FreeGameDev Planet - Games

Stellar Forces - Stellat Forces: Door Tactics

2010-03-12T10:28:00+00:00

Doors can a real issue. You just know that right behind it is an enemy unit waiting to stick his laser pistol in your face the moment you step through. But there's no other way to proceed! Or is there?

Here's my list of available options to handling doors with the minimum of death:-

Grenades
This is the obvious option and works very well, but takes a bit of time to set up and also uses up a grenade. Simply drop (or throw if your feeling lucky) a grenade next to the door. Once it goes off, the door will be no more.

Advanced tip: time the grenade to go off at the end of your opponent's turn, so you get to move in straight afterwards.

Needless to say, don't stand too close when the grenade goes off! I like to have a few snipers stood well back ready to pick off any units that become visible.

Super-Heavy Armour
Super heavy armour is pretty much exactly as it sounds - it's very heavy, so it slows a unit down considerably, but it does afford a 40-point protection, meaning they will stand a much better chance when staring down the barrel of a gun. Use a unit wearing S.H.A. to open the door and check for enemy units immediately behind it. Once the coast is clear, let a more agile unit investigate further.

Force of Numbers
Your final option is sheer force of numbers. Line up all your units outside, let the first one take the hit, and then pile in! Usually works eventually, but can lead to lots of death, especially if there are multiple enemy units covering the door with lots of overwatch points!

PARPG - Towards techdemo 2

2010-03-12T09:19:12+00:00

Now that techdemo 1 has been released two days ago, the team is starting to look forward towards the 2nd techdemo. Obviously a number of planned features and content didn’t make it into the first one so these aspects are hot candidates to ship with techdemo 2.

PARPG developer b0rland did the first step and compiled an early techdemo 2 proposal at the wiki. We appreciate every kind of feedback, both from developers as well as from the community.

A discussion thread about the priorities for techdemo 2 has been started at the forums. Feel free to contribute.

Hedgewars - Here comes ... 0.9.13! - Well, at least the trailer!

2010-03-12T01:07:30+00:00

Just in case you're not one of those browsing YouTube day after day looking for new videos featuring Hedgewars: Armagon has created a new trailer featuring some (but not all) of the new features that will be introduced with the next release that should be out soon™.

How about rating the video, leaving a comment and subscribing to his channel to not miss any future creations and honor his work? I'd expect he might have one or more new voice packs in his sleeves as a small thank you as well.

PARPG - Let’s go surfing

2010-03-11T10:16:03+00:00

Heya and welcome to yet another PARPG news update! This is a just a mini update to yesterday’s release announcement.

My permanent departure

I’m sorry to say so but it turned out that I won’t have more free time on my hands in April. There have been changes in real life and I simply don’t have the time and the energy to continue my job in project management. That’s why I’ve decided to ship this first techdemo release of PARPG and retire after that.

The reason why I’m announcing my departure now, is that the increased public interest due the recent release hopefully helps to find a new maintainer for the project. I do still strongly believe in the concept of an old school isometric 2d RPG but unfortunately time for me has run out.

Unfortunately not many of the formerly involved devs are still active at this point. But I’m sure that a new project manager can find a new interested developers for such a project.

Post mortem articles

In case I got some free time on my hands in the next weeks, I’ll start to post a couple of personal post mortem articles, either at this blog or at a new one (haven’t made up my mind about that one yet). The articles will cover my experiences working on PARPG: what turned out to be working well, what didn’t work out at all, what could have been done better or tackled from a different angle. Hopefully these articles are useful for everyone who works in a similar field in a software project. They hopefully turn out to be even more useful for everyone who considers to pick up and revive this project.

PARPG infrastructure

To increase the chances that somebody actually picks up the project, I’ll leave the entire infrastructure (blog, forums, wiki, trac, svn, etc.) in place for at least another full year. I’ll pay for the hosting and will be around and do my best to support anyone willing to take over.

Maintainer / project manager tasks

In case you wondered what kind of tasks a maintainer / project manager would have to take care of, take a look at this list at the wiki.

Ways to contact me

In case you want to discuss becoming the new maintainer of the project, feel free to contact me via IRC or email.

That’s all concerning PARPG for today.

Not sure who will post the next update at this blog. In case we can’t find a new maintainer for the project soon, the next update will be prolly the first post mortem article mentioned above.

Syntensity - Move to a Permissive License?

2010-03-11T09:00:19+00:00

I am considering relicensing all the code I wrote in this project to something more permissive, like zlib, BSD, Apache, etc. - basically, to let people use the code entirely freely. Please let me know whether you think that is a good idea or not, and if it is, which license we should switch to. This is a big decision - involving some 65,000 lines of code (about the same as Cube 2, btw) - so it should be done carefully.

As background, I chose the AGPL when I started, because I wanted to keep open the possibility of dual-licensing (to generate income for the project), and to make fragmentation of the community less likely. The situation with both of these has changed: I don't intend to make money myself from this project anymore (I still think it can be done - but it would take time, and before that time arrives, I will have run out of money myself...), and so far there seems little worry of fragmentation and incompatible forks.

So, I am considering moving to a license like zlib/BSD/etc., which are simpler and make life easier for people using the code - clear benefits, and could lead to more people using the code. Of course the flip side is that the code could then be used and modified in closed source projects without returning anything to the community. These are the usual tradeoffs between the BSD and GPL approaches.

Some thoughts on possible licenses:

zlib: Same license as Cube 2, so kind of simple in that respect - a single license for almost the entire project (almost, because things like V8, ENet, Django, etc., have other licenses).
BSD: Probably the most common permissive license out there, and the most familiar to people. Also worth mentioning, zlib is not an option on Google Code, while BSD is.
Apache: Permissive, while adding some patent protections, which is useful. However, it does make the license text quite long and complex compared to zlib/BSD/MIT, which is a downside. Another downside is Apache is not compatible with GPL2, but is with GPL3. There are many codebases out there that are GPL2-only (including ones relevant to this project) so that is an issue.
LGPL, MPL, etc.: More permissive than GPL&AGPL, but still some requirement of giving back, at least for changes to existing code. If the license is to be changed, I kind of tend not to go this route, because the current license is already quite close to it, since we don't consider games to be derivative works anyhow, which makes our AGPL sort of like the LGPL in that respect (a good comparison is how the Linux kernel is GPL, but you can run apps in userspace that are not GPLed). So really the actual change in going to one of these licenses is the removal of the 'A' from AGPL, that is, removing the condition of providing the source even if running over a network.

So, again, I am looking for feedback on this topic. We can also hold a vote if there are strong opinions and that makes sense. One thing though: Please let's not make this into a GPL vs. BSD flamewar with all the usual arguments we have all heard before - I ask that the discussion be about this project, which license makes sense for it (and not which license in general is 'better').

PARPG - PARPG techdemo 1 finally available (updated)

2010-03-10T21:09:40+00:00

Our first techdemo release is finally available for Linux, Mac and Win32! This release is based on PARPG SVN trunk revison 522. Built against and tested with FIFE SVN trunk revision 3236.

Preamble

This preamble has been written to give you an upfront overview of the current status of the project. In the last months the project slowed down considerably and we basically decided that we’ll rather release what we have right now instead of trying to implement more features and add more content, risking to collapse before we reach the finish line of the first release.

This said: we didn’t manage to fix a number of bugs and didn’t reach the original aim to implement a couple of quests that you can actually play through. You can walk around, talk to other characters, change to different (placeholder) maps, listen to background audio tracks and play around with the settings. That’s it. It’s possible that this is the first and last official PARPG release due the issues we are facing lately. Hopefully this release will help to attract some fresh blood that will get the project back on track. If not, it was at least fun for us to spend a year of our life on such a project and release what we have achieved to the public. And move on after that.

Download

Linux, Mac, BSD variants

FIFE 0.3.0 r3236 source package (needed to run PARPG)
PARPG techdemo 1 r522 source package

Win32

PARPG techdemo 1 r522 win32 installer

License

All Python code is licensed under GPL 3.0. For the full license see: /game/license/gpl30.license
Assets are either licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 BY-SA or public domain. For the full licenses see: /game/license/cc30_by_sa.license & /game/license/public_domain.license
Most directories contain an .license file that states under which license the specific assets in the directory are released under and who created them. Use this file to properly attribute developers in case you reuse PARPG assets in your project

Supported operating systems

PARPG is officially supported in combination with these operating systems:

Linux (32 & 64bit)
Win32 (32 & 64bit)

PARPG should nevertheless also work with (prolly some tweaks required):

FreeBSD (use Linux install instructions)
Mac OSX
OpenBSD (use Linux install instructions)

Install process

Linux

Unpack the fife_r3236_src.tar.gz archive to a folder of your choice (called [FIFE] from now on)
Install scons using your package manager
Install swig using your package manager
Install Python 2.5 or 2.6 and a matching version of PyYAML if you don’t have them installed yet
cd into the [FIFE] directory and run: scons ext && sudo scons install-python
In case you encounter any build errors, install the necessary libraries and try these pointers
Unpack the parpg_td1_r522_src.tar.gz archive to a folder of your choice (called [PARPG] from now on)
cd into the [PARPG] directory and run: ./run.py

Mac

Unpack the fife_r3236_src.tar.gz archive to a folder of your choice (called [FIFE] from now on)
Install scons using macports
Install swig using macports
Install guichan using macports
Install Python 2.5 or 2.6 and a matching version of PyYAML if you don’t have them installed yet
cd into the [FIFE] directory and run: scons ext && sudo scons install-python
In case you encounter any build errors, install the necessary libraries and try these pointers
Unpack the parpg_td1_r522_src.tar.gz archive to a folder of your choice (called [PARPG] from now on)
cd into the [PARPG] directory and run: ./run.py

Win32

Run parpg_td1_r522_win32.exe and install PARPG to a location of your choice (called [PARPG] from now on)
Make sure that you’ve installed (Active)Python 2.6, PyYAML and FIFE (they either ship with the installer or can be downloaded with the help of it)
To run PARPG itself, cd into the [PARPG] directory and execute run.py (should be automatically associated with your Python 2.6 interpreter)
To run PARPG with file logging, cd into the [PARPG] directory and execute log_parpg.bat; the log will be written to logfile.txt

Map editor

To run the PARPG map editor, cd into the PARPG directory and execute parpg_editor.py
A work in progress map editor tutorial can be found at http://wiki.parpg.net/Map_editor_tutorial

Known bugs / limitations

FPS rate tends to be rather slow on some systems; the FIFE team is working to address this in their view_performance branch, for details see http://forums.parpg.net/index.php?topic=570.0
While it’s possible to talk to the NPCs, you can’t solve any of the quests without using the ingame console (see ticket #229)
Some unit tests are broken (see ticket #253)
Random music playback hasn’t been implemented (see ticket #250)
PARPG crashes on exit in combination with Windows Vista 64bit if FIFE is built via MSVC 2005/2008 (see ticket #114 for a workaround)
There is no regular main menu, you’ll have to use the key to access the placeholder menu (see ticket #118)
Containers don’t support taking everything out of them at once (see ticket #225)
You can’t drop items onto the ground (see ticket #223)
Some map objects are semi-transparent while they should have been rendered opaque (see ticket #251)
Full list of open tickets can be found at http://parpg-trac.cvsdude.com/parpg/report/1

How to provide feedback

You can reach the development team in a couple of ways and provide feedback:

PARPG forums: http://forums.parpg.net/
PARPG IRC channel: #parpg @ irc.freenode.net (visit http://irc.parpg.net to join the channel via your web browser)
PARPG bug tracker: http://bugs.parpg.net
PARPG blog: http://blog.parpg.net/

All feedback is welcome!

Acknowlegements

We thank everyone who supported the project and believed in the idea of creating an old school isometric 2d RPG despite the general trend of more and more higher budget cross platform (read: consoles and win32) 3d RPGs. We do especially want to thank qubodup, a loyal follower who supported the project since its first steps and has helped us by spreading the word about PARPG with his ingame videos and his continued news coverage at http://freegamer.blogspot.com/

Furthermore we want to thank the developers of FIFE, the engine of our choice. Without you this project would not have been possible at all and we’re glad that the project is finally in good hands again now. If you want to find out more about FIFE, check out their website http://www.fifengine.net/

The PARPG developers

Knights - Knights 014 and Map Editor 001 released

2010-03-10T18:34:53+00:00

The first beta release of the map editor is now available. Download from here: knights_map_editor_001.zip. This is a Windows only release currently. There are also not any proper instructions yet, but this blog post (and the previous one) will give you the basics of how to use the editor.

There is also a new release of Knights. You will need to install this before you can use the map editor, as the older versions of Knights are not compatible with the editor.

To use the editor, first download and unzip it. Then run knights_editor.exe.

Before you can start using the editor properly, you have to tell it where Knights is installed. To do this go to File -> Settings and fill in the “knights_data directory” and “Knights exe location” fields. These will usually be set to “C:\Program Files\Knights\knights_data” and “C:\Program Files\Knights\Knights.exe”, unless you have installed Knights to a different location. The program saves these settings so you only have to do this once.

You are now ready to start editing. To load the standard Knights rooms file, go to File -> Open and open the file “knights_rooms.txt” in your knights_data directory. (It is a good idea to make a backup copy of this file first, in case you break anything.) The standard Knights dungeon “segments” will appear on the left hand side of the window. Double click any one to open it for editing.

To place tiles you can click one of the tiles at the bottom of the window and then use the mouse to “paint” this tile onto the map area. You can use either the left or right mouse button to paint (i.e. you can have two different tiles selected at once, one on the left and one on the right button). You can also ctrl-click any tile on the map to select that tile (this may be faster than going down to the palette at the bottom all the time).

In the tile palette you will notice certain tiles have letters attached. The “P” indicates a “live” pentagram (the other pentagram tile without a “P” represents a “dead” pentagram that has no effect when stepped on). The “G” and “N” represent the gnome book and the Necronomicon respectively. “S” indicates the special pentagram, used for destroy book with wand quests (as opposed to a normal pentagram). “L” indicates doors which are “permanently locked” and can only be opened by means of a switch.

By clicking “Switches” you can cause actions to be triggered when a knight walks onto a certain tile or presses a switch. Double click the map to place a switch, or right-click to remove an existing switch. The switch actions have to be entered using a special scripting language which will be the subject of a future blog post.

By clicking “Rooms” you can set the locations of the individual map rooms which make up the segment, or view the existing rooms. Note that the actual dungeon rooms extend one square further in all directions than what is visible in the map editor (so that the rooms overlap by one square in the game itself). To place rooms, drag out a rectangle while holding the left mouse button. The right mouse button is used to delete existing rooms. Note that all rooms must be set properly before the segment can be used — if this is not done properly, the game is likely to crash.

On the File menu you have the usual New, Open, Save options. I recommend saving your work regularly since this is still beta quality software and it could crash at any time

The map editor has Undo and Redo features, available on the Edit menu (or by pressing Ctrl+Z or Ctrl+Y).

On the Segment menu you can add and delete segments to/from the current file. Each segment can be given a name (by editing the box on the right-hand side of the main window); this is not used in the game but is useful for keeping track of segments in the map editor. The segment “category” can also be set; this should be left blank for most segments, but can be set to “gnome_room”, “liche_tomb”, “guarded_exit” or “special_pentagram” for the special mission types. (See the segments at the bottom of the standard knights_rooms.txt file — the ones with names beginning “Z” — for examples of these.)

Last, but not least, there is also a feature where you can test your creations in the actual game. To do this, double click the segment you want to test, then go to Segment -> Test. Assuming you set your Knights exe location correctly, this will start a copy of Knights and put you into your chosen segment. After you’ve finished testing you can either close the Knights window or press ESC – Q to quit in the usual way.

If anyone does give this a try, please send me feedback – both as to any bugs you may find (I’m sure there are plenty) and also any suggested new features or improvements. Also, if anyone wants to send me dungeon rooms they have made, then I would be happy to put them into a future version of Knights!

Warsow - Duel, Bomb & more duel!

2010-03-10T14:40:52+00:00

Today excello announced a new duel cup sponsored by Bigfoot Networks! It will be a 32 player Single Elimination cup on Sunday the 21st, you can find out more information on http://www.teamexcello.com/index.php?p= … amp;id=236 or join the IRC channel #excellocup. We really hope that everyone signs up for this cup, because the bigger succes this cup is the more likely there will be more excello cups with prizes!
The first place prize this time is a Bigfoot Networks Killer Xeno Pro network card and its worth about 100 USD!

There is also news from the #pgZ Long Bomb Cup. With the past 2 weeks of the cup running smoothly, we enter the third week of this season. There's already been some tight and exciting matches and excellent shoutcasting done by Jehar of Tastyspleen.TV and we have a great match lined up for this Sunday night Lost !n Nirvana vs Quad at Home! Tune into WarsowTV (connect warsow-esport.net) on Sunday at 20:30 CET, bring some popcorn and prepare for a thrilling match.
Be sure to check http://longcup.tourney.cc regularly for updates regarding the cup.

Last but not least upcoming Sunday the 14th Inane and BelliCus are once again hosting an ESL duel cup with the same prizes as last time (ESL-tv premium accounts for top 3). Though ESL will only hand out these wonderful prizes if 16 players sign-up and play, so support Inane & BelliCus, Warsow and ESL. You can find more information about the ESL cup by joining #ESL.warsow in IRC or going to http://www.esl.eu/eu/warsow/news/117361/.

I hope to see all of sign-up, play and have fun spectating the cup! See you ingame.

Wormux - Wormux 0.9.1

2010-03-10T10:19:01+00:00

Wormux 0.9.1 is out ! Here is the changelog:

Bugfixes:
- Fix shoot key handling when user exceeds the weapon max strength
- Fix: Do not apply damage from explosion twice
- Fix rope size check when attaching
- Fix some memory leaks
- And some others...
One new skin: bugzilla
One new map: chess map
4 new musics: circux, diabolicux, exoticux and woodlux
Menu improvement: better management of tabs on small screen.
Cleaner code
Update translations

12 March 2010 - Packages for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux standalone binary are now available! Have fun!

jClassicRPG - Further converting to Ardor3D

2010-03-10T00:31:12+00:00

Nice progress is going on here with converting the project to Ardor3D engine. I've ported Obj loader of JME2 to Ardor3D. With a lot of help from Joshua (lead dev of Ardor3D) finally I could repair the remaining problems with the migrated Geometry batching too. That two made the static object rendering mostly complete. Also the partially billboarded trees are working now. After that I managed to integrate the GeometryClipmapTerrain of Ardor3D to replace the current awkwardish method how terrain was created in jcrpg's jme2 version. Still it's very basic integration: needs a lot of tweak like texture generation, dynamic loading and even alpha holes. I've created an extreme view distance screenshot for you, but it's really not for normal use, ate a lot of memory and gave low FPS - there's need for Level Of Detail based on distance for the trees and such to make it usable later. Anyway, check the screenshots (one with very high distance, one with normal. :)

Battle for Wesnoth - Wesnoth 1.7.14 aka 1.8-beta7: Development Release

2010-03-09T18:30:50+00:00

The seventh beta for 1.8 is ready. Please note that due to a critical bug fix only versions >=1.7.14 are allowed on the development multiplayer server. For more details about this and celebrating the new release please visit this forum thread.
As with the last releases, we continue to offer two versions of changelogs: a rather nice to read players changelog that only includes changes every player will probably notice and the (rather) complete changelog with (almost) all the details, which is likely to cause a serious headache...
At the moment the Windows package and the MacOSX packages are ready. You can find them at the download page. Once the others are done you can find them at the download page, too. Please keep in mind that it is a development release which might include quite many bugs. If you find one, report it.

_{-- Delivered by Feed43 service}

Simutrans - Pak128 1.4.6 released!

2010-03-09T17:16:09+00:00

Several days after the new Simutrans release, here comes a new version of pak128 for v102.2.2.

This new release brings many new factories that replace old items, an airplane set, new airport graphics and objects, trucks and improvements to menus as other small updates and bug fixes.

You can download it at Simutrans SF site.

PARPG - PARPG techdemo 1 release tomorrow

2010-03-09T17:00:49+00:00

Heya PARPG community

I don’t have the time for a detailed announcement, but we’ll ship our first official PARPG release tomorrow. Unfortunately we didn’t manage to implement some functionality that was originally planned for this first techdemo. But in the end we’re rather happy to release what we have right now before risking to collapse close to the finish line.

We’re just uploading release candidate packages for Linux and Win32. If you would like to help us testing these packages please visit PARPG’s IRC channel!

Hope to see some volunteers and see you for the final release tomorrow.

Simutrans - Simutrans 102.2.2 released

2010-03-09T03:19:02+00:00

Since the 102.2.1 had some critical errors due to some last minute code changes, we made the 102.2.2 release. There are still few known errors in it. But we decided to focus on the upcoming network release, since bridging between trunk and branch cost us more and more time.

You will also note that there is now a Haiku instead of a BeOS version. This is due to my BeOS is on a dying computer and for any recent system the Haiku-alpha release is a better choice.

Links:

Hardwar - Weekly dev update #14

2010-03-09T02:43:34+00:00

Last week there was no developer update as I was sick with the flu. This week however I wanted to do something different so I have been working on the sky in the game.

My first attempt was to simply place a skybox into the game with a star background. A skybox is simply a box with an image on it.

As you can see the results are not very pleasing. I tried numerous ways to increase the resolution of the image displayed however nothing seemed to work, including increasing the image size.

Instead I tried something completely different. I read about SkyX in the Ogre forums and decided to give that a try.

Firstly however I had to convert the shader code from HLSL to CG and then get it working in linux. Below you can see the results.

I am unsure that it is working 100% correctly at the moment. The screenshot with the dark clouds should show a star background which doesn’t seem to be displaying. The second screenshot with the white volumetric clouds seems to be working correctly however has very slow FPS.

FreeCol - FreeCol 0.9.2 released

2010-03-07T09:56:29+00:00

FreeCol 0.9.2 has been released.

jClassicRPG - Ardor3d test migration in progress

2010-03-07T00:29:43+00:00

I'm in heavy evaluation process, taking closer look at the two alternative 3D engines for migration. Currently in a long process to convert the existing sources to use Ardor3D, to let me test how the new engine performs. Stability is the most important factor. Most of the codes in my experimental workspace are converted to Ardor3D. I could take a screenshot of the main menu. I still need to find a way to refactor the Input, the Terrain and the Audio system of jcrpg to let it work with Ardor3D's architecture. Hopefully the most beneficial will be the Terrain part, as there's a nice shader based terrain that streams data, and can produce 'megatexture' to cover the terrain. This will take a lot of time, I can foresee. But hopefully will lead to a better 3D architecture, speed and look.

If things settle down I'm planning to move to a different SVN repo, possibly googlecode. I'm a bit frustrated with SF.net SVN speed at times. Now will be the time to do so, as I'm restructuring the project while doing the migration stuff, moving the media to an upper directory, to let developers checkout less data. Also jcrpg will now build with Maven.

Ultimate Smash Friends - Spring Cleaning

2010-03-06T14:01:36+00:00

Kizzo once said that as the days go by, we are getting more and more organized. To further along our reoganization efforts, I have reorganized the source directory, consolidated a few modules, and implemented a distutils based packaging system. While it may seem strictly cosmetic, I think that the new directory structure is more akin to other projects, and thus future contributers will not only be less intimidated by a potentially foreign-looking directory structure, but also be able to dive into the code much quicker. The new build system is also more standard than what was previously present, meaning that us developers can worry less about packaging the code and more about making the code work.

If you are a baffled by the new changes, they are explained thoroughly in the README.txt file.

Ultimate Smash Friends - A forum for Ultimate Smash Friends

2010-03-06T10:17:13+00:00

USF has now a forum ! It is hosted by Freegamedev, thank to them !

It is located at http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewforum.php?f=33

Unknown Horizons - Wiki Cleanup Evening - 7. March 2010 18:00 GMT+1

2010-03-05T22:09:56+00:00

Hi everyone,
we have been a little on slow motion the past few months due to real life that wanted to be accomplished first, but development speed is picking up again now.

We are planning to do a "wiki cleanup evening" on the 7. March 2010. Starting at 18:00 o'clock GMT+1 we will be cleaning up the wiki of old documentation and outdated information. If you would like to help out, please join us on irc #unknown-horizons @ irc.freenode.net or use the IRC Applet on the homepage.

We want to clean up the wiki to allow interested users and developers an easier access to up-to-date information on Unknown Horizons, make joining development easier and help users getting everything set up.

If you are interested in helping development with graphics, programming or sound please email us at team [a t] unknown-horizons.org or join us on IRC. We are always looking forward to new faces on the team!

More updates coming soon.

So long,
Nihathrael

Hedgewars - Boom! Explosive Barrels

2010-03-05T17:56:15+00:00

Yo Frankie! - Blender 2.5 Alpha 2 update

2010-03-03T18:50:00+00:00

The alpha 1 version had a bad bug - not saving texture images - making it not a good test build. Here is the fixed version!

Frogatto - Content News #2

2010-03-03T09:38:17+00:00

We’ve upgraded the world-map’s logic; it’s now got text-labels on each of the locations, and rather than (in debug style) being accessible from the main screen, the map is accessed as we’d intended it – there are a series of magic pedestals you can stand on to be whisked away to the map; these offer a network of shortcuts between key points in the game, so that if you need to backtrack to finish a side-quest, or collect a special item, you can do so.

These are currently accessible by default, right off the bat, but we intend to make them something you have to unlock by completing a quest in the game.

We’ve cleaned up a bunch of the movement mechanics with ants, and frogatto spitting them – they now sit stunned on the ground for a bit, and flash when they’re about to recover.

We’ve also removed the “exploitable” behaviour wherein spitting an enemy into a wall at point-blank range would kill it – now, it simply reflects backwards, passing through the player. We’d put that in to handle that edge case, but (as we feared) it was such a convenient way to kill them that it was being used more often than the normal methods.

Long, rambling aside on game design:
Some designers might not care, but exploits like that, in my opinion, tend to break the ‘immersion’ of a game, because they’re a jarring reminder that it is just a videogame. They’re a bit like “a glitch in the matrix”, if you will. Most games have issues like this, and one or two won’t kill a game, but they do add up, and enough of them will cheapen the experience.

This example in frogatto was a fairly weak one; a much stronger one might be a classic RPG which happened to allow you to toss items from your inventory at enemies – and in which by whatever accident, tossing a shoe did more damage than the intended spears or knives. It’d be amusing, sure, but the key problem is that it robs the game of the intended experience, which is fighting with actual weapons. (I’ll leave arguing whether sticking to the intended experience is a good or bad thing to another post; generally speaking it tends to be bad, because it tends to have very shallow assets to it – the creators didn’t expect it, and therefore didn’t create art/scripting/custom-interactions/etc for it. It may happen to work, but it’s usually buggy, ugly, and sometimes outright able to crash a game.)

Another argument against it is that – if some exploit causes something the programmers and artists invested a bunch of work making, to get completely neglected, then their work on that thing is wasted.

On the flip side of things, accidental gameplay exploits like this can be an excellent way to discover emergent gameplay. Designers tend to have a kneejerk reaction of disparaging/correcting anything that didn’t fit their initial plan, but the ultimate goal of gamemaking is to have fun gameplay and “fun” is notoriously hard to invent. If you stumble across something that’s really fun, by accident, it might be worth changing the plan to accommodate it.

Syntensity - Running Locally & Singleplayer

2010-03-03T01:16:28+00:00

The server runner plugin can now work entirely offline - without connecting to anything remote, not even a master. In such a case it will run using the local files. Basically, running a map is now as easy as entering the name of the map in the GUI and clicking 'start'.

In such a situation you don't have any of the benefits of the master server, like getting the latest version of the game, being able to upload changes, play multiplayer or co-op games, etc. But, it is useful for when you don't have a network connection, for demos, or if you just want to run entirely standalone - like for a singleplayer game.

Speaking of singleplayer games, in a few lines of script the client can now be set up to automatically run a certain map using the plugin, which would basically turn the client into a single-purpose game: Start the client, and that game runs. If you also change the branding (logo, menus, etc.), it is now easy to use the Intensity Engine for your own singleplayer games.

(The underlying functionality for these new features is that you can set [Activity] force_location on the server, and it will run the map with that location, without querying the master. It will also communicate that fact to the client, so it does the same. The server runner plugin basically runs the server in a transparent way, with that feature enabled.)

jClassicRPG - New Voicepacks contributed! Twitter for jcrpg. Migration to JME3 under consideration.

2010-03-02T20:38:44+00:00

Hello again! Things are slowly-slowly creeping to a spinning up here, hopefully now that I'm less inclined towards actual gaming - finishing Witcher I'll get back to business, developing the game. Right now I'm starting to consider migration from jme2 to 3d-engine jME version 3 created by lead dev MomokoFan @ jme forum. I'm looking at the project and how complete and stable it is right now before deciding to migrate or not.

But other kind folks too are relentlessly keeping things going on. For now latest great additions are two male voicepacks created by Rigardi from Austria and MaximB from Israel (author of Linux Gaming News). Both packs are of great quality, Rigardi's pack is one for a sane and fair person, while MaximB created a 'Drunken Dwarf' pack. Now we have 3 voicepacks with the previously announced female pack by Bunches that will be integrated to the game soon. Thanks, guys! :)

For your information I've opened a microblog at twitter that will be the quickest way to follow jcrpg dev progress on my side. Follow me here: http://twitter.com/illespal. It may also feature tweets about other linux related things too, so don't be surprised if you get something like: "hey, new catalyst out, more things broken" or "woohoo, new kernel is faster than anything". ;)

0 A.D. - GameInformer's Indie Week Coverage on IGF 2010

2010-03-02T16:10:50+00:00

If you're interested in indie gaming besides 0 A.D., GameInformer is running a special seven-day coverage on all indie games that received nominations in this year's Independent Games Festival. (via The IndieGames Weblog)

Edit: On a similar note: 0 A.D. hasn't accepted funding outside of PayPal donations, but it's still cool to know about Indie Fund, "a brand new funding source for independent developers, created by a group of successful indies looking to encourage the next wave of game developers". (via @Wolfire)

Simutrans - Simutrans monthly screenshot contest

2010-03-02T16:01:41+00:00

All started at the simutrans german forum but now the new simutrans screenshot contest has involved the whole community. It’s going to be a monthly contest with a different topic each month. This time it’s about landscape-scene with player-vehicles (rivers, small train tracks, a little airfield, etc…)

Everybody can participate, but with only one screenshot of 800 x 600 pixels, in jpg or png formats. You can use any pakset, and the deadline is March 14th. The voting begins on March 15th.

The prize will be a mention of your nickname in the hall of fame, praises from the whole community and one post including your picture at blog and simutrans.com.

Links:

Several examples of the possible candidates:

Stellar Forces - Stellar Forces: Now with less beta!

2010-03-02T13:13:00+00:00

I've finally decided to bump the version number of the client all the way up to 1.01, since it stopped being "beta" weeks ago and is now a fully fledged feature-complete game. This new latest version has the following features:

New equipment: Death Grenades.
A unit's health is shown on the stats bar.
A shot's accuracy is always adjusted by a random fractional amount.
Added 2 more sound effects.
Reduced the potential throwing innaccuracy.
A lot of the weapon and equipment prices have been recalculated.
When deploying, the map shows the enemy's deployment squares as well as your own.

There's also a new mission by the name of "Moonbase Assault 2", which is very similar to Moonbase Assault 1, except that both sides now have a moonbase with computers to be destroyed. This means that delicate strategic decisions need to be made: how many men do you send out to attack the enemy's moonbase, and how many you keep back to defend your own?

Frankly, the biggest problem I had with this mission is trying to think of a contrived storyline as to why two enemy's would build moonbases right next to each other! Any suggestion gratefully accepted.

Hedgewars - They're coming!

2010-03-02T12:16:42+00:00

Dun Dun dunnnnnn

FreeGamer - FlightGear eyecandy release (2.0)

2010-03-02T12:11:00+00:00

The flight simulator FlightGear now has pretty clouds and lighting. I have not had the chance of giving the new release a try, so I decided to create a little gallery of the best-looking shots from the 2.0 gallery.

Looks neat. But following video looks even better!

(youtube-dl link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4oMOFnD6bw )

GearHead2 - GearHead2 v0.623: Less Bugs, More Filling

2010-03-02T10:46:51+00:00

I’ve just uploaded v0.623 to SourceForge. This is mostly a bugfix release, since v0.622 had a couple of serious problems. It also includes a new way for mercenary lancemates to bug the player, and the first ever pirate mission. Even better, the police patrols haven’t been added yet! Enjoy your easy plundering while it lasts, ya scurvy dogs.

Frogatto - Graphics News #7

2010-03-01T09:24:05+00:00

We have a cave background now. Woohoo.

This brings us most of the way towards having the cave environment done, although we have essentially no enemies/traps for it at the time being.

Like most things parallax, a still screenshot doesn’t quite do this justice; it doesn’t convey the sense of depth this has ingame.

Edit: I also drew a new font. The old font was quite typographically schizophrenic and just plain amateur; this font tries to actually follow rules like having consistent x-heights, and consistent ascender/descender lengths. The previous one was just a quick hack job to finish any small font at all, so we could implement the text-label object (which lets us place arbitrary text labels on levels).

Syntensity - Local Server Runner Plugin

2010-03-01T09:10:12+00:00

People have complained that local editing and playing were harder than it should be. A plugin that I finished writing today, server_runner, should help with that. When the plugin is active, you can start a local server with just a few clicks in the GUI. The plugin will run the server in a separate process (so if your scripts crash the server, the client won't crash - kind of like how modern web browsers run plugins in separate processes).

Usage:

Activate the plugin: Add intensity.components.server_runner to [Components] list in your settings.cfg
After logging in to the master, click on 'plugins...' in the main menu. You will then see the status of the local server.
Tell the plugin which map to run (simply by writing the location of the map, e.g. "racetrack" for the racing map). Then click start, and wait a bit while the server is started up for you. As soon as it is ready you will automatically connect to it.
The server will be shut down automatically when you close the client, or connect to another server, so no need to worry about that. You can also shut it down in the GUI if you want (which is necessary to start it up with a different map).

Limitations:

Requires you to be logged in to the master, but allowing master-less running would be possible if people want it.
If the server crashes, output is saved to ~/.intensityengine_client/out_server.txt (note: not in the install directory, but the engine home directory). A nice GUI for viewing the output should be added later.
You can't write the location of a map that you never played on before, as it only looks locally for translating the map location to the asset info.
Tested on Linux. Should work on other OSes (it is 99% pure Python), but not tested yet.
The server still uses a network port, so your firewall may ask about that. It would be possible to move to a pure IPC solution later, without that problem, but it would be additional work.

You must be running the latest git source code to use the plugin. If you do, I'd be happy to hear feedback on how things work.

Background:

Sauerbraten, the engine that the Intensity Engine is based on, lets you easily run a local server - it runs the server inside the client, in fact. This makes sense, since the Sauerbraten server is very simple, it is basically a network message router.

However, the Intensity Engine lets you run scripts and physics on the server, which raises the possibility of the server crashing (due to bugs in scripts, etc.). The server also can take a lot more CPU and RAM because of that. Consequently, the server is strictly separated from the client - there is no option to run it inside the client. Another reason is since the server now does a lot of the things the client does (scripts, physics), then maintaining a single codebase with the server defined as separate - and not two options, separate or internal - is much easier.

Hero of Allacrost - New unstable release

2010-03-01T00:44:32+00:00

We have posted a new unstable release (development snapshot) on our Sourceforge page:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/allacrost/

Differences you may notice from our past demo include new environments, music, characters, and plot. This content is unfinished, consider it to be in a beta or even alpha state right now. Other features include an internationalization framework (work-in-progress), settings profiles, and a new shopping interface. To see the complete list of features, check the release notes on our Sourceforge page. Alternatively, play the game and find out!

Some known issues that we hope to have resolved by the next release:

- You may experience random crashes, particularly when changing maps, so save very frequently.
- The story is mostly complete, but details are missing. Some parts may be hard to follow because of missing or incomplete animations/dialogue.
- The desert outskirts area is not complete and should be fairly unchallenging.
- Claudius may keep running when certain dialogue events occur.
- Treasure chests repopulate when revisiting an area

Enjoy, and be sure to post any feedback in our forums!

Hedgewars - It'saaa meeee!! Mari..... ohh?

2010-02-28T22:02:52+00:00

Nintendohohohohohoh

FreeCol - FreeCol 0.9.1 released

2010-02-28T14:52:40+00:00

After several months of development, we are proud to release FreeCol 0.9.1.

Knights - Map Editor

2010-02-28T14:44:48+00:00

So I have been working on a map editor for Knights. Here is a screenshot (click to enlarge):

Some explanation is probably needed. First of all you have to understand how the dungeon generator in Knights works. Basically, there are a bunch of pre-designed 12×12 map sections, which I call “segments”. There are 259 of these segments defined currently. The game randomly selects a number of these and combines them to make a dungeon. The number of segments used depends on the dungeon type: for example, a Tiny dungeon is a single segment, a Basic dungeon is 4 segments (in a 2×2 arrangement), and a Huge dungeon is 9 segments (3×3). Each segment is then further split into a number of “rooms” which are the rooms you actually see in-game.

In the map editor screenshot you can see small images of the segments down the left-hand side. (There is a scrollbar so you can page through all the segments in the file.) Double clicking a segment brings it up in the main editor window (in the centre). Below that is a palette containing all the dungeon tiles that can be used to make the map.

The editor has three modes: Paint, where you can select tiles from the palette and “paint” them into the map; Switches, where you can edit the switches and their effects; and Rooms, where you set the boundaries of the individual dungeon rooms.

The switches are defined using a mini scripting language, which you can see on the right-hand side of the screenshot (each line represents one switch). In this example there are two types of switch, “Open” and “Shoot”. Currently you have to type in the switch definitions manually, but in future I may add some sort of GUI system so you can enter them in a more user friendly way.

The plan is to do an initial release of the map editor in about a week or so. This will be in a fairly early state so should probably be thought of as a “test” release, but at least it will allow people to start using the map editor and feed back to me any problems. If anyone makes any cool rooms with it then I will be happy to incorporate them into the game. Also, if anyone wants to draw some additional graphical tiles to use with the map editor, then that would be good too

Hero of Allacrost - Release early, release often

2010-02-26T20:53:57+00:00

This popular mantra of the open source community is one that Allacrost has historically neglected to follow. I feel that we had good reason to do so in the past when our work was focused more on the core engines and game logic rather than content and features. We had very little to show then. Other than our official releases, the only other type of releases that we made available were internal pre-releases to our forum community for testing. These releases were kept somewhat private and required a registered forum account to download or even be made aware of the pre-release. Being an open source game, it was always possible for someone to download the latest SVN and compile and try the game out on their own, but not everyone has the technical know-how or motivation to perform such a task.

Early this month, at the encouragement of some fellows of the open source game community, our team considered whether we should begin to make releases more regularly. We decided it was definitely worth a shot. This weekend, we will make available our first "unstable" release. This is unlike anything we've done before, because it truly is a snapshot of the current state of the game. Unstable releases will be unpolished, unfinished, and full of bugs. But they are great for keeping our players involved in the design process, our team motivated, and the general public interested in the project. Below is an explanation of our current plan with these unstable release in a Q&A format.

Where can I download the unstable releases?
Unstable releases will be made available on our Sourceforge page, the same as our official releases. Unstable releases will be clearly marked so and placed in a separate directory.

What systems will unstable releases be made for?
The same as our official releases: Windows, OS X, and a source distribution for POSIX-type systems like Linux and FreeBSD. Others outside our team may decide to make specific release builds for their respective systems, but we do not support this.

Is there a way for me to automatically be notified when a new unstable release becomes available?
Yes. Sourceforge provides the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds about our project from the project page. If you register on our forums, you'll be sent an e-mail every time that an unstable or official release is made available.

How often will unstable releases be made available?
We're tentatively setting ourselves a guidelines of trying to have no longer than two months between unstable releases. However, this is not a guarantee. We are not releasing on a strict schedule and unstable releases are basically made when the timing is right.

What are the criteria you will use to decide when to make another unstable release?
There are many, but the most significant include: the amount of time that has passed since our previous unstable release, the presence/absence of any bugs that may cause crashes or freezes, and the degree of noticeable change from the player's perspective relative to the previous release.

The word "unstable" has me concerned. Is there a risk involved in playing an unstable releases?
We intentionally decided to call these unstable releases to indicate that yes, there is indeed a risk in playing them. However its no more risk than the developers take every day when they are working on the code (actually its much less risk). The worst that we've observed happen during development is the computer freezing completely and requiring us to restart our systems, but this situation is very rare. Other times the application may freeze, become unresponsive, or crash suddenly. These conditions are also rare. We do, however, try our best to eliminate any bugs that cause crashes or freezes before the unstable release goes live.

How many unstable releases will be made available for download?
Only a single unstable release will be available at any time. Once a new unstable release becomes available, the previous unstable releases is deleted and will no longer be available. This is done to ease the burden on our team so we are not trying to support or resolve issues with multiple unstable releases.

How do I tell which unstable release I have? Is there a version number?
The file you download will have an eight digit number representing the year, month, and date that the unstable release went live. For example, if the unstable release was made on February 28th, 2010 the file name would include the string "20100228". Other than the file name, there is no version information available. The game itself will likely report either the previous or next official version number such as "1.0.0".

Do you want feedback or bug reports on the unstable releases?
Of course we do. But because unstable releases by their very nature contain an unfinished state of the game, some problems are very evident such as missing images or something being drawn at an incorrect position. Please try to anticipate which problems are self-evident to the team and don't waste your time or ours reporting such issues.

Will you be supporting unstable releases?
Yes, but don't come with the expectation that we're going to fix your problem immediately and directly. For example we may fix a crash that a user reported, but the fix wouldn't be available for the user until we make the next unstable release. We want to make sure that unstable releases are not counter-productive for our team, and producing a new unstable release every time we fix a reported problem would cost us a lot of time and effort.

Will installing the unstable release conflict with the official release I already have installed?
Probably. To be honest we're not sure at this stage. This issue we'll figure out along the way, and hopefully in the future we'll have a system in place to ensure that official and unstable releases can co-exist on the same system without conflict. We recommend you back up any saved game files and settings that you don't want to lose.

I want to make one final and important note about our unstable releases. This is an experiment for our team. Many of us have great hopes that this will be a positive force for the project, but we can't be sure if this will ultimately help or hurt us. If, after a lengthy trial period, we decide that these releases are not beneficial enough to justify their cost, we may decide to discontinue making unstable releases available. So bear with us through this process and hopefully both the players and the team mutually benefit from this new system. Check back with us late this weekend for our first release of 2010!

Simutrans - Pak128.Britain 1.07 released!

2010-02-26T07:55:38+00:00

Great news for pak128.Britain fans! The latest version is out now, and you can get it here.

Main new features in this release:
- AEO’s maglev
- New Citybuildings from Archon and Wlindley
- Snow images for lots more things
- More sailing boats

World of Padman - John Carmack gets award for his life's work

2010-02-25T21:36:44+00:00

I think only a few of you know the name John Carmack, but without his work on the Quake engine, and the co-foundation of id Software, WoP would not exist. Additionally he worked on the Doom and Wolfenstein 3D engines and he soon will set the cat among the pigeons with Rage.

For exactly that he will get the Lifetime Achievement Award at this year's Game Developers Choice Awards in San Francisco. The award will be given to him on March 11th, 2010.

Meggan Scavio, the Event Director of the Game Developers Conference said: "It's no exaggeration to say that John Carmack and id Software have had a monumental influence on all modern 3D games, but especially the first-person shooter genre. John is one of the key figures in the history of video games, and we're delighted to be giving him the Lifetime Achievement award this year.

Evidyon - Evidyon to be Presented at BOOM 2010!

2010-02-25T18:55:49+00:00

BOOM (“Bits on our Minds”) is a Cornell research conference showcasing work of students. Evidyon has been accepted and will be presented next Wednesday, March 3rd, from 4-6 PM in the Duffield Atrium. If you’re in the Ithaca, NY area, please feel free to drop by for a live demonstration!

More information can be found at the BOOM 2010 website.

Hardwar - Weekly dev update #13

2010-02-25T18:07:07+00:00

This week was very successful. The problems saving building layouts has been fixed. You can now load and save your layouts. My next task is to get editing working and then I am hoping to generate some support in helping to texture all these building models we have.

Right now they’re all texture-less white, Boring. If you know how to skin models please consider dropping by the forums and helping out.

I upgraded the debian packages I use for development to the latest version of Ogre (1.7.1 RC1) and found some new bugs which only appeared after the upgrade. They’ve all been fixed now.

SuperTuxKart - Towards alpha 2

2010-02-24T17:04:00+00:00

As you may have noticed, I'm not Magne (Arthur_D) ;) This is because he had hardware failure, and was thus unable to publish a blogpost in reasonable time, therefore I offered him to make one. So here we go!

I can now officially confirm it to everyone, we are planning to release an Alpha 2 of SuperTuxKart "soonish"! The main reason is that many bugs/limitations were found in the track format used in alpha 1; therefore, we will release Alpha 2 so that artists can keep up to date with the changes.

So what's new since last post?

First of all, support for Grand Prix is now back in STK 0.7.

This is not visible on this still, but the image shown for each grand prix is actually cycling images of the tracks within the grand prix.
When you click on one GP, you get a further description of it, just like for tracks :

EDIT: Oh, the screenshot above features a track name "Nolok's castle", but don't get too excited, it's a small test track I did to get familiar with the track exporter, I'm not much of a 3D artist myself ;)

Now, along with GP, I wanted a nicer ending than what we had in 0.6. Here is what it looks like now (not that it can't change) :

Apart from Grand Prix playback, the "3 Strikes" battle mode is also back, with a new battle arena by Thomas Oppl and Wayne Dennis (Pixel_2ACF3) : The Stadium

Furthermore, Joerg started adding support for end-race animations.

It is not yet sure what form this will take in the release; but for now, in the latest development version, you can see the elephant wave his arms and trunk in the as he wins the race

Finally, one minor thing, I added a 'loading' screen, so that the game does not seem unresponsive when loading a big track (which was especially annoying in GPs, when you clicked 'next' and it seemed like nothing happened)

To conclude, there were other misc changes :
* Fixed compilation issues caused by spaces in the font's name
* Conversion of files from LISP to XML format, including Grand Prix files and music files
* The track format has another change : removed support for 'description', added 'designer' instead
* Many fixes to Follow-the-Leader game mode
* Added back the infamous plunger-in-face attack from 0.6
* Added support for camera-far value to be exported. This was used in the mines track, to get a few more FPS by not rendering far away geometry
* Added back bullet debug view. Debug view can now be switch on and off during a race (ctl-F11). This debug mode will be useful to debug physics.
* irrlicht 1.7.1 was released, which fixed potential performance issues (though nothing huge was measured in STK so far)
* Many translations were updated
* And of course much code cleanup and bug fixes!

GearHead2 - GH2 v0.622: Space Pirates Lament

2010-02-24T09:31:05+00:00

The space pirate stuff I said I’d try to complete for the next release? Not ready yet. However, since there’s a whole lot of other stuff worth releasing and since the space pirate stuff is going to require some deeper changes than I originally thought, I’m making a release now.

Here’s an overview of the changes:

More components and better connections in the core story. All deadends reported to me so far should be resolved this time around. Core story missions now tell you their rewards up front, and the dreaded “Mansion of Fetch” episode has been altered to become less arbitrary.
New character development plots for lancemates. If you have a lancemate who owes you a favor, they now have a chance to pay you back.
Some script bugs fixed. Repair skills used by lancemates will now display the correct message.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Frogatto - Content News #1

2010-02-24T07:33:52+00:00

It’s an overdue category, really, since there have been a couple of things I could well have blogged about in the past that’d fit it like a glove.

Recently, we’ve added several levels to the latter half of the seaside environment; these go right before the town. (Cred goes to a friend of ours by the nick “shadowmaster” for doing some of the heavy-lifting there.) These flesh out the area to be decently interesting to play in, and have a number of puzzles and secret areas in them, unlike the prior levels which are significantly (and deliberately) simpler.

Right before the town, we’ve also added a shop, with items you can purchase; the list of purchasable items is not considered final, because although they’re neat ideas, some of them might be destructive to puzzles and such. If so, they’ll be replaced.

We’re also hard at work putting together the town; we’ve already got a small “miniboss” fight working, where you square off against some of the henchmen of Milgram (known as the “Milgramen”), who (as you’d know if you’ve played our previous releases) has taken the town hostage. These soldiers are guarding the gate to the town, and ambush you as you try to talk your way in.

The town itself is also being worked on; the whole environment will be very different from the relatively free-exploring, fight-with-random monsters levels that led up to it; it’ll have doors to unlock, and puzzles involving the rescue of various townspeople (a term which is understandably used quite loosely). At the end of the town, you’ll be treated to the very first boss fight of the game.

Lips of Suna - Lips of Suna 0.0.3

2010-02-24T04:38:45+00:00

Chatting with the NPC companion

A new technology demo release is finally out. The brave are invited to read the below health warning and head to the project website to get it. Expect to see a few new gameplay features plagued by awful bugs and lack of polish.

Warning: As you explore the map of the game, the areas you discover are loaded from disk and never freed. Hence, the game can consume over a gigabyte of memory and the physics simulation can become very sluggish if you try to explore too much. The feature required to fix this will be completed for the next release. Furthermore, a GPU better or equal to the nVidia GeForce 8000 series is required for the game to run properly. The game also eats babies.

Changes since the last version

The player model has been improved. Still lots of work there, especially in the animation department, but I think it’s still significantly better than the old version.
A simple NPC companion. You can’t really say it has an AI, but it still tries to follow the player and fight enemies, and it has a couple of commands and a simple dialog scripted into it. The fact that the path finding feature of the AI system is still too incomplete to be used makes it pretty useless in practice, however.
A new lighting system using deferred lighting. It’s a bit buggy and shadow casting is still disabled, but the performance seems alright and it’s easier to work with than the old forward shader. Lighting still looks bad, though.
Grass blades, tree leaves, crystal shaders, terrain shaders. Most of them are just quick hacks used to test the capabilities of the graphics engine, but they’re improvements nevertheless.
A new terrain engine core. It will take a bit more work to make it look any good, but at least the design can cover the most pressing requirements now. Expect to hear more about it in the future.
A quasi-random map generator and a simple map generated with it.
Lots of big changes under the hood to make the rest of the features for 0.0.x easier or actually possible to implement.

Primitive combat

From my point of view, the three redeeming features of this release are the new character model, the NPC companion, and the map generator. The character model because, for the first time, I managed to create a model with more detail than those low polygon models they used in games in 1996 or so. The companion because it surpasses the plans I had regarding interacting with creatures for this release. The map generator is more subtle since the current map is far from impressive, but having it working well enough to create anything functional is really important for future development.

The big bummers are that it took over 250 days to get the release out and that I released with major known problems that probably degrate or ruin the experience. In addition, I have dropped the 64-bit Linux binary and the plans to make a Windows build for now and also gone for much less testing than before. Trying to make highly polished and stable releases is overkill at this point, I think.

Project management and other issues

Things that have been done in the project management and other fronts include:

The project forums are now hosted at FreeGameDev.net so that me and the few who have shown interest need to lurk on fewer sites. Hopefully posting is less scary too now since you can see a few passers-by in the neighborhood.
A roadmap listing short-term gameplay goals was written. It should help the game to mature from the technology demo stage to a real game a bit faster.
An online task list was created. It should make it a bit easier to see how the next release is progressing. Anyone interested in helping can naturally refer to it too for ideas on what to do.
A new website theme, now with the mandatory abuse of rounded corners.
Yours truly is approaching the mental age of an advanced kindergarten airhead.

Corridors and particles

I have been developing quite a lot in general but perhaps only a few have noticed since I have again neglected the blog and other publicity work. The task list is an attempt to make the progress more visible in the future, but I doubt it’s enough to get and keep people interested.

I don’t think the blog is too useful for that either, though. To attract developers or contributors, it would take much more commitment than I have. It might increase awareness a bit if you only put a little effort into it, but people who just see the blog and move on mildly impressed at best are of little value in practice.

Also, blogging and recruitment work in general is boring. Helping people to get started would be a bit more fun in some ways but if you can’t keep the newcomers interested and motivated enough to work, it’s waste of time. People having good time creating all kinds of wacky things together would be perfect but it’s hard and improbable to get there. People looking for a game project seem to expect lots of professionalism and a team modeled after commercial games companies so my nonsensical approach would probably disappoint them. In my experience, such a fundamental conflict doesn’t make for a fun working environment.

Wait, it’s the exact same thing with ladies! Both endeavors are troublesome to get into, the partner can waste your resources and dump you in both, most of the good candidates have already been taken, and lots of them simply just can’t stand you. Well, there’s actually one difference: a JPG of a developer doesn’t get the job done. Ahahaha…

What was I saying again? All this ranting is just a verbose way of saying that blogging bores me. Not having a team doesn’t actually bother me that much since I’m just looking for fun from development and there’s plenty of that in this project already. It would be a nice bonus to be able to share some of it and progress faster but I’m too weak and the game is probably still too incomplete to achieve that.

Future plans

Destruction and creation of terrain on the fly

“I am but an empty shell, an entity devoured from the inside by the very disorganization I embraced. I lie in the bottom of the abyss of corruption and fully acknowledge what I have made myself be. My eye walks the path from which I strayed and returns to me, and I know no shame. I submit to my flesh and become one with the fate.”

Was that a sneak peek at the next release, the motto of the project administration or just mindless rambling intended to distract you from the facts? Who knows or cares?

In any case, the next release will be interesting since the main quest will be added in a form or another to it. This will be the primary focus of the release because it will surely make the game more of a game and it also has potential to help better define the gameplay and the lore.

The secondary goal of 0.0.4 will be to expand the skill system and make the map a bit more useful by introducing an alchemy system, alchemy ingredients, and spell reagents. There are no particularly big technical challenges here so it should be an easy way to expand the gameplay and provide more things to do.

In addition to the aggressive development of new gameplay, there’s a lot of miscellaneous cleanup, bug fixing, and polishing to do. Combat, monsters, animations, and the user interface, among several other things, need some serious love. I’ll probably implement a few of those version independent minor features listed in the task list as well. They’re a nice way to spend evenings.

OpenArena - 0.8.5 patch released!

2010-02-23T21:04:01+00:00

- New effects: rocket smoke, shotgun sparks, flares
- New maps
- Improved maps
- Improved CTF skins for Angelyss
- New skins for Beret and Assassin

Sorry it took so long.

Stellar Forces - Stellar Forces: New Client 0.56

2010-02-23T09:12:00+00:00

New client 0.56 has just been released with the following features:-

* Implemented the original Laser Squad shooting algorythm (with a few minor tweaks).
* Added Rocket Launchers.
* Added sound effects.

That's right, you can now play The Assassins mission with the classic tactic of blowing the whole building away!

Should I increase the version number to > 1? The Stellar Forces client is still on v0.56 because I started on v0.1 or something, since the first version is usually full of bugs, and then just add 0.01 each time. However, it's been pretty much bug-free and complete for as long as I can remember, so I was wondering if having a version number 1 was putting people of by making them assume it's unfinished? All I'm doing now is adding snazzy features and more equipment, so the v1 tag would be fully justified.

Stellar Forces - Stellar Forces: Victor no longer the Victor

2010-02-22T16:56:00+00:00

Since Stellar Forces started having a league table, the player named "Victor" has been at the top - until yesterday! He was finally usurped from his position by "1980-20..". Actually, they are both on joint first place, but "1980-20.." is probably first because I put them in alphabetical order if it's a points tie.

Talking about the Stellar Forces website, what the site really needs is some graphics, maybe depicting scenes from various missions. If anyone is able to do this it would be very much appreciated.

Finally, there's a new mission and new client about to be released, but I'll say more about that when it actually happens.

World of Padman - Finally a new coder joined the team

2010-02-22T08:34:41+00:00

PadWorld Entertainment is slowly waking up from hibernation and WoP 2.0 development gathered some momentum lately. We're not yet going full speed, but at least we're yawning and stretching. This is mainly due to the latest member that joined the team, who's currently settling in and started on some UI tasks already. Our new programmer is well known to the community, it is The Brain. He has contributed to and was involved in several community projects, so we had no doubt about his skills.
His applied a couple month ago, but it took us quite a while to bring ourselfes to make the commitment. Now we made up our minds and are happy that he was patient and kept his enthusiasm. The Brain has a couple last multiplayer tasks on his plate, and afterwards will help up push forward the singleplayer.

Frogatto - No more crashing on Windows!

2010-02-22T02:52:18+00:00

For many months now, the Windows builds have either crashed at random places, or crashed consistently in a particular spot. Yesterday I finally tried out MSVC++’s debugger, and squashed 2 buffer overrun bugs (which consistently crashed the game for me, but no one else). And today I helped Dave fix the bug that had been consistently crashing it for everyone (on Windows). It was another buffer overrun bug – some animations had invalid rectangles defined for their frames. Dave fixed it so it will now fail for everyone when that happens, and give an actual error message about it, saying what’s wrong.

All these errors were undetectable on Mac/Linux, but they were real bugs that were causing undefined behavior. I don’t really like using MSVC++ (I’m used to gcc and XCode), but this does show the value of compiling on many platforms.

Technical stuff aside: we finally have a Windows build that doesn’t crash on the 2nd outside level or the editor! Yay!

Simutrans - The International Simutrans Forum has now new forum rules and guidelines

2010-02-21T00:32:00+00:00

The International Simutrans Forum has now new forum rules and guidelines and came to replace the old forum rules from 2008 with 3 pages of text (obviously nobody would not want to read that =P) . The new version is very short and covers all needs of the community.

From the Forum rules and guidelines official topic:

These guidelines are here to facilitate the smooth operation of the forum and to protect the community as well as their activities and works. Make sure you have read them. These are not, for the most part, hard and fast rules; in fact, they can help you to better enjoy your stay here.

Now, please our dear members and upcoming ones, read it and behave. :-)

Links:

World of Padman - Pad Day

2010-02-20T20:13:41+00:00

Finally the time has come again: on this Sunday, February 21st at 8:00 pm CET, a Pad Day is going to be played. We are going to play CTF, but also other custom maps will be present. Some of them are Saha’s Flat, Phobosroom, the Monkroom Map and Oregano’s Plane. In case you don’t have those, you can download them on the forum or – if you want to have it easy - just set autodownload on under Setup -> Options before connecting to the server.
The Server which is going to be played on is named "CTFmod v1.0" and provided by haferschleim.
Alright, as said before:

Sunday, February 21st
8:00 pm CET
(7:00 pm GMT; 1:00 pm CST)

Be there!

FreeGamer - Game sfx maker tool ... sfxr in flash!

2010-02-20T18:17:00+00:00

What's all this then? This is as3sfxr, flash port of sfxr. It makes sounds for your games. You only have to press buttons and listen and press buttons again.

This is great: no need to understand how sound synthesis works, ability learn a little about sound synthesis by pressing buttons/moving controls randomly, no need to download/compile/install anything either. Oh how I would wish for more tools of this kind, maybe specialized stuff like (non-8-bit) fire effect generators, ice effects, explosions... There are some sfx gens for pure data but it will take a little more time to get them running.

At the top of this post, there is an embedded flash applet. If you are a user of an open source flash player: do you see it? Can you use it? How many of you already knew of sfxr but only now did try it through as3sfxr?

I hope this 'no info about games' post does not shock you.

0 A.D. - Press page, Twitter feed and more

2010-02-19T17:39:00+00:00

Hey everybody, we have started an official 0 A.D. Twitter page and linked to it above. Some interesting recent tweets include CC-licensed music; a new study saying Carthaginian child sacrifice never happened; and secrets revealed from a Bronze-Age shipwreck. (0 A.D. doesn't really cover the Bronze Age but it's still interesting). You're all invited to follow us!

Next, we've hooked up the RSS feed with Feedburner, to make it easier for new fans to subscribe, and launched a page called In the Press, which documents some of the awards, news coverage and critical acclaim 0 A.D. has received.

Also, have you been wondering what gameplay features of 0 A.D. are done and which aren't? Philip (Ykkrosh) compiled a feature status report. Discussion can be found in this thread.

Hedgewars - Donations: An update

2010-02-19T11:24:07+00:00

Donations are coming along nicely, I just wanted to update everyone with regards to recieving our thankyou gifts to those who decide to be generous.

First of all, if you've donated over $15, as quite a few of you have, we'd love to make a hat for you to be included in the next version of Hedgewars. If you'd like to email me (Tiyuri, details on contact page) I'll make sure this happens for you.

Thank you to all the donators so far:
(Initials used for privacy reasons, if you'd like your full name/nickname up here, or you'd like to remove your initials, just let me know).

Tiyuri - £50
XC       -   £40
AO    -   $50
RK    -   $16
Nemo - $10
TAS      -   £5
VG -   $5.70
TH    -   $5
ML -   $4
BT -   £1

Thank you all for being so generous, those of you who have donated more than $15, please make sure you do get back to me to get your hat in game.

For those of you not interested in the iPad/iPhone/n900 versions at all, here's a PC update for you, almost complete desert theme:

Yo Frankie! - New training DVD: Open source painting course

2010-02-18T18:49:00+00:00

Frogatto - Graphics News #6

2010-02-18T02:16:12+00:00

We’ve added an alpha-version of a world map to frogatto. Like in many classic games, you’ll be able to use this to also teleport yourself to the listed locations on the map. The graphics in this are really an alpha ’sketch’ of what the final version will look like, but the programmed motion of the camera feels quite nice already. Here’s a video of it thus far, on youtube:

Hedgewars - Hedgewars, Xfire and 0.9.13

2010-02-17T20:39:06+00:00

As some of you might have noticed, Xfire now officially supports Hedgewars.
Especially those not playing under Windows might not even know it as it doesn't support other operating systems so far (but might run under Wine). It combines friends list, instant messenger and some other features while sharing information about the games you play.

More information about Xfire can be found on the official Xfire homepage. While tracking your time ingame works out of the box running version 0.9.12, Hedgewars 0.9.13 will support some additional tidbits showing others the server you're playing on as well as your current room and maybe other things as well.

While we're talking about it... Hedgewars has its own sub page including screenshots, videos and usage statistics. If you're interested to compare it to other artillery games (only including Xfire users in the statistics) have a look at the Artillery Games Genre.

Note: I'm aware of a sometimes occuring bug causing the engine window to lose its input focus right after starting a game while Xfire is active. I'm trying to resolve this issue once I'm able to reproduce it in 100% of all cases. If you've got any hints or thoughts, please tell me!

Knights - Knights game this Sunday

2010-02-17T20:04:52+00:00

Since the Knights server is often empty (although admittedly less so than it used to be), I have decided to start holding a regular multiplayer Knights game, once a month. I thought this would be a good way to give Knights players an opportunity to get together and play in a bigger game than would normally be possible.

The first of these monthly games will be this Sunday, 21st February at 16:00 GMT. This will be held on the official Knights server (knightsgame.org.uk). All welcome, just log in at that time and join in the games. Hopefully there should be quite a few people online. I myself will be there and so will a few people from the forums (see this thread for details).