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Metal Glove Solid: A Policy of Constant Improvement
It's time to party like it's 1987! Where to start with the list of new features?- Back-ground graphics: The player is no longer walking on a void. And there doesn't seem to be any slowdown.
- More enemies: Flayers to be exact (that's what the image file was called that I ripped them from). I might just call them zombies though.
- Score - it keeps it, it starts at zero, and it goes up.
- Different images depending on which direction a sprite is walking in - You'll have to take my word for this until I do some kind of video of the gameplay. But it is there, honest.
- A GPL licence. Again, since I can't release it yet, you'll have to take my word for it, but I give you my cub-scouts honour that I svn-added that into my repository. And this time I didn't forget to commit.
- A working exit. Unfortunately due to there being no second map, this does cause the game to crash.
by Steve (noreply@blogger.com) at May 13, 2008 03:36 AM
iris2d first glimpse of 2d scenery
Ghoulsblade 00:16, 12 May 2008 (CEST): first statics visible, still too high, zorder problems and black lines on the border, but good enough for a first glimpse =)
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Edit : fixed blacklines and position, and some zorder problems, but a lot still remains.
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by Ghoulsblade at May 12, 2008 12:16 AM
New animals in the fauna - models by wciow
A nice pack of models made by wciow at glest.org was added to the fauna of jcrpg. Thanks to wciow for allowing free use of it for the people. The Deer, the Heron and the Wolf was picked out of the models. The fauna of jcrpg is strengthening well! :) (On a side note, I've decided to replace old wolf model by theotherhiveking because the old one does not have a good texture, I hope someone will create one for it later although)While adding them to the code I've fixed some minor bugs. Pre encounter window was not reset after the encounter (causing a crash to desktop on new encounter with less groups) and remov
ed the unnecessary use of audio-system when audio is configured switched off in config.properties (which was a bug especially using a Linux where audio device can be busy and you couldn't start jcrpg although you switched audio off). So I'm a bit back in the business. I plan to catch up with the population thing with fresh ideas I've gathered during my coding-free period. :)
by Paul (noreply@blogger.com) at May 11, 2008 09:08 PM
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.
by Paul (noreply@blogger.com) at May 11, 2008 07:49 PM
Metal Glove Solid: The Key, The Secret
You would hardly recognise the game! There are now graphics for the ghost generators and the exit, and new graphics for the walls, and new gameplay features, namely keys and locked doors.It's almost looking like a finished game, but there is still plenty of the donkey work to do, such as designing more maps and adding more gameplay elements, such as more types of enemies.
by Steve (noreply@blogger.com) at May 11, 2008 09:58 AM
jMonkeyEngine at JavaOne 2008 - and a bit of jcrpg too
JMonkeyEngine's great staff has again visited JavaOne conference in 2008 too. They've created several interesting videos. One of them showing different projects using jME. I'm happy that jcrpg was given the possibility to show itself in some of the demo video's scenes! You can check the video with some jcrpg here. :) It includes several other projects demo video cut into one, so it's worthy to check out what the awesome jME is capable of! Thank you jME!PS.: Here's the javablog post about the day jME was presented (scroll down to jMonkeyEngine part if interested, jcrpg is linked too although as "the Java Role Playing Framework" which is not correct :) ).
by Paul (noreply@blogger.com) at May 10, 2008 10:50 PM
started working on a new 2d mode
Ghoulsblade 03:30, 10 May 2008 (CEST): looks like iris will get a 2d mode again =) orthocam setup seems to work after a few attempts, and the 3d multitex-terrain will be used for the 2d mode at first. maybe we'll add a "legacy-terrain" option for imitating the original 2d client later.
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by Ghoulsblade at May 10, 2008 03:30 AM
Demo movies
I present three demo movies
showing off my engine. Feast your eyes on!
In related news, development of the engine goes on. Some of the latest improvements include
- X3D XML handling. Next release will include support for X3D (both XML and classic encoding) for all programs.
- File filters in open/save dialogs. In GTK 2 (by GtkFileChooserDialog) and Windows (WinAPI) backends.
- Passing kambi_time to GLSL shaders, allowing shaders to perform various beautiful animations.
Metal Glove Solid: More Graphics
Flying in the face of possibly copyright lawsuits, I've added more ripped graphics to the game. In this case, it's the walls, but there is a flaw:Since Wyvern (where I've got the graphics from) is obviously a better game that mine, it has different images for a wall depending on whether it's a corner section or a straight (amongst others), there is no actual image for a straight top-down wall. And since my game doesn't calculate what kind of section a wall, I'm going to have to think of something else.
Oh, and the other problem is that my "mapsquares" are bigger than those in Wyvern, meaning I'll need to stretch them as well. Why is ripping off other people's graphics never easy? I might as well have drawn them myself.
by Steve (noreply@blogger.com) at May 09, 2008 01:30 AM
SMC & internal affairs
SMC 1.5: New particle effects and enemiesYou can now download version 1.5 of Secret Maryo Chronicles (smc). Lots of improvements found their way in:
New World, many new sprites, replaced enemies, particle emitter, ambient sound, many fixes and more!
The project is moving the game's visual style further away from it's Mario inspiration - I applaud to that. There still is a bunch of tasks for audio and 2D graphics artists though.
A bit of a while ago, the platform game scored first place on yet another genuine top open source games list™.
Okay. The update on smc was actually just a cover up. You and I, dear reader, we have to talk. Text browser folks and RSS users can leave now.
This is what Free Gamer will look like... maybeThis blog will get a new look soon. If you care about the style of the text you read here, please take a look at the current work in progress and comment on it. Let me help you help me help you (help me?)
by noreply@blogger.com (qubodup) at May 08, 2008 11:54 AM
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
by Paul (noreply@blogger.com) at May 08, 2008 09:37 AM
Metal Glove Solid: Looking better
Yes, your eyes do deceive you - there are in fact no original graphics in this screenshot. I'm no artist, and as many others find, getting graphics for a game takes longer than actually writing the thing. I've used the graphics from the excellent Wyvern game, which comes with sprites that are perfect for my Gauntlet clone.Here you can see the warrior wondering what that ghostly noise is coming from the other side of the wall. The red square is an exit, which can only mean one thing - that there is another level, though in the interests of keeping the surprise, I won't reveal it yet.
I do have a conundrum with the graphics though: I'm guessing that it wouldn't be right for me to release it with them, as they are not mine. There is no kind of licence information included with Wyvern, so I think my only solution is to email the author and ask him politely.
by Steve (noreply@blogger.com) at May 08, 2008 02:27 AM
Top Mud Sites? Bugger that
I run a mud based on GTA. I say "run", what I mean is I wrote it about 2 years ago and it's been sat running ever since and I've not even looked at it. It gets quite a few players though; back when I was promoting it, I registered it at a few of the Mud listing sites, one being "Top Mud Sites".I'm now in the process of changing the URL. Since my DynDNS has stopped working, I'm moving over to No-IP. So I've just tried logging into the Top Mud Sites website to change the details. Oh, my login details don't work. Why not? Well, this is the FAQ section with the solution.
WTF? Bear in mind that, surprisingly, I'm not "familiar with the new TMS database", whatever that is. I've already got one full-time job and frankly I can't be bothered to go through that rigmarole, so the details are going to stay wrong.
(Contrast this with The MUD Connector, which took me about 2 minutes to update the details).
by Steve (noreply@blogger.com) at May 07, 2008 05:11 AM
Guest Post: The Price of Games
This is a guest post by my other personality since I forgot to take my pills today.The price of games - it's way too low! What? I'm not talking about the current crop of games, which compared to the prices of (good) games of yesteryear seem to be a bargain considering the amount of content you get with them.
No, I'm talking about old computer games from the 80's, and specifically old Spectrum games. I've got a fair few boxes of the things that I've bought from Ebay (obv) and I was hoping that the price of them might have increased slightly in order to make me very rich. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Even a bona-fide classic like Escape from Krakatoa (a game I can't believe hasn't been remade yet - I'm adding it to my list) is available for a paltry £1.50 from the Preservation Team Shop. As it is, it looks like it will only be my great-great-grandchildren who stand to benefit. Bloody scroungers!
by Steve (noreply@blogger.com) at May 07, 2008 04:41 AM
Metal Glove Solid: Now with a map
No, your eyes do not deceive you, you really can see some bona-fide collision-detectable walls in the screenshot on the right. They are the two blue vertical lines.But the fun doesn't stop there. You may have also noticed the small yellow square in mid-flight downwards towards the white square "ghosts". Yes indeed, that would be a bullet - I have also implemented shooting. I'm still debating whether to allow the player to fix the direction of shooting in a Llamatron kind of way, but I'll do that as part of the gameplay tweaking later when I determine the speed of all the movement.
Whenever writing games that involve some kind of "map" (i.e. most of them), there's always the perpetual problem of how to design it. I always like to get something up and running as quickly as possible, so instead of writing a custom mapping program, or implementing a way to "design-as-you-play", I simply use a spreadsheet program (OpenOffice of course). This is a picture of the map data for the dungeon shown in the screenshot:-
As you can see, by using colours it makes it far easier to see the layout of the map, and when saving it as a CSV file, all the colour is stripped from the file leaving a nice flat file of data for the import code to read. Designing the map couldn't be easier once all the different sections have been placed at least once; it's just a case of copying/pasting about, and then re-saving as a CSV.Another bonus is that any hackers can edit the CSV files and make up their own maps very easily. My other games Laser Tactics and DangerMan (among others) use this method, though as of yet nobody has told me that they've been bothered.