Entity-O-Meter, new textures/models, climatic sounds

These are the new things for today. I couldn't stop adding some new features like environmental sounds for climate belts (some rarely played nice bird sounds while walking around, or eagle cry over the desert :) ), the new Entity-O-Meter (icons showing the detected groups (will be skill based if you can detect them or not)) and some refactoring for the houses in texture and model too (also added the steps created by theotherhiveking with a wooden texture on it). I'll check a few things yet but the prealpha release is due in a few days. I hope you like these news! :)

Environmental Sounds working

With using the quick TreeLocator class in Ecology it's easy to determine the entities/groups around the player, so I've added a doEnironmental call to the GameStateContainer which is called when Engine is ticking an environment event in every 16 seconds. Then it's looked up which groups are around and the EntityMember descriptor tells what sounds can be played (EntityMember's audioDescription is used for storing this information). I've added sounds for the human commoners, gorilla and wolf groups. Check the SVN if interested, you'll get sounds right after starting a new game.

Mountain Village - heavy geo tweaking and such

With heavy hacking put into Boundaries, TreeLocator ( a kind of speed up locator for positioned objects [economic, boundaries or whatever we need] like OctTree in 3D scenarios) GroupedBoundaries, Population and Residence plus the EconomyTemplate is ready.

GroupedBoundaries is for grouping smaller boundaries into a bigger pool which uses TreeLocator to quickly return the boundaries covering a given coordinate range. It is used in Population (towns and villages will be based on that class) to contain the boundaries of Residencies (houses, castles etc. will be based on that class) which build up a Population.

Each humanoid EntityInstance (=a group of humanoid beings) can have a Population. The Instance's HumanoidEntityDescription contains the EconomyTemplate which describes what Population class and Residence class the given entity can own in a given Geography (e.g. Plain, Forest or Mountain). Thus upon generating ecology, the humanoids settle their village around their HomeBoundaries' coordinate. :-)

With tweaking Geography getPointHeight adding exceptions for parts of the geography with humanoid economy it became possible even that the sloped Mountains can contain Residences (houses). Where a house takes place Geography point heights are made similar on each coordinate of the house covered part. Check the screenshots, how a population's houses override the mountain slope's default height. I will review the codes in the next few time-slots I'll have and then roll out a test release.

Village revisited

Population (you may call it some kind of a village's economic implementation) class is getting itself tuned up. Experimenting with providing some basic population structure and synchronizing these first steps into the complex economic buildup with the World's getCube and Geography's getPointHeight functions. So far not too much complexity yet it's getting better I think. A village building quantity based on an EntityInstance's number of group and a dynamic updating system for the Population class is being worked on. Interesting. :)

Over 1000 commits to SVN

jcrpg project's SVN repository is now over the 1000th SVN commit. Great thing indeed! :-) Noteworthy news for me is that Radakan has changed 3D engine to jMonkeyEngine! Radakan is a sandbox RPG with 3D graphics, so kind of a similar in a lot or few ways to jcrpg. It's opensource too, so I'll keep an eye on it if I can learn some things from their code. It's lead programmer is MomokoFan a seasoned Java jME programmer who I know superficially from jME forums.

Working on Humanoid Economy/Ecology

It's obvious now that I cannot proceed on with UI development of encounter page till I've got some more sophisticated concept of Entities and their relation to each other and the player. So currently started to strengthen the code of humanoid ecology and with that the economy too to test the limits of memory and CPU before proceeding on with too much of humanoids around. ;-) I've added a CC-BY licensed human model created by Tiziana aka TiZeta. Thanks for licensing it! :)
PS.: I've further qualified things to please the Anonymous masses.

Image Speak - More Contribution and UI

Archenemy has contributed again! Thank you! This time new skins for the bear, giant spider model and new portraits! Very nice bunch of contributions. :-) The Party Behavior screen is now mostly done and working. I've started to create the player initiated encounters' preencounter group selection window now (nice name, isn't it?), it's almost ready. All in SVN. Press F2 to toggle Party Behavior screen.