting to believe it's viable even in the middle term. Check the awesome menu shot for now. And yes, some minor optimizations have been added to SVN, maybe can result in a performance bonus of 10%-15% - new config options added for switching of logging and more precise tree detail configuration.

Project still in need of 3D and 2D contributions. All will go under open free media license (CC,GPL) - building other possible current and later free open source games, not only jcrpg. Check the forum for details of what's needed the most.

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. :-)

Skills under tuning

The screen for skill tuning of char creation is nearing its completion. Much hacking of UI elements and some tweaking of the underlying class hierarchy of skills, persons and professions were executed. Also I patched up my Eclipse IDE to prevent crashes, and decided to switch back to AMD64 bit JVM 1.5, using 1.6 resulted in often crashes with Eclipse. Otherwise I run the game with JVM 1.6 with no problems, so I recommend you to use 1.6 although game runs with Sun JVM 1.5 too.

One more important thing to mention is that I've begun to use the new language utility + language.properties more accentuated. Still many labels are hardcoded in Java, but I plan to support multilingual interface with the possibility to use localized language.properties later.

Hard work put into UI - Character Creation maturing

Let the screenshots speak. I'm too tired at the moment after working on jcrpg's UI widgets and character creation screens for hours. :-) (There's been some nice sound additions for animals into the game committed into SVN. Check the latest SVN for howling wolfs and the wild gorilla and all the UI improvements for New Game subscreens.) PS.: Missing Charisma and Karma added to attributes this morning - before you'd complain. :-)

Sounds like a misery

Adding some sounds to the game like walking resulted in problems - if sounds are too many too close to each other some of them are not played. Currently trying to fix this thing. Sounds I've found at the fine site pdsounds.org. It's great to have'em in the game, the world feels to start to expand again into another dimension. :-)

Music added to Main Menu and Game View

Music! I've added some of my old XMs (xtended mods - 'old' file format for multi channel tracked music) to the game's SVN repository as .ogg files. Also created AudioServer class for audio operations which is now wrapped around jME's audio extension library. It plays .ogg and is rather professional and easy to use. Can stream as well! :-) The music was converted to .ogg files, and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works. I hope it won't scare you away totally. ;-) The 'game view' track is currently for testing purpose to see if there are or not problems with audio performance during heavy loads. Seems to work okay on my 1.6GHz single core. :-) You can download and listen to them here, or check SVN for the in-game experience!