Wiki moved, addition of mouse support for the UI started, contributions

Due to the previous mediawiki (self installed) being dogslow (every page loading takes +5-10 seconds just waiting for something, probably DB or some name resolution?) I have decided to revisit the idea of using MediaWiki hosted natively by sf.net for the projects. I've gone through all the content, copied the remaining changes to the new MediaWiki. From now on please use that one (all the links I've tried to replace, so you just have to follow those links). To edit it, you will need an sf.net account, and probably permission from me. I'm not sure how this part works on sf.net hosted mediawiki. We'll see! :)

Yesterday after incroporating mkienenb's new patch for starting the addition of menu mouse handling, I've found some time to tweak it and make it work with the InputBase class of the InputWindows, with a special kind of picking for the UI element based on Mike's advice - to check the WorldBound of the given Spatials under a window's root node. At least buttons are working now! We will keep on working for an all encompassing UI mouse support (dropdowns, inputs, value tuners and all the stuff). You can expect it to work in the next release. :)

Meanwhile tidbit is helping with a lot of different new content. Yeti, igloo, snowy road texture for the arctic region is ready for integration (animation still needed, if interested in that part visit our forum/wiki/irc for more details). He's just finished a new series of Shrines to be integrated as part of the road networks later. TheAncientGoat - another helping hand from the FreeGameDev community - has created a new unique monster (something like a horrifying larva/insect/spider mixture) and posted it on the forums. So lots of things happening in the contributions forum! Check the topics out for preview images! :D

Path development ready

After tweaking the worldmap display (thinner lines of road with direction) and adding some bends to the road network I started to fiddle with some better algorithms for road generation - instead of simple lines drawn between the populations an A* algo should find the most efficient path to build a road upon. With the help of the superb slick 2d java library I managed to add a fully featured, cost based, fast road network generation - the class World of jcrpg implemented the TileBasedMap interface of slick pathfinder. Kudos goes to slick2d! ...and thus ended the first iteration of road network development in jcrpg! :) Check the screenshots to see how it looks on the world map! :) (PS.: Updated 1st screeny, nicert gfx now in SVN.)

Turning, bridging that old dusty road

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! :)

Something crosses?

Hah, with some very basic tweaking of the Economic class melted with some parts of the EconomicGround class and the River's WorldSizedFlowDirection thingy (a kind of bit switch map, 4 bits for each world map block and the for directions (currently a block is 40x40 sized areas)). The mixture is called RoadNetwork! Right now the roads go in a cross in the middle of the block where road directions are defined. Nothing complicated, still now it's being represented in the 3D view as well. :) I will improve it later on.

The IRC channel (you can find a webchat link to it above at Chat menu element) seems to be quite useful, we gather there day by day, chat and try to be constructive. :D mkienenb from New York has shown up there as well and helped out with some good ideas and code patches along with some editing of the project Wiki's brand new user guide part created by him. Meanwhile tidbit started to work on an polar monster called 'yeti'.

Update on the roads

Yeah, I've tried to come up with something regarding roads. Now it's getting into shape! Certains towns of bigger size are now interconnected. Each town with two of the closest big cities. A web of road will get you into all the bigger towns. Currently it's very early but at least some kind of very simple path drawing is already in, using the WorldSizedFlowDirection class (already used for rivers and their directions). The WorldMap is already showing something of it, but the 3D view and abstract cube architecture is not yet aware of the roads. :) The screenshot shows the randomly generated world, with a few bigger towns connected with the reddish colored road.

jME and lwjgl updates in SVN

I'm currently catching up with what has been going on in the jMonkeyEngine development. It's still a rather active community there, I'm glad to see - patches are incorporated in the jme svn, dependent libraries updated. So I took the time and updated jcrpg's dependencies.

Next thing I must have a look at before the planning is to debug a recent in game text related bugreport - fonts are getting totally unreadable with some GPUs under Windows. Have any of you experienced the same thing (messed up fonts in-game) with latest release - if so what GPU/OS do you have?

PS: Just attached the bug's screenshot. Anyone else with it?

Project IRC channel launched

Just in the weird case you wanted a separate jcrpg channel on freenode... here it is! I felt like experimenting with the IRC bots (like eggdrop, which is kind of pretty usable) and thought it would be a good idea to have a jcrpg dedicated irc channel for the times to come. So the parameters:

IRC server: irc.freenode.net
Channel: #jclassicrpg

See you there!