The 'Head Chop' Release

Yes, we're ascending to the next level of our destiny through the obstacles of the great dev-eater beast of Tiredness and Desperation. We have entered the sanctuary of the miraculous Release again. Here we stand astounded and in silence, holding back breath. We are aware that something great surprising and of elemental effect may happen anytime. As we are there awaiting for some never-ending minutes, a booming sound starts to cite something strange, slowly - pressing each word. Listening carefully we try to memorize what's being told:

"
- New monsters/humanoids (by tidbit, TheAncientGoat)
- New animations for some beings (by tidbit)
- New town types (anatipion and yeti by tidbit)
- New buildings (by tidbit)
- New character voicepacks (by getter77 and qubodup)
- Generated Road System added
- Mouse support added (based on patches by mkienenb)
- Camera set to smooth turning in combat mode
- Options menu completed
- Very basic scenario support with seed choosing at New Game
- Intro text for scenario added
- Behavior skills are now used in perception
- Easier to use character creation
- World map window enhancements, graphics, town icons
- Enhanced shaders and more normal map textures
- Displaying percept beings in 3D in walk mode with fade shader
- Top button row for accessing windows
- Tooltip system added
- Optimized font rendering for UI elements
- Lamp light added (key L)
- Buffer pool debug OSD (key T)
- Many-many bugfixes, optimization, reference leak fixes
"

Right after finishing these words, a glowing globe elevates from out of the darkness of the Sanctuary. Yeah, now you know what awaits you, jcrpg's next sneak-peek enchantment is in your hands like a crystal ball. It may be that it helps you to look into a distant Future... so let the Trial begin!

Candidates for Testing - don't hesitate! And don't forget to report back at the forums or IRC chat channel.

If you wish to make the dev happy, don't forget to donate some bucks to the project through paypal (at the left side of the blog, the links positions your browser there). It will help to keep the enthusiasm high and also let the remaining audio tracks to become free (CC-BY-SA without the non-commercial attribute). It still needs ~340$ (see Project Budget on the left side of the blog).

Please note, that the project greatly lacks female voice packs, so if you happen to be a kind lady, please stop by and create a voice pack for the game. :)

The 'Head Chop' Release Is Out

Spread the good news. I have no time for a proper blogpost now, tomorrow I''ll do it. Anyway here is the link to the download zip: http://sourceforge.net/projects/javacrpg/files/jClassicRPG/svn_20091102/jcrpg-20091102.zip/download . Instructions still here: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/javacrpg/index.php?title=Download . Use the jcrpg.bat under Windows. chmod +x jcrpg.sh under Linux. ;)

3D beings displayed in walk mode, more animations

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 Animation 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. ;)

Contributions, shaders, new normal maps

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...

Screenies, polishing, testing multiple platforms

Options menu is again in focus. A few related bugs resolved now. Meanwhile tidbit has added cool new animations for the new humanoids (yeti and anatipion [which is walking, scorpion like people of desert]), all those got into the SVN too. Anatipions even have their own building models (done also by tidbit). Thank you!

More testing is under way. Even Windows 7 64 bit test version got its round after Vista64. (You'll have to be careful with Windows 7, like installing latest nvidia driver for nvidia cards, otherwise it doesn't work. Also it's recommended to use 32 bit Java under Windows, seems like 64 bit doesnt want to work with the supplied 64 bit lwjgl dlls.) Well, with my new mobo + CPU and my good 'old' 8800GTS, I've tried to boost the limits of view in game, game works nicely with a view distance of 100 now. Check screenshots.

Forums down due to freegamedev.net outage - backup forum is installed

Unfortunately a full system failure at the freegamedev.net machine results in a quite long outage in the forums services too. It's not yet sure if the forums can be normally restored. Let's hope it will get better, but in a week or more you can expect the forums to be down.

Brighter news is that the polishing of the release is progressing very well. Apart from adding a few more entity icons and probably sounds no other thing is planned to be coded, added before releasing.

EDIT: till it gets back, you can use this backup forum http://jcrpg.ath.cx/phpbb/

Bughunting, profiling, polishing

In brief: smooth camera turning added for combat plus zooming activated enemy title text for better understanding what's going on the battlefield; left over memory reference hunting to allow restarting/loading games multiple times without lag or OutOfMemory; new male character voice pack by qubodup added by qubodup personally, thank you; a dozen other smaller bugfixes; correcly working mouselook while moving; added starting-at-closest-shrine at starting new game; saving of Options menu settings implemented (now on you can use jcrpg.sh/bat instead of the special scripts for different detail levels and use Options menu to select/tweak the needed detal level and save). New content done by tidbit awaits integration (brand new humanoid base model and its home buildings). After adding those I'll start to give the really really final polishing to the release package (reviewing scripts and documents) and then......