MediaWiki wiki fired up on sf.net

With the recommendation and help of Charlie (@freegamer) I've tuned up a MediaWiki on sourceforge site for jcrpg. It's very basic yet, but I'm planning on adding content later on. This will be the main site of jcrpg information later. Here's the link.

A little rest for a while

I can confirm that OpenJDK 6 is working properly with jcrpg after testing it under Ubuntu 8. I've put development to a little rest for an undecided time. Hopefully I'll get interested again in a few days or weeks. Maybe it's the nice weather and a bit of a period for incubation that's needed. :-D

EconomicGrounds started + AbstractInfrastructure in the plans

Using Goegraphy in a hacked style - EconomicGround base class extends Geography and uses non-identical Geographies' point heights as its own plus replaces some cube kinds with street stones - check the screenshot, you can see that non-steep parts of the EconomicGround are overridden with pavement. Now it will also override steeps with stairs later when I get there...and we are getting near to a simple street/plaza implementation that will go together well with the AbstractInfrastructure a base class for determining different population formations.

OpenJDK, rpgcodex topic, jme upgrade

Today a tester has reported that he successfully run jcrpg in OpenJDK under Ubuntu Linux. I'm a bit surprised and happy that the open-source version of the Sun JDK is working this good. This mainly is interesting for Linux users as installing OpenJDK under Windows is currently rather hard for non-experts, but Ubuntu distribution (and most likely other Linux distros too) contain a package for it.

Recently I've opened an rpgcodex forum topic for discussing jcrpg related things. rpgcodex is a highly community based rpg site, their motto is "bring the 'role' back in rpg". A nice place with a lot of rpg-loving people.

Reading this post I updated jme to test the performance surplus. You can check jcrpg with the new updated library in SVN. (lwjgl was also upgraded.)

Otherwise not much news for today, only small tweaks and planning in theory (currently about populations' generation).

New demo video at Vimeo

Java Classic RPG video for "Nightside" release from Paul Illes on Vimeo.

Check out my latest video to show the state of the project at the time of the "Nightside" release. Some fixes since the last release are also in this video - those that are only in the SVN repo.

Fixes, optimizations

Reviewing a big portion of the code to clean up old bugs hanging around. Small but important fixes and optimizations were done since the release came out. I've added multilevel placing of units in the encounter phase so that you always meet'em even standing on a mountain. Also I've detected a serious node culling issue I was not aware of yet that disabled the whole culling - now it's working again resulting in big boost of performance that we've lost on the way maybe months ago. In the end the working culling caused me to do some tricky zero quad placement to the UI base node (which is in jme's ortho queue, only 2D things for UI) to make sure it is not culled. A bit confusion maybe in jME or even a bug or two? Now tonight I've hunted down another old issue - the jumpy foliage and vegetation bug. Making the time counter field static in the TrimeshGeometryBatch solved the problem.

The "Nightside" Release is out - call for animators

Check out the downloads, ungzip, play and report back with your experience here or at the forum. As things go further and further we are nearing a state where more and more 3D models and their animation is becoming tremendously needed in the art department! There are already several models (e.g. bear, wolf, fox, spider) that's in need of rigging and animation or there's the already rigged human model pair that just needs animation. So if you want to help out, join the effort! A great opportunity to practice animation and it would mean a lot to the free game development community and jcrpg.

Highlights:
"New animals as bear and spider were added. Humanoid groups were introduced with the humans and their basic economy. Basic populations and houses added for human groups. New sounds for animals and humans along with environmental effects depending on nearby beings and climate. Party Behavior and Pre-encounter input screens were introduced. On screen display extended with the 'Entity-O-Meter' which shows nearby groups' icons. New portraits and models by Archenemy."

Next steps will be to further sophisticate the encounter part, the UI, the ecology (especially for humanoid and with that the economy too), bring in the skills to the world, the EntityMember and PartyMember leveling, inventory and object system, and some kind of dialog system. This will round up slowly a fully playable experience. If you feel like you want to make the project a bit more manageable consider donating some bucks.