Planet Freegamedev

A random day in the studio

2008-07-04T15:40:46+00:00

Res making Franky on water.

Download the OGG Video (44 meg)
Venom showing his piranha level he made.

Download the OGG Video (22 meg)

Dariusz giving a short demo of Apricot powered by Crystal Space, coming soon!

Good Morning Free Gamer

2008-07-03T06:54:00+00:00

Well it's been a while since I chipped in. Q has been doing a fantastic job, I'm sure you will agree, of keeping us up to date with the Free gaming news. I've just been way too busy lately and it's great to see that I can disappear and things keep ticking. Hopefully in the future others will join us in our mission to conquer enlighten the world.

Blood Frontier, the mod to make Sauerbraten look serious, has it's next demo release tomorrow. You may or may not notice a lovely new website. I'm sure Q will follow up on this after the release.

Boarman in JCRPG Woman by Grumbel

There's also been tons of progress on JCRPG which is looking more and more impressive. There's a fully animated boarman, contributed by artist Zphr, who has almost completed a boarman mage as well. Both are released under an open source license (CC by SA, I think).

There's a gorgeous new portait image contributed by Grumbel. Whilst JCRPG and Scourge have picked it up, this and his other portaits are available under an open source license (CC-by-SA or GPL3) and you can find out more information, lavish praise, or even make requests (!) in this topic in the FreeGameDev forums.

In other fantasy-game news, DungeonHack progress continues and they finally have the project in SVN (direct link) so interested people can check out their progress which is apparently pretty good. It's a Daggerfall-inspired game, which can only be a good thing.

Did you know FreeOrion will soon have 3D combat? Check out this topic on the Ogre forums for some preview screenshots. In the meantime, they released 0.3.10 with the usual raft of bug fixes and minor improvements. Downloads are available, from different places, for Linux and Windows.

The White Chamber

Studio Trophis have released the source for their very lovely looking game The White Chamber. It's an anime themed 2D point and click horror adventure game. It requires the WinterMute engine and I'm not sure whether that's Free Software although it seems the source is available but under no specific license EDIT: - it's not open source at all. The White Chamber source is at the bottom of the Studio Trophis downloads page. It looks like it's all Windows-only =( but I could be wrong.

A while back I made some hullabaloo about Portalized, a perhaps-to-be-open-source better-than-Portal engine. Well, the guy working on it (who, by the way, is only 16 - shame on us all who are older and less productive than him) now has a blog with some interesting commentary on his efforts as well as some gorgeous screenshots. It doesn't look like it'll be open source any time soon but I don't think he's ruled it out either, and now he has help so it'll be worth watching. Version 0.1 is on the way, so there's something to look forward to.

Well, hopefully that satisfies your Free game news needs for another day or so...

guisystem:activated ingame, partial unicode support

2008-07-03T02:45:00+00:00

Ghoulsblade 02:45, 3 July 2008 (CEST) : the new guisystem has been activated ingame for server-sent dialogs , all major issues seem to be resolved, and there are only a few minor features missing (text-centering, maybe a few uohtml font options, and a few minor coloring problems, maybe dialog positioning is slightly different from before) but overall it should be an improvement, and even unicode is partially supported now : either unicode OR uohtml so far, our uohtml parser doesn't understand unicode yet, but if no uohtml is used in a textchunk, unicode will be used. Text-Scrollbars also don't work yet, but they also didn't work in the old gui, so no harm done here. Client side dialogs like healthbar, paperdoll etc still use the old gui system as some of them access the widgets at runtime (e.g. healthbar scaling, coloring) and that code still needs to be adjusted to work with the new gui system.

Recent changes

2008-07-03T01:46:45+00:00

Let's sum up the recent changes on AC:

models from toca

sound scheduler, during heavy bursts sounds are played using a priority scheme

settings menus reworked

more hud setting variables, see the "head-up display" menu

WHOIS privacy, only admins can see the complete IP

muzzle flash

scoreboard fixes, added grenadiers 'ratio' column (thx!)

removed master (replaced by the voting system)

"givemaster" has been changed to "giveadmin"

a second follow-spectate mode showing the player transparently (thx meatrome)

We are currently trying to get things stable, searching bugs and broken stuff. Big thanks to grenadier, harps, rantinghuman, randum and the other people from #assaultcube for their testing efforts and for constantly kicking my ass to fix bugs ;) Right now I'm working with meatrome on enhancing the demo playback, making it a pleasure watching game replays from all kind of angles. The code in this area is still WIP.

It is now possible to donate money to AssaultCube, in other words: "Feel free to donate something if you like this game. The money we receive will be used to pay for the webhosting of http://assault.cubers.net and to buy some beers for the developers to make them code fresh and awesome features ;)"
Thx to rantinghuman and harps for showing their support!

TRA$H_PC, the creator of this vid, will create an official promotion video for AC v0.94 using the new spectator features =)

Horrible note:
There are now some (google) ads spread over the forum. We get a few cents for each click. If there is any revenue we'll use it for the hosting bills (or dev beers of course). I hope this doesn't suck too much.. Well, otherwise get Adblock Plus :P

Inventory and BodyParts in the works

2008-07-02T21:16:03+00:00

Equipping/unequipping armor to a certain bodypart is now working. Also there's now Body part and Body definitions for different creatures, so they may have different Body build-up. Body parts like legs, torso etc. define their size and criticality upon injury. In a combat chance of body part hit will be based on size of a body part. The criticality of injury is also defined by body part. A lot of inventory thing has been developed, working Give, Drop, Attach (ammo type to a weapon). There's even a draft Inventory Object Detail page to see details about an item.

Also party order can be changed now so the lineup in a combat can be different. It can be done by pressing F5 on the Party Character Order window. A lot of small fixes, and a memory optimization for UI text generation were done (it was eating away a huge amount of memory, I've added caching for font quads now). Steady progress for now, I think! :D

Playing the first Apricot demo

2008-07-02T00:23:00+00:00

The first playable demo of Apricot has been released! I am able to play it! (with low low low quality settings - Hint: disable shaders.) You have to get a recent "Apricot" Blender build from GraphicAll, then download this .blend file, open it with said Blender build and press "p". That's it! Sorry for spamming the blog with news related to that project lately, I think it's interesting... :)

Apricot, first demo

Edit: An unofficial OpenArena 0.8.0 pre-release was posted. Testing it is encouraged, so that the official release can become a great one. I must admit that two months ago I thought that OA was probably the ugliest of the interesting games with QuakeI/II/III-engine roots. Now I know that it's getting prettier and prettier every now and then with new maps and models.

The GearHead 1/2 homepage has been updated a while ago. It now looks pretty pretty and has a sexy RSS feed. The GearHead games are Roguelike titles (which I find not that cool) involving Mechs (which I find cool) of the Japanese kind (meh). Totally unrelated: a webcomic based on the games' setting has started.

PS: In case you are interested in using glc as a game recording tool on GNU/Linux systems, this Arch Linux newsletter contains some usage hints for the cool application.

First Playable Demo!

2008-07-01T22:52:02+00:00

For a while now we have been close to being able to release a playable demo and I’ve been itching to get something online that shows the gameplay coming together since its really fun to play Franky here in the studio and videos don’t cut it anymore for an open, interactive project.

Chris made a small test level for playing Franky, with a range of asset that can be used as modules for making your own levels too!
Pablo (VenomGFX) is working on animations and characters and I have been learning blenders game logic to get Franky to a playable state as well as a few bugfixes and logic brick additions.

Download the OGG Video (13meg)
Download packed Blendfile (57meg, Incompatible with 2.46, see below)

Special thanks to Brecht for his amazing GLSL shader work and Benoit Bolsee for writing a new game logic state machine. Thanks also to Mataii for optimizing Franky’s mesh and removing ~1700 triangles .

The response from the last post was overwhelming, We wanted to include peoples wacky animations but I’m afraid this would have set us back yet another day so we will have them included by the next update.
If anyones interested in making their own levels, this is not so hard, just edit the existing terrain, or add a “ground” property to any mesh and use the existing blocks to jump on.

Playing the Game
For this test level you collect and throw nuts, climb up the ledge, glide and run around.
This demo requires a modern graphics card (for Nvidia, 6+ Series for GLSL to work), Blender Apricot-Branch revision 15389 or higher - grab one from www.graphicall.org

Keys

Up, Shift+Up to walk, Pressing Up while hanging climbs.
Left/Right - Turn or Shimmy when hanging.
Spacebar - Throw when you have collected a nut.
K - Kick (no kick objects in example level yet)
Z - Jump, Press twice to double-jump, hold to glide.
F10 - Reset

What We Have

Actions - Jump, DoubleJump, Run, Walk, Hang, Shimmy, Throw, Glide
Collecting items.
Armature driven ShapeKeys in the Game Engine (Thanks to Benoit)
Blenders Shaders in the GameEngine.
Game locic state machine to separate groups of logic into states (more on this later).
Linked Set Scenes from external files to manage game logic in one place.
Simple Camera system that detects obstacles.

Whats Missing

Loop the loop, Climbing tree’s
Enemies
Water
Interactive objects to jump on
Group Instances dont work in the game engine yet
HUD Has to be merged with the new state machine logic
Blenders Bullet physics library needs updating to get anisotropic friction with the ground to work right. Now were working around the problem but side effects are you can run through walls.
Optimizations, Level of Detail
Wont run the the Blender Player yet because its missing Blender.Mathutils module
Sounds haven’t been added into the game logic
Testing on different graphics cards and hardware.

Notes

the franky in this demo has rotated wrists, please use THIS rig for animations.
Their are reports of the game engine crashing with ATI cards, we need to look into this.
As of revision 15426 improvements made by Benoit break jumping. Next test demo will have modified gamelogic to support this.

TPServer-cpp 0.5.1 released.

2008-07-01T12:45:00+00:00

This release is mostly bug fixing, and a bit or refactoring. It certainly feels a lot better to have two months between releases, instead of 14 like the last one.

TPServer-cpp 0.5.1 is on the downloads page and will be on our SF downloads page soon. The GIT repo is tpserver-cpp (branch master) and the tag is TPSERVER_CPP_0_5_1. Feedback and suggestions are always welcome.

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GearHead Comics: Mischa’s Story

2008-07-01T07:43:04+00:00

A new GearHead comic has started at Ataraxia Theatre: Mischa’s Story. In other news, a new release of GH2 should be right around the corner.

guisystem:clip,text,html

2008-07-01T03:35:00+00:00

Ghoulsblade 03:35, 1 July 2008 (CEST) : scrollbar still missing, but at least the clipping works, also our parser for the html-like syntax used by uo has been redesigned. "CENTER" does not work yet, but changing to a different font in mid-text works : headlines like "28.06.2008 by Lumberman" use a slightly different font than the messages below.

A long overdue update

2008-06-30T16:02:36+00:00

Its been a few months since our last update on the site. Sorry about that. I'm currently the only one who writes these site updates and I have just returned from a large break from working on Allacrost. Here's an update on the state of this project.

First I'll talk about the team. Many people, including myself, have been inactive or minimally active for the first half of this year. I can't speak for everyone's reason for this, but for me personally I needed a break. I had been working hard on Allacrost for over 3 years without a break and it was eating away all of my time. I have begun working on Allacrost regularly again in the past 2-3 weeks, but I also have a new hobby and lifestyle that will prevent me from putting in the amount of time that I used to for this project. Over the long term I'm hoping that there will be more distributed leadership in our team and less reliance on a single lead (myself). I think we're well on our way to that future though as many individuals on this team have already begun stepping up.

Obviously because a large portion of the team has been on downtime, we haven't been making much progress in the past months. This has lead some to question the project's future. Go ahead and read the forum thread in the link to find out the answer to that question. We continue to make progress on Allacrost, its just been slower than usual. On that note, we celebrated the end of the fourth anniversary of this project earlier this month.

Lastly, we have a surprise for you all that we've been working on for several weeks now. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but I will say that its something brand new to the Allacrost experience and will play a large part in this project in the years to come. It's near completion now, though I don't want to predict a release date. I hope we'll have it finished up by the end of next month though, so stay tuned.

guisystem

2008-06-30T02:47:00+00:00

Ghoulsblade 02:47, 30 June 2008 (CEST): it's not quite finished yet, but the new gui system is starting to take form, for example, the original uo fonts and coloring are supported by it, it's also an important step towards unicode support.

Shadow game prototyping challange, FreedroidRPG lifesigns, recording GNU/Linux games with glc

2008-06-28T23:25:00+00:00

Shadow & light mock-up, thrown together by Danc

Daniel Cook of Lost Garden started a shadow and light based game prototype challenge. Lost Garden is probably the best thing to read related to gaming. If you would like to participate via an open source project, feel free to gather a team on the FreeGameDev.net forums!

There's some activity surrounding FreedroidRPG. The students Kaisa Anttila, Markku Väisänen and Sami Mylly wrote an usability study of the game and it's editor. The criticism is very general and there are no direct solutions provided. The documents are supposed to serve interested developers in helping improving FreedroidRPG.

Version 0.11 of the game is scheduled for... soon? Anyways, for now the 0.11 pre-release candidate is available.

Video of Slune, made with glc

glc is now my tool of choice when it comes to recording game videos on GNU/Linux systems. It is faster than xvidcap, istanbul or gtk-recordMyDesktop and is also the only app that manages to records audio on my machine. It's also easy to install! (Hints: cat /proc/cpuinfo to find out what flags to use, O2 is written with an uppercase o, if you don't know where to install to install it to /usr/ and also execute the install script as root.) Using it is easy too! Just run glc-capture game-name and press Shift+F8 to start/stop recording. There is even a script provided, which will convert the glc files to mp4 (attention, non-free), the preferred format of Vimeo. If you know how to use ffmpeg to create an Theora/OGG video, you can probably export to that format instead.

glc is great! I want you to use it! I've used it a lot already. It is to my knowledge the first Linux direct rendering capturing tool that does not suck! If you have any trouble whatsoever with it, you're invited to ask for help in this thread. (There's also #glc on irc.freenode.net.)

Edit: Many thanks to Pyry for writing glc and making me aware of it!

Speaking of game videos, I discovered some game-exclusive video hosting services! GameVee even supports OGG/Theora!

One more thing: Apricot is looking for animators!

textatlas bugfix, better dynamic handling in 3d and progress in new gui system

2008-06-28T18:31:00+00:00

Ghoulsblade and I meet yesterday and he continued to work on the new gui code and i did some bugfixing and speed improvements.

Hagish 18:31, 28 June 2008 (CEST)

First Particle Effect, EntityMemberState (HP,SP,MP and such) + many updates

2008-06-27T23:59:11+00:00

Well, we're progressing at steam power level, my RPG-fan friends! We already have a thing we can proudly call a progressing and functional combat. You can die, you can have a Game Over, you can run out of Stamina so you have to wait, or run out of Mana so you can't cast spells. Yes, we have now an extensible effect program thing for the Skill Act Forms (spells, shots etc.) that uses J3DMovingEngine to handle jME based particle effects! Check the screenshot.

Also there's now a Camping button. If you press button 'C' in normal mode you switch to a camping mode with quicker passing time, Interception switched off, replenishing points like health and stamina (until you press C again or an AI initiated encounter surprises you at the start of the turn). The list of new things is not finished yet: we've just introduced Resistance values against skill act form impacts: Pierce, Bludgeon, Chemicals, Cold, Fire and Mental resistance for now! A new font is also replacing simple Verdana for a better more RPGish typography.

Well, yeah, we have now Experience Points as well, and it is accumulated upon each use of a skill! If you can get enough now you can even do a leveling of you experienced character! It's done with the help of the new shiny Character Leveling Window where you can pump some attribute points (which can raise Health, Mana, Stamina, Sanity, Moral points as well) and some skill points - which may lead to addition of new Skill Act Forms to you character if you've hit the right skill level needed for them.

Zphr is still working heavily on new 3D contents for jcrpg. The Boarman Thug is mostly complete with pain and death animation! He's working on a Boarman Mage currently. You've a more complete shot here about the tough thugs!

Much progress, working ahead to version 0.1 steadily. So loyal jcrpg people, get on and do some trumpeting around about jcrpg on forums you are at. We're about to get some serious innovated classic-RPG fun here! :D

Animate Frank!

2008-06-27T20:35:33+00:00

UPDATE: Tomorrow there will be an update with those animations we’ll be including. Thanks for all the contributions, you guys are doing awesome, keep going! There’s also been a few questions, and here are the answers..
1. Yes you can use 2.46 to animate. To view Frank with glsl you’ll need an apricot build though. You can get one from graphicall.org
2. There is no deadline really
3. You can modify any animations you’d like, even ones that appear finished, if you think you can make it better, but please don’t change anything on the skeleton.

Here is Frank, in all his glsl shaded glory. Pablo has pretty much finished his textures and one of the tricky parts was the tail. I created the tail with the shell method, which means the tail mesh is duplicated multiple times and fattened(alt+s) so that it’s slightly bigger each time, with each outer shell having an alpha texture that is a noise pattern colored by the base color map.

Now, here’s how you can help out. Frank has some animations that haven’t been made yet. We considered working with a few externals like Peach had done, but thought it would be more fun to release Frank to the community and see what you can come up with.

So the deal is, download the blend file here, make some animations, then post a link to the blend file in this post in the comments below. We’ll look at all of the entries and if your animation is awesome, we’ll include it in the game and you’ll get a spot in the credits. We won’t be able to be the director to everyone making animations, so only animators whose work we include will receive a reply. When you post your work, be sure to leave your name and email address. All work that’s sent to us and is included in the game will be released under the same license as the game, Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution.

Some animations we have are placeholders that need to be redone, so look through the actions list in the blend file and find one you think would be fun to redo, and do it. Here’s a list of some of the animations we really need though. As far as style for animation goes, we’re looking for fun and exaggerated animations.

Idle(fun stuff, scratching his ass, etc.)
Jump
Double Jump(front flip, wing flap for boost, etc)
Getting hurt(minor damage)
Getting hit(impacted, rammed into)
Shimmy left and right while hanging on ledge
Falling(dropping down from a high place)
Throwing nuts

DNT & XUT

2008-06-27T14:33:00+00:00

Today I gave DccNiTghtmare a try. I learned about the project on the LGT.

DccNiTghtmare (aka DNT) is a project to make a Free (as in free speech) 3D single player RPG in a sarcastic post-apocalyptical world. Any suggestions are welcome, just put them at our forum.

How convenient! I'm a big fan of apocalyptic settings, single-player games, sarcasm, free software and projects that encourage participation!

DccNiTghtmare

First impressions after starting: Weird music, strange resolutions limitation, interesting races (Headbanger, Strange Autistic, Mutant Human Cricket, Human Llama).

The controls are contumacious and the graphics engine is either slow or unstable (it either crashes or slows down to unplayable speed when I exit the first area.) This means that I can't say much about playability. The clown care seems right though. So if you're into bizarre humor, you should get DNT, just to be able to read the race/class descriptions.

XUT screenshot detail

DNT is a project by DNTeam, "a group of developers and artists involved on creating free (as in libre, livre) games projects." Another game they're working on is XUT, a Button football game. It looks like fun, but there is no release yet. Unfortunately it is under "not so active development."

Apricot ripens, NO just is and Warsow wants $

2008-06-26T16:18:00+00:00

Winning a game of NO

NO is a fun little puzzle game [video]. It is built on top of LÖVE, which is fairly easy to have for Win and Lin users. Mac builders wanted!

I found a list of open source games for the Mobile Edition of Java. About 25 puzzle/arcade titles, mostly GPL'ed.

The Apricot project is ripening with great speed! Further additions to blender have been made and videos of a playable prototype recorded and uploaded. The plan to unleash "real Open Source power" by opening Apricot's code repository has unfortunately not been fulfilled yet.

The opinion exists, that a game will be less fun for people who were able to play a development version of it. I don't think this problem is a big one and believe that simply because of the necessity for compiling, most people will wait for an official release.

An example of a story-based single-player game with an open Subversion repository is Rastullahs Lockenpracht, a TDE-based 3D RPG. I haven't tried it so far because the last time it caught my attention, compiling code was a large burden for me. Now I won't try it as it appears to be depending on non-free Nvidia and Fmod libraries.

Apricot: Crystal Space Preview #1

It seems that the Apricot team has the same problems that I have when recording with recordMyDesktop: The recorded field doesn't fit the selected window, which results in capturing of unwanted space above and below the targeted window.

Warsow's developers started accepting donations. They want to use it for making participation in an own LAN party cheaper. I'm becoming more and more uncertain about the ultimate goal of the project. Is it profit? A fun game? An elitist community? Being popular? PS: What I'm talking about here is the "ultimate master plan" - which I'm certain every open source project secretly has. ;)

CivCool, TremFuture, WineOne, WarzoneFree

2008-06-25T20:26:00+00:00

If you have had problems viewing this blog via Internet Explorer, you should not have these problems any more. Many thanks to intelperfectionist for pointing out that css-related issue that we had!

FreeCiv, it's sooo pretty (you knew that already, I know...)

I recently learned to enjoy FreeCiv very much. It's pretty and fun. It also has a (fairly) new release called Mr. 2.1.5.

FreeCol 0.7.4 has been released.

Tremulous 1.2? Visit this page to read how you can help making the next release a reality. By playing!

The latest version of LÖVE is now 0.3.1 and a bugfix is coming soon. I can now say with complete confidence that this yet another project is an awesome one. It has style. Check out their forum community. These guys are cool. As you easily can tell, I'm still blinded by LÖVE's stylishness. Oh. And here is a terrible video of some engine demos!

OpenFracas (0.5) now has music and sound.

After 15 years of development, Wine reached version 1.0. Wine is not a windows emulator.

Remember Mars - Land of No Mercy? I at least twice mourned it's death. It seems that the game likes to revive a lot. Animations seem to be the aim at the moment.

Little video showing off what the engine can do right now

PS!!!: Warzone 2100's music and videos are now licensed under the GPL! I am so excited! Warzone 2100 is a great game that long ago was a proprietary one. The real-time strategy game is much fun, though I felt that long gameplay was dull without music and that the story wasn't very touchable without videos. Joy!!! I also discovered the Warzone 2200 project. It appears to be aiming for improving the game engine.

First month of Google Summer of Code

2008-06-25T18:13:00+00:00

With the first month of GSoC almost gone, I thought I would horribly embarrass all our wonderful students by sending this email which links to all their blogs.

Why not help out and test the students work? Please ask questions or just comment on their blogs! I encourage everyone to at least put the blogs in their feed readers.

Jphr has been working on a Risk clone. He has finally got a working Risk ruleset which he is now debugging. Hopefully he will now create a simple AI to help with his testing :) After the mid-term evaluation he hopes to add options for more interesting variations and universe loading.

JLafont has been working on a totally new game called DroneSec. His progress also has been very good and will soon have a basic playable game. Already a majority of the orders needed have been implemented and combat is taking shape.

Jmtan has created a delicious meal for your eyes with a almost functional 3D client. It already supports a majority of interactions with the server and will soon allow you to easily work with orders. The screen shots look awesome and everyone should check it out. You can come and see some of our cool artwork being shown off.

Ezod has been working on splitting the console from the server. He has successfully make tpserver-cpp a real daemon and is now working on creating a client to actually do the configuration. This should make running servers much easier to run and maintain.

Iwanowitch has been working hard on a rule based AI for RFTS. He has his constraint store almost working and has had a basic client interacting with a server.

Nuleren is working on a game called Tigrus and Euphrates. A large number of orders have been created and the universe is generally taking shape.

vi1985 has been working hard on Iwanowitch's competition :). He has been working on an AI which is based around genetic algorithms. He has a basic java client working to help visualise how the AI will work.

Pluskid has been working hard on improving schemepy. Schemepy will become the backend that all our python components use for scheme parsing. He has gotten both a mzscheme and a guile back end working. He has also tested out various pure-python implementations. The speed improvements for doing scheme processing is very impressive.

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Shadow Baking!

2008-06-25T17:07:00+00:00

More awesome blender dev. It’s there at last, the bake panel has existed far too long without the shadow bake option. Thanks Cambo! The plan for the BGE game is to use dynamic shadows for the character, and bake shadows for the level.

Note the quad split option in the image above. Blender’s baking needed an option for quad splitting as well. Internally, most systems will split a quad into 2 triangles, and blender’s no exception. It checks for non-planar (bent) quads and splits them in the direction that gives the least distortion.

While good for rendering models, this causes a problem for baking because the split direction can differ from the one used to display and export. One solution is to triangulate all faces before baking and exporting, but this isn’t ideal since it would loose the edge loop topology and make models harder to edit later. To make matters more confusing, graphics card don’t all split quads the same way, but many game engines just convert to triangles when exporting.

Campbell was also kind enough to add this option to split quads in a predictable manner (0,1,2) (….) etc.

NLGD expo and Crystal Space movie

2008-06-23T17:27:52+00:00

NLGD expo in Utrecht was very successful. People likes Apricot and our tools. Most important thing was that organizers supplied free beer for us ! Also we meet some cool guys from other teams/companies (cheers!) so it was very good experience. We have some photos, and also movie with current work-in-progress Apricot powered by Crystal Space 3d engine.

Apricot: Crystal Space Preview #1 from Pablo Vazquez on Vimeo.

2008-06-23T10:45:21+00:00

We are proud to announce the release of OpenFracas 0.5. The most notable changes in the 0.5 release are:

Sounds and Music
OpenFracas now supports up to 8 players
New troop count drawing algorithm
- Better placement of troop counts
- Scales troop counts to fit within smaller country
Options to restart a game or reuse the current map
Streamlined User Interface
Map Editor improvements
More player colours to choose from
Help documentation, revised from Fracas help, now available

Perhaps most significantly of all: Since the last release, OpenFracas has undergone major changes in its internal organization and structure. This means that OpenFracas is in a better position to begin adding more advanced and complex features in future releases.

A new developer, Eric, has joined the OpenFracas team since the last release, and has produced the new troop count drawing algorithm.

OpenFracas 0.5 is available on the downloads page; please feel free to contact us with any questions, concerns, or bugs on our forums.

Ubuntu users who have added our repository to their package manager will find the new version automatically available as an update.

GH2 Core Story: Making It Interesting

2008-06-22T13:21:46+00:00

I’ve decided that the random story generator of GearHead2 needs a bit of tweaking. It’s working exactly as I designed it to, and the stories it generates are generally coherent, but there’s a certain something missing. It’s time for me to stop being a programmer for a while and get back to being a writer.

Fortunately, I’ve just bought a new book and discovered a new podcast which have given me all kinds of good ideas. The book in question is Making Comics by Scott McCloud and the podcast is Writing Excuses by Brandon Sanderson, Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells. If you’re interested in writing, comics, or even just the creative process in general I advise you to check out both of these sources.

There’s a difference between telling an interesting story and telling a story interestingly. The plot generator of GH2 can tell reasonably interesting mecha genre stories, but is absolutely terrible at telling these stories interestingly. Why not? I’ve identified two key problems- characters and pacing. The non-player characters need to be more interesting and the pacing needs to give the player that ever-important sense of progress.

Let me start with character. Making Comics reminded me that characters need motivation. There has to be something that they want. They also need mannerisms, recognizable traits. Writing Excuses reminded me that they also need conflict. The global conflict, the type of conflict currently modeled by the story generator, was described by one of the writers on the podcast as the character arc of the world itself. I think this is a brilliant way of looking at things, and it highlights the fact that in the current system the non player characters are not getting their individual arcs.

Next, let’s talk pacing. The pacing of the core story is fairly random. Sometimes the situation will change very quickly, while at other times it will get stuck in a rut. This is bad, since the player will not know what to expect or how to plan for it. I know that not knowing what to expect is a hallmark of the roguelike genre, but there’s a vast difference between tactical uncertainty and wandering in the dark with a blindfold on. The real bad thing about this randomness is the fact that the player won’t have any goals. Without goals, there is no sense of progress, and no sense of failure when a component is lost.

What am I going to do about this? Add more xxran descriptors to handle character arcs and sub-goals, of course.

Every character should have its own story state including several xxran tags. Right now I’m thinking about tags for motivation (what does the character want?), relationship with the PC (is your enemy just doing his job or does he have a personal reason to want you dead?), and modus operandi (is this NPC a lover or a fighter?). The motivation and relationship states may be able to be combined into a single character arc descriptor. So, when the lone bounty hunter offers to join your party since your arch-enemy killed his brother, this information will be encoded into the NPC’s record. These tags will change over the course of the story, thereby providing that all-important character development.

The global story is currently handled by a descriptor called the Propp state. To improve pacing, each propp state should come with a number of tasks that must be completed. Since the word “task” has another meaning in the story generator I should come up with a better term for this, but for right now “task” will do. Suppose your character generates the “+Pua Under Attack” Propp state. Normally this state would last until a new state was generated, which could be in ten minutes or during the final battle. Suppose, instead, that in order to complete this state the player had to (1) find out what the enemy’s plan is and (2) defeat the main enemy attack. Suddenly, the player has expectations about what’s going to happen. Completing either of these taks will bring the player one step closer to the conclusion of the game.

I haven’t yet decided how to model these tasks. Obviously, they’re going to be tags in the story state description, but I need to figure out how best to do that. In the above example, one should have to learn where the enemy is planning to strike before one can foil the invasion, but in other examples the tasks may be completable in no particular order. It should be possible for additional tasks to be added regardless of the story state- for instance, if Aegis overlord sends three of their best assassins to kill you, then three “Survive Assassination Attempt” tags should be added to the state.

I’m thinking about making a third addition to the random story generator- a relationship web. The component selector should be able to tell the relationship that exists between different story elements. Right now, it can only tell the relationships between the elements and the PC. Let’s take another look at the bounty hunter example from above. If a certain plot event revealed that the hunter and the enemy used to be lovers, this would take the story in a different direction than if it revealed that the hunter and the enemy are actually siblings (well, unless you’ve installed a hentai mod, anyways).

What will be the technical effect of adding all these new tags? The most important effect is that it would provide many additional ways to move the plot forward. This would allow more varied component combinations and hopefully provide for some more interesting stories. What’s this change going to cost? In terms of actual programming not very much; in terms of editing the series files, potentially quite a bit. Some of the +P and +C states may be changed into either character states or story tasks.

Hopefully this discussion wasn’t too dry for the non-programmers out there. Later this week I’ll try to post the third part of the Klarn story.

Real Time Shadows in Blender!

2008-06-21T14:32:45+00:00

Just like you read it, Real Time Shadows in Blender’s 3D View *and* in Blender’s Game Engine!

It uses Shadow Buffers, so is only available for Spot lights now, and it works with the same settings as for rendering, like OnlyShadow (very useful!), or ClipStart, ClipEnd, SpotSize, falloff, Bias, etc. They are not filtered (yet!, so don’t complain : ) so no Soft shadows for now.

I don’t like to take attention from other’s blogposts but this feature totally deserves it.

Made a quick video showing how it looks right now in both our game demo from Chris’s blogpost and in 3D View, is speeded up a little bit also for not to bore you too much.

This feature was made by our code hero Brecht and is still under development, so go compile your apricot branch, test, and share your happiness here with a nice comment.
That’s all folks!

Watch in crappy quality at YouTube
Download/Watch the AVI Video

WorldTool

2008-06-21T05:41:13+00:00

WorldTool will be Radakan's official level editor. Currently in heavy development, upon completion, it will support infinite world, terrain sculpting, texture painting, and entity editing features. For information and download, see the development blog: http://radakan.org/forums/index.php/board,22.0.html

Working on EncounterLogic Turn Act Phase playback

2008-06-21T00:53:45+00:00

We're continuing the accentuated work on turn act phase! Several new things designed to make it a working system. Just to mention a few: added multiple animation type definition for MovingModels, boosted the EncounterLogic with a real turn plan listing choices that units and player made ordered by the EvaluatorBase speed evaluator code. Success of a given skill use is now calculated by EvaluatorBase too. Another new thing is Impact and ImpactUnit that is calculated by EvaluatorBase - modifies actor's points and target's points (like health, stamina) on success.

Based on results different sounds and animations (etc. attack, pain) are played now when available for the model/skill. It's starting to round up well, although this part just needs tones of work as you can imagine. Ugh, not even mentioning the particle system and such that will be needed for spell effects. Lots of work ahead. But it's FUN! Watching the enemy attacking and struggling when hit by player's party members - a visual turn based game logic is (will be) just right before the nose of player. :D

Check the screenshot for a preview - also a faint glimpse at Zphr's brand new fantastically looking animated boarman thugs (modeled in Blender again) and the text box in the bottom shows combat messages of the previous round... Thanks Zphr for doing a great-great job with the boarmen! I will post more about the boarmen when it will be more complete.

All in SVN!

Plan of Attack

2008-06-20T15:15:16+00:00

Here are the things that I wanted to do for the next few days until Sunday.

==Requirement==
*The CopyPirate's map engine can be forked into an engine library of some sort.
*Development of The CopyPirate 0.0.2 can begin.

==Hope for==
*Rake file for zipping things up
*Start development on Human Robohunt

==Pipe dream==
*Rbgooey being transformed in the world's most sophisticated game UI

Progress update, GLSL, shape keys, speedups in the BGE!!

2008-06-19T18:56:45+00:00

Just one and a half weeks since we started using the bge, and the progress has been insane. There’s way too much for one post.

GLSL is now integrated in the BGE, just enable it in the game menu to preview it in the 3d view, and it’ll look exactly the same when you press P. Support for nodes, multiple uv layers, all blending modes, stencil maps for splatting, color ramps for that precious falloff, and much more. One more week like this and my grin will be permanent.

Ever wanted shape keys to work in the game engine? Well support for shape keys has been added! There’s a brand new actuator called “Shape Action”. Grab yourself an apricot build and go nuts. And there’s been some really impressive speedups to the game engine. Just enable “Vertex Arrays” in your preferences and “Generate Display Lists” from the game menu for the fastest performance. Our test scene gets almost twice the frame rate. The devs helping us are really doing amazing things.. Things are really progressing quickly.

Have a look at our latest demo from the BGE, showing some new gameplay and playing with new features like glsl. Most of the main actions for Frankie have been added, plus a small environment to play around in while we work on the world for the game. Things are getting really exciting around here. We’ll post more progress this weekend, and, if anyone is interested, we may be looking for help soon. More info on that later. Of course one really big way to help this project is to pre-order the DVD!.

Download the ogg file

Wonder still happen!

2008-06-19T07:44:41+00:00

[What does that mean?]

I’m back, and now with furniture!

2008-06-18T13:54:05+00:00

Eunsuk and I have finished moving into our new apartment, just across the parking lot from our old apartment. My presentation class is over. All the lesson plans I’m going to need from now until the end of term are written and filed. I’ve caught up on the press releases for Transplant Comics. My new website for Ataraxia Theatre is up and running. In other words, life should be getting back to normal. Even better, I now have a desk!

This is the first time I’ve had a desk since University. Most of the development of GearHead so far has happened with me sitting on the floor and my laptop perched on a stool. I’m really looking forward to using this desk. Originally, I had planned to write tonight about the changes I’m going to make to GH2, but screw that. I’ve got a desk.

Technically it’s not a desk. According to the website where we bought it, it’s a “Forming Table”. I don’t think that’s proper English but anyhow it was cheap. Part of my job as an English teacher is to correct the broken English my students pick up from websites. Once I had to break up a fight between two students over whether LOL is a verb or a noun (it’s both).

Back to the desk. It’s nice. The chair isn’t too shabby, either. Come back next time for something that doesn’t involve furniture.

RubyWeekend Postmortem

2008-06-18T09:06:19+00:00

This postmortem is about my first game entry for the first ever Ruby game programming competition. This game is called The CopyPirate.

What went right?

1. I finished my game before everyone else. This is probably because I was motivated by my previous failure to submit my game in time for PyWeek, the first contest that I participate in. The shorter time also don't give me breathing room so I forged ahead of everybody.

2. Merging and reusing my code was a snap. I was able to use most of the code from Twisted Shootout and SpaceFighterAce and merge them together. Very little time is spent on coding new gameplay elements. I was probably the laziest programmer in the entire contest.

3. There are little downtime. I did not have to waste 3 hours in tracking down bugs. Because the codebase was essentially finished even before there was even a codebase, the code I used were proven to work and are generally free of bugs.

What went wrong?

1. Readme's instruction manual were difficult to get it right. Because I did not use virtual machines, I have to relies on others to check my work. It took me several try to get it right. Even as I finished the instruction, I lack information on how to install rubygem, a package manager essential to the installing process.

2. My codebase have magic number syndrome. Even though my codebase was known to work, it was also entirely undocumented. This make future modification of the codebase in delicate and complicated areas risky operations.

3. The game have uncompelling gameplay. Due to my lack of knowledge about gamepplay design, my game wasn't able to compell anybody to vote for my game. Thus I probably rank dead last or near dead last in the contest.
What I learned.

1. People like to read programming journals. It also draws traffics, which boost ads revenues as a bonus.

2. Extreme but reasonable deadline and blogging are useful productivity tools. I look forward to using it outside of this contest.

3. I learned that what I see in my text editor isn't actually what I will actually see in my git repoistory. I was also advised not to use tab space, but instead, actual spaces. Tabs ruins formatting I believed I was told.

What I would do differently.

1. I would clean up, document, and port my map engine so I haave more time to work on the gameplay during the contest.

2. I would try a rush hour every 8 hours or so. The rush hour is when I just simply focus all my energy on coding rather than spending part of my time chatting on IRC.

3. I would try to find a teammate to do the artwork for me so I can focus purely on coding and gameplay design.

Boy (not) afraid

2008-06-18T01:42:35+00:00

Hello and welcome to yet another FIFE update :-) We got a bunch of topics that we want to cover in this update though I try to keep things short to save some time nevertheless.

License switch status

As you might remember: FIFE is currently in the process of switching from the current GPL 2.0 licensing to LGPL 2.1 as potential engine users asked for a more "liberal" (I know that this term can be questioned :-)) license. We're quite happy to announce that although this took us about 9 months from the initial plan until now, things finally start to look good. We got the agreements of all important developers who contributed code to FIFE that still resides in trunk.

Code of developers who we could not reach has been already replaced or is to be replaced soon at least. The only problematic code that still needs to get removed / reimplemented are the boost-based unittests that have been written by Vovansim. Fortunately FIFE developer NikN volunteered to reimplement them and as we encountered a bunch of issues with the old tests (e.g. we had no luck getting them working with mingw on win32), we decided to implement them from scratch with Unittest++.

At the moment we're a bit short of developers but vtchill, a recent addition to the team, ported NikN's unittests to Linux and I was able to successfully built them with code::blocks / mingw on win32 some days ago. If everything goes well we could replace the old boost-based tests with the unittest++ ones and officially release the next FIFE milestone under LGPL 2.1. We haven't decided yet when the 2008.1 release will ship but we plan to adjust the file headers in SVN as soon as the old boost tests are gone. This way you can get your hands on a LGPL version of FIFE as soon as possible. Hopefully we can make the switch within the next 2-3 weeks but don't quote me on that.

As soon as the LGPL version is in SVN, you'll read about it here :-) If you would like to know more about the current status of the license switch process, you can find detailed information at the forums: http://forums.fifengine.de/index.php?topic=36.0

New developers on the team

Vtchill is not the only new developer on the team. We would like to welcome m64 and eefano on the team as well. Both are graphics programming experts and consider to overwork specific aspects of FIFE's view and video modules. Nothing is set in stone yet but hopefully we'll see some commits by them in the next weeks.

Upgrading to guichan 0.8.1

FIFE does currently rely on guichan 0.7.1 and just works correctly with this specific version. FIFE developer phoku recently tested FIFE with the latest guichan 0.8.1 release and after some adjustments were made, it worked rather well. As FIFE uses the custom pychan wrapper we're quite positive that we can switch to the new 0.8.1 release without breaking the existing GUI code of FIFE-based games.

There is an updated win32 compile SDK available for testing that contains binaries, headers and precompiled libs for the latest guichan release. All needed information how to get FIFE working with the new guichan version can be found at the forums: http://forums.fifengine.de/index.php?topic=147.0

As soon as the new guichan code will make its way into SVN, the new win32 compile SDK will be officially released. It's quite likely that the new SDK will contain all needed files to build the new unittest++ unittests on win32 as well.

New maps for the upcoming release

I'm currently testing the new editor tool of the datasets branch to create some maps for the upcoming release. The work in progress version of the stone shrine and tourist beach maps can be already found in SVN. Still a lot of work to do but it's a start. If you like to take a peek instead of grabbing the map from SVN, check out the recently updated screenshot section at the wiki: http://wiki.fifengine.de/Screenshots

Datasets branch status

The engine core for the upcoming release does currently reside in the so called datasets branch and we plan to merge it to trunk rather soon. Unfortunately there are still a bunch of things to take care of e.g. updating the map format article at the wiki to reflect the recent changes and additions. As key developers are rather busy ATM it might take some more time to get the datasets code into trunk. Just letting you know that we're still working on it and it we can hopefully make this step in the next 2-3 weeks as well.

Open positions on the team

While working on the maps for the upcoming release we realized that we're in the need of a bunch of custom graphics. FIFE supports correct view rotation now so you could e.g. rotate the map in 45 or 90 degree steps and it will look correct if the assets that you're using have been defined for these orientations. We were using graphics from Reiner's tilesets in the past but these graphics often just offer 1-3 orientations while we could show the rotation feature if we could find a graphics artist for the team who models some custom objects and renders them for the different supported orientations. If you're an artist and would like to help a little promising open source project out, gain some experience in a game development team and work on a product that will actually see the light of the day, please don't hesitate to get in contact with us at the forums. We plan to advertize the position at a bunch of modeling forums in the next weeks but maybe we're lucky and some artist reads this advert in this very moment.

Furthermore we could need some help with the planned website redesign. I initially planned to take care of it myself but unfortunately I'm rather short of time ATM and I would appreciate any help I could get in this field. If you would like to help out, let us know at the forums: http://forums.fifengine.de/index.php?board=8.0

OpenAnno? at Dusmania

Last but not least: the FIFE-based OpenAnno project plans to attend the Dusmania, a German game development conference. The Dusmania will take at Saturday and Sunday, 2008/07/19 & 20 near Frankfurt Main. While the German FIFE developers are rather busy ATM and therefore might not have the time to attend the event, the OpenAnno? developers mentioned that they'll be there to present a first work in progress version of their game. As they're using FIFE they plan to speak about the engine of their choice in their presentation as well. Good luck at the Dusmania and I can hopefully post a little report how things worked out there after it has taken place: http://www.dusmania.de/

That's for today from my side :-) Next news update should feature the end of our way to the license switch!

Posted in: gpl, datasets, license

Python and Crown and Cutlass

2008-06-17T16:00:32+00:00

David has posted a couple times now about python. We certainly had a good time going to PyCon and had a good time doing PyWeek. I really am a fan of Python. I think it worked really well for us during PyWeek and the other times I’ve used it. I have other thoughts on both items, but I think they’re better left for another day. What I want to focus on is how is all this affects our work on Crown and Cutlass.

If anyone is still with us, watching the blog or the forums for activity, you probably have noticed a considerable slowdown in work. This has been caused by a couple things. First, and I think most importantly, is that fact that David went back to school 8 months ago. Since we work together on Crown and Cutlass quite a bit, our motivation often ebbs and flows together. Since David has less time to work on it, I find myself with less motivation. The other issue I have, is that when I take time off from Crown and Cutlass, I have a very hard time jumping back into the code. Getting back into a C++ mindframe from Delphi (which I use at work) is really difficult.

Based on that, we’re going to be writing as much of the game play code as possible in Python. By exposing our Protocce engine to Python, we’ll be taking advantage of the rewrite work we’ve been doing as well as moving to a more hospitable development environment. I think this will speed up development on Crown and Cutlass by removing accidental complexity.

We’ve long talked about scripting as a major component to our game engine, but have always put it off for another day. Now, by using Python, all (or most) of our actual game code will be done in script. It gains us the flexibility of Python, while maintaining the speed of C++ in the engine. Anything that needs to be sped up can be implemented in C++.

I think is an exciting development for Crown and Cutlass. It gives us more opportunity to think about the gameplay and avoid the problems we’ve had at times in C++. You should be seeing more exciting developments over the summer as we make more progress on Crown and Cutlass.

RubyWeekend, but also PyDay

2008-06-17T01:40:00+00:00

Yesterday the first RubyWeekend ended, which is a two and a half days Ruby game creation competition. The topic was "Pirates Versus Zombies!"

Seven contributions were made: kiba's digital piracy parody The CopyPirate [video], atiaxi's tbs Port Town [video], satoshi's console-based footracer [video], jlnr's ZombieSoccarrr [video], ippa's Zombie Horde [video], jacius' Election Year: Zombies vs. Pirates! [video] and trejs' Caribbean Onslaught.

The submitted code had to be released under an OSI-approved license and all media under one of the Creative Commons licenses (alternatively public domain for both.)

The contest is being hosted on the forums of Rubygame, which is a SDL-based Ruby media library. Most submissions are based on it, some use Gosu.

Ninjapix, probably PyDay #2's winner

Another competition ended on Saturday: PyDay #2 - a rather fresh 24-hours Python game making contest and the smaller brother of Ludum Dare, which is the granddaughter of PyWeek.

You can download an archive (.7z) of all contributions. Or pick them individually. Or just watch some of them.

I also seriously recommend two out of the three PyDay #1 games. They're in the video at the end of this post.

While some games turn out terribly (it will be either less than ugly graphics or inhuman controls), gems tend to appear on such contests. I love the idea of brain-storm programming, even though results are likely to be buggy and incomplete, the important thing is that a playable model of a game exists. It allows to see the potential for fun.

Port Town

For example I enjoy playing Port Town much more than I should. It's a game based on boring random numbers, where you get a random number of units and position them in a part of the town, where they fight and win randomly. The tiny detail that zombies will convert humans to their own kind is what makes the game shine for me. Also the zombies start on the graveyard and the pirates start on a ship. It makes so much sense! I see a lot of potential in this minimal Risk-like strategy game. It only needs a bit more complexity and then a bit more graphics.

Another example is The CopyPirate, which is no fun to play at all for me, but which has a cool scenario. You're a pirate, who has to steal some music and escape to the intertubes while avoiding the RIAA's Zombies! How awe some is that? I hope this scenario will find it's way into a decent satirical game someday.

There is one problem with short time game contests' results though: documentation. I think it's a big deal, as many contest contributors won't be willing to spend any more time on their quickie creations while being the ones who understand the game's code best. (The reasons will be "The source is sooooo dirty!!", "I would, but I got this totally awesome idea for my next game!", "I'll rewrite it instead, rly!!", "I don't care if you like it, I don't!", "I'm lazy!" and "I can only work under pressure!") But at least the small size of the games protects against total unsuitability for further development by others.

I'm looking forward to PyHour. Less is more!

PyDay #1 games (the third one is the coolest!).

[Edit] This just in: Sauerbraten has the new release "CTF Edition" for Lin/Win/Osx. There's a changelog. I've noticed following new things: pretty weapons (which have been in the code repository a long time now), new maps, new capture the flag game mode. New models too I think. Fun!

Sauerbraten CTF Edition