Hi again! The last update was some time ago now, too long in fact! This is not a post to announce a new update, but to give some insight into what is going on.

Hit the jump for the full read.

After the last update we got a bunch of bug reports, and they are still coming in. The most troubling ones were related to random crashes and other equally bad stuff. We have gone through a series of fixes now on our side, but one of the bugs took longer than expected and have held us back from having a stable executable for a while. We have also received some feedback that a weekly or bi-weekly update tempo would be great, and we can only agree. We enjoy development in that tempo and we should be getting back to that after the coming update.

In the meantime we have been building the Adventure component of the game. This includes work on the editors as well as the content of it and the implementation of running it.

An example shop setup in the adventure editor

We are looking forward to see what people will be able to do with these editors!

As of this week things seem to be on track again and we are basically in release preparation mode trying to make sure that all the things that we have worked on since the last update gets packaged and presented in the best way possible. I’m currently sitting on a train, the weekend will largely be occupied by a wedding, and next week the Mojangstas and Kinten are away and I’m in Denmark. So as of right now, we cannot say a date, but I will be working today and the next week to make this happen as soon as possible.

Also, here is a flying brain:

Today, we catch up with Mod Krista for the full scoop on the new Prayer training method: The Nexus!

Version:  9.728 Games Freeware

your favorite game with the funny commanders.
version: XTA 9.728

Changelog:

XTA 9.728 —————— by Deadnight Warrior, Jools and Noruas
—————
* Fix landboat transition from land to water

* Improve commander selection widget (remembers selection from last game, better countdown text)

* Bugfixes for minelayer and buildspeed gadgets (probable cause for error: builder died)

* New sounds for D-Gun, Arm Penetrator and Core Doomsday machine. Sounds by Noruas. Should be less disturbing.

* Update cursor out of range gadget. It now gets range from engine. Cursor will still show bad attack cursor if attack is blocked, but attack order is only dropped if it is outside of range (only for turrets).

* New splash sound for lava maps.

* Builders can now again fight.

* Fix hitsoundwet sound for Arm Bulldog

* Optimise MinimapX gadget to use less fps

* Force some gadgets that wouldn’t unload to really do so (gadgets that have synced and unsynced parts).

Author / Publisher:  Jools_

Greetings everyone!

As I mentioned yesterday we are officially announcing a new version of Foldit for use with Leap Motion! One of our devs working on the project, Dun-Yu, answered some questions about the release.

How close are we to releasing Foldit for Leap?
We plan to release it in the next month or so.

What's different about Foldit for Leap?
It provides an opportunity to get closer to the true hand folding experience. You can manipulate the 3d geometry of the protein with your fingers and drag it to a true 3d position. You can essentially twist and move the protein as if you were manipulating it with your own hands. Like a real world object.

How long has the team been working on this?
Since last Fall.

What types of players might be interested in this?
People who like hand folding for example. It gives you better control when playing. For example, you don’t need to do so many camera rotations to position the protein. It's all pretty intuitive.

What’s the difference between Foldit for Leap and Foldit for Kinect?
Kinect allows multiple people to play the same protein but Leap caters to a one player experience. It's more precise and to top if off, you don’t need a big workspace. You are working very close to the screen (and your protein structure physically). You're using your hands instead of your whole body. With the Kinect you have to play at a distance of 2-3 meters from the protein itself, but with Leap you can get right up close to the protein. I have a video of some Leap gameplay from last year when we first started working on it that people might be interested in seeing.

What's also cool is that you can point your finger at the screen to make mouse clicks. Just another cool gesture for controlling the game.

What's required for the Leap version?
You'd just need to purchase the Leap camera, install their drivers, and run the Leap version of Foldit which will be coming out soon.

What has been the most difficult part of designing this new version?
It’s all about working through human interaction. For example, if I'm thinking about working in a pinch gesture, everyone pinches in slightly different ways. We are using a vision based method to track human gestures, and it’s a big task to accommodate all kinds of human gestures. Optimizing detection for everyone is never easy, but getting it to work is really rewarding.

Any last features that you think players will be excited to hear about?
We have some cool extra tools for Leap like the pin tool. It lets you pin part of the protein structure to the workspace and move the rest of the structure around it. Kind of like freezing sections but more handy when using your fingers to manipulate the structures.

Thanks, everyone! If you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments.

- katfish

We have already seen Community Chest I and the public beta of Community Chest 4 in TNS. Now it's time for the second wad of this series which contains a full collection of 32 maps, from 26 authors in total, and bears a release date of 2004. In this session, we will tackle the first half of the wad, so come enjoy fighting through those maps with us. Skill: Ultra Violence PWADs: cchest2, miekskins-r3, tskins1e, tns91 Maps: 01-16, 31 Lives: 1 ...

Focus this week has been on developing the official company website, and filling in the blanks for client<->server functionality. The website won't be done until it's done, but it's coming along nicely! Regarding the game, here's progress for the week:

Server / Client Features Controlling a Magician and Warrior at the same time.

You can play with multiple characters at a time now! For the time being, you can switch between players manually using the 'character' command. I have some sketches at home for a new UI component that shows all your characters so you can click through them, or select them by left-clicking on the map.

The server now sends over ALL the entity/object data to the client, which includes Max HP/MP, current condition, terrain costs, and a million other things. The irrelevant stuff has yet to be filtered out (we don't need Max MP for items), but it's still relatively cheap on bandwidth. Now that the client has this info, it can show us loads of useful information, which means another round of UI improvements should be coming up.

Key Bindings

Now that key bindings work, we need a proper key configuration window. Until that's ready, keys are stored in a "keys.txt" file which looks like this:

f fly ` character space use_map enter attack 1 skill_1 2 skill_2 3 skill_3 4 skill_4 ...etc

Creating the key configuration window implies a big change to the way options are stored, so this will be a ways off ;) There's plenty of more exciting work to do right now.

More User-Interface Tools

This game won't be only keyboard-driven. Now that the client can send every command to the server, it's time to make a few windows and tools to make those commands more intuitive and mouse-driven.

For example, to attack a target, right now you have to enter the command 'attack <target_hotkey>' manually. Eventually, you'll have these options available:

1. Right-click and hold on a target and release over the 'attack' icon. This is a standard 'move to our target and attack' command.
2. Hit 'a' and left-click the target. This will also move to the target and attack.
3. Right-click and hold on a map location, release over the 'attack' icon, then left-click your target. This will make your character hold position at the location and attack the target whenever possible.

The other big UI project will be for a fancy inventory screen to handle the 'use', 'give', 'equip', 'drop', 'remove', and 'put' commands. And then... well, everything else :( That will take a while.

As promised in my previous post, I have just released new versions of Zelda Mystery of Solarus DX, Zelda Mystery of Solarus XD and Solarus!

These updates still use the old 0.9 branch of Solarus because I haven’t finished to convert both games yet to Solarus 1.0. And you have waited long enough for the German release and for important bug fixes, especially the bug of blocks that only made half moves.

Solarus 0.9.3 changes:

• The game screen size can now be set at compilation time.
• Change the savegames directory on Mac OS X.
• Improve the support of Mac OS X, Android, Pandora, Caanoo and other platforms.
• Fix the compilation with Visual C++.
• Fix blocks making sometimes only a half move (#33).
• Fix pixel-precise collisions not always correct (#53).
• Fix the end of target movement on slow machines (#34).
• Fix the hero being freezed when using the hookshot on bomb flowers (#119).

This should be the last release in the Solarus 0.9 branch. Our games are currently being converted to the 1.0 format.

ZSDX 1.5.2 changes:

• German dialogs available.
• Castle 1F: fix NPCs possibly overlapping the hero.
• West mountains cave: fix a chest possibly overlapping the hero.
• Fix various issues in French, English and Spanish dialogs.
• Fix the CMake script that creates the zip archive (#1).

ZSXD 1.5.3 changes:

• Dungeon 2: the piece of heart could be obtained very easily with the sword.
• Change the English website url in the credits dialogs.
• Fix missing lines in dialogs.
• Fix the CMake script that creates the zip archive.
• Make creepers appear earlier in the game (#1). Because creepers are fun. I like creepers.

 

Reprisal's new Linux version is ready to try out. This is a new completely stand alone version of Reprisal for Linux!
Reprisal's new Linux version is ready to try out. This is a new completely stand alone version of Reprisal for Linux!

DONATIONS GO HERE <-

Ryan, our music guy, is also working on another project right now, called Seyken: Crystal Kingdom. I’m going to do a post about this project sometime soon, because it’s awesome, but I’d rather not rush it and fail to do it justice.

One thing Ryan’s struggled with for the past few years is a lack of decent orchestral sound libraries to work with – he did amazing stuff, IMO, with the tools he had, but he always complained about the limitations of what he was working with (in terms of expressiveness and flexibility), and a substantial part of “doing good work with lousy tools” came from carefully avoiding the weaker instruments in the libraries he had. Which is fine some of the time, but sometimes you really want to do an epic string section, and without the right tools, you can write the best sheet music for it, but crummy midi-sounding samples just won’t do it justice. Buying better ones is tough when you’re on a shoestring budget.

So with the support of this new project, he’s doing a fundraiser to get some better orchestra samples. If you like frogatto’s music – please support him in doing this, by donating to this fundraiser!

My minions, I am happy and pround to give you Tales of Maj'Eyal 1.0.3 ! See http://te4.org/

Your launcher should automatically update your game so no need to redownload it all.

Enjoy and have fun in Eyal!

 

Don't forget to help ToME by with donations ( http://te4.org/donate ) !

And do not forget to vote for ToME on Steam Greenlight!

  Release highlights:

• Rebalancing of many races and classes
• Addons will stay active if the game's patch version is over the required one. So addons for 1.0.1 will work on 1.0.2 (but would not on 1.1.0)
• Most tier1/2 zones can now have alternate layout/stories/... brings some fresh air
• Rak'Shor pride looks more .. necromancy, and is more interresting
• More direct melee-range talent UI
• Many bugfixes and improvements

 

Expanded changelist:

• Made sure the transmo chest always spawn
• Creepding Darkness will try harder to disappear
• Psychic Lobotomy no longer ignores confusion immunity
• Fixed Conduit when used by a NPC
• Moss now use mindcrit for duration instead of spellcrit
• Fix for OpenGL rendering bug on release builds
• Using a Moss talent will correctly put other Moss talents on cooldown even if they were at 1 or 2 CD already
• Antimagic indicator debuff doesnt prevent worldmap access anymore
• Thalore exp penalty back to 35% (from 30%)
• All Moss talents can not crit their durations anymore (still can crit their damage)
• Nourishing Moss healing factor reduced a little
• Reduced Slippery Moss fail chance a little
• Reduced Slime Roots range
• Number of bloated oozes limited to the Mitosis talent level
• Reabsorb damage reduction reduced to 40%
• Mitosis chance increases with talent level
• Call of the Ooze max life is dependent on Mitosis level
• Upgraded to LuaJIT 2.0.1
• Lowered Shalore exp penalty to 25%
• Increased Call of the Ooze cooldown
• Golem's starting equipment comes identified
• Alchemist potion reward are identified
• Vor Armoury main room is a no teleport zone
• Fixed Shadow's Blindside description
• Buffed Shaloren: Grace of the Eternals scales with dex or mag, Magic of the Eternals also increase crit power, Secrets of the Eternals triggers more easily, Timeless also reduces cooldowns
• Willful Combat correctly states it affects physical power
• New Game:idling(focus) method to detect gaining/losing OS focus
• Ego inscriptions are suffixes, so they all sort by inscription kind
• Fixed alchemist golem resurect
• Rogue poisons can be applied with slings too
• Level 5 Trap Launcher also lets traps be placed without breaking stealth
• Increased Bear Trap and Nigthshade Trap damage
• Reduced Lure cooldown
• Dexterity now also gives a chance to shrug off all kinds of critical damage (just like the oozemancer maleable body talent)
• Sticky Smoke does not affect the rogue anymore
• Fixed online charsheet ESP
• Temporal Form paradox boost reduced to 400
• Fixed blindness on NPCs
• Siding with the Assassin Lord also teaches you the Flash Bang Trap, if you know trapping
• If siding with the merchant you can still get the Flash Bang Trap, only the merchant will sell it .. for a price
• Fixed psiblades
• Oozemancer rares are .. rarer
• Solipsists rare are back !
• Running and resting are stopped when a dialog pops up
• Off-balance reduces damage by 15% instead of global speed
• Fixed Blunt Thrust description
• Big bad popup after the ambush to direct the player to Last Hope
• Limmir will not cry too early
• Lightning daze, acid blind, ice damage now use either spellpower or mindpower for power application
• Fixed Coral Spray gfx effect when blocking a ranged attack
• Low level npcs should be a little more interresting
• Fixed a weird death bug
• Born into Magic arcane damage bonus replaced with a proc on spell damage to buff the damage type
• Overseer of Nations increases blindness resist
• Higher's Bloom duration increased
• You Shall Be My Weapon! starts cooling down even if it missed or kill the target
• Ruined dungeon guardians can not be preset uniques
• Some factions now have symbols, which you can see in store & chats in towns
• Many new artifacts
• Fix errors when running/resting with special events that make you switch characters
• Last Stand won't heal when auto-reactivated by leveling up
• New option to change the speed of flying texts
• Randboss/randelites kills are not recorded in the uniques kill list
• Autouse talents will not trigger sounds
• Echoes from the Past description correctly displays temporal damage bonus
• Naga and Fearscape portals will always popup when walked/rushed/teleported/... on
• Dreamscape can not happen on random bosses
• Addons will stay active if the game's patch version is over the required one. So addons for 1.0.1 will work on 1.0.2 (but would not on 1.1.0)
• Maelstrom will not destroy the stairs from killing the assassin lord
• Breeding pits reduced to entrance + 2 levels
• Psi-wielding a twohanded weapon does not prevent dual-wielding
• Damage Affinity is displayed on charsheet
• The rhaloren camp is sometimes partly overground
• Walls will not look weird when near trees
• Doors will not look weird when near trees
• Sometimes the last level of Nur will be flooded by a failing barrier
• Sometimes the Old Forest is overrun by crystals
• The Grand Corruptor leaves the mark of the spellblaze when you go to Zigur
• Sometimes the Maze will have been destroyed by a quake, leaving holes in the floor leading to deeper maze levels
• Sometimes the scintillating caves hold too much magic which distort them into weird angles
• Sometimes Murgol Lair is being attacked by nagas from the Vargh Republic
• Rungof got his own artifact!
• Sometimes the trollmire is flooded by the rain, leaving it filled with muddy water and some aquatic life
• Norgos lair is sometimes invaded by shivgoroth
• Levitation correctly makes you immune to pinning instead of making you more vulnerable to it
• Sometimes the ruins of Kor'Pul have been invaded by a group of thieves and bandits
• Sometimes an old volcano erupts at the center of the Daikara
• All resource cost for talents can now be functions
• Sometimes the Heart of the Gloom has been purified from the corruption, only to fall pray to a powerful solipsist
• Changed Rak'Shor pride tileset to be more .. flavorful
• Sometimes the sandworm lair has a different layout and a different "guide" .. don't fall of the trail !
• Melee range talents that require a target will now react to direction keys directly instead of using the classic targetting cursor
• Slime Roots can not reset passives or ubers
• Acid Splash radius reduced by 1
• Indiscernible Anatomy lost confusion resistance
• Speeds are always limited to 10% (can never go to 0)
• Game options are now organized by tabs
• Rak'Shor Pride now has some new layout and new "fun" monsters inside !
• Dark Portal correctly triggers on teleport effects
• Electric Eels do not fire lightnings at low level but are buffed

Have fun!

Events, news, and artistic creations from around the community! Check out this week’s Community Round-Up.

Send us your take on the RuneScape Theme for a chance to get your music in RuneScape itself and featured on our social network pages, as well as some awesome in-game prizes!

Events, news, and artistic creations from around the community! Check out this week’s Community Round-Up.

Send us your take on the RuneScape Theme for a chance to get your music in RuneScape itself and featured on our social network pages, as well as some awesome in-game prizes!

We are trying out a new way of gaining stages on the Development & Testing Server. I'll try to explain how it works and why we made certain decisions.

Version:  1.0 Spring Maps Freeware

Description

A beta map, made by Shongjen

Up to 28 Players (14 versus 14 Players)

Fixes:

- Textures
- new metalspots at mid

Have Fun

Shongjen

Author / Publisher:  Shongjen

A globetrotting power fantasy and Mario Kart Excitebike crossbreed coming from the developers of KRUNCH!
A globetrotting power fantasy and Mario Kart Excitebike crossbreed coming from the developers of KRUNCH!

Radical notions about “the Natural Environment” are not given much thought in The Empire and rightly so. Indeed, those who profess “Misgivings with respect to the effects of Unbridled Industry and So-Called Progress in our Nation” are dismissed as debased spiritualists that can be assumed to gather in Laudanum Dens to associate with Poets who fill their heads with rambling apocalyptic screeds.

When all is quiet, the Rubbish Beetles scurry from their burrows and perform the duties Nature has seen fit to assign to them.

Continuing forthwith: All et up from that tin of Doctor E. Sanin’s Patent Tinned Meat* Slurry Product? Just toss it aside with nary a care. Divested the shipping crate of its contents of finely enameled bric-a-brac (including a set of commemorative plates featuring portraits of our fine Prime Minister)? Toss it on the heap with the rest of the rubbish. The world provides its obviously limitless bounty to us to be used, dear reader!

Ms. Tortoise (centre bottom) is unimpressed by progress on the new Autopneumatic Lumborium while Edwina Cogwright (centre left) is confused by the floating mechanical eye looking down on her.

In darker news, rumours surrounding the matter of shadows appearing, as Mr. Zedekiah Swinglever’s letter to the Empire Times put it, “most vexingly angular and wrongly geometried” is in perfectly capable hands. It is had on good Authority that Her Majesty’s Ministry for Investigation into Affairs of the Unnatural & Occult has one Mr. Nicholas Vining – an expert in theories & applications of matters pertaining to Luminous Aether – consulting in the investigation into what is clearly a Cultist conspiracy.

We are assured that the issue will be resolved before the week is out and that any cultist rioters, labourist agitators, or suspected Republique Mechanique spies will be shot.  Cog save the Queen!

Version:  1.0 Spring Maps Freeware

A beta map, made by Shongjen

Up to 28 Players (14 versus 14 Players)

Fixes:

- Textures
- additional ways
- lower height ratio (max height 64)

Have Fun

Shongjen

Author / Publisher:  Shongjen

“Yo dawg, herd you liked game jams, so we put your jam in a jam so you can jam while you jam!”

In the last month I’ve attended 3 game jams:

1. Game Dev Party Lyon March 23-26,
2. Ludum Dare 26  April 26-29,
3. CHI 2013 “Games [4 Design]” game jam April 27-28

As you can see, two were at the same time!

“Hugly” a care-bear based beat’em’up

First off I promised a debriefing of the Lyon Game Dev Party. We had a team of 8, which was very exciting for me – I’ve never done a jam in such a big team! All told it went extremely well:

You can pick up the 48-hour build of the game from indiedb or grab the newest rolling release from github, though you’ll have to wait a bit for a nicely-packaged version of the latter. Code is under LGPL so free to use even for commercial products provided you give credit

Most of the changes involve making the game more “legible”, with a lot more feedback and a clearer interface.

CHI 2013 “Games [4 Design]“

So the jam in Lyon went well and the one before it in Lille was an epic failure. Despite having been to so many jams I’m losing count (it must be about 10 now I think), I still haven’t found the magical formula that makes a jam go well, and the CHI 2013 “Games [4 Design]” game jam was… well if not a failure it was a bit of stagnation as far as my personal progression is concerned:

I suppose I can hardly expect each new jam to feel like a leap forward when I’ve done so many. Still, I feel somewhat unsatisfied with my contribution. Our team made the heart-beat game: a sort of Pong style game where you control the height of your paddle with your heart-rate. We went through a large number of rapid iterations and generally did all the right things, but in retrospect I’d saying trying to use a heart-rate monitor as the control interface for an arcade game was just the wrong path to choose from the very beginning.

It was a fun gimmick, but ultimately wasn’t very playable: the sensors never worked very well and stopped working altogether just before the presentation, which made things a little complicated This is why I don’t work with hardware! Also worth noting that we only had Saturday and Sunday until around 4pm, that we never had a decent internet connection and that most of Sunday we didn’t have any electricity. All things considered we did a decent job.

That said while the other teams thought outside the box (Joust clones or not) we stayed tied to the screen, and people have a lot more fun interacting with each-other than with a computer terminal. The most enjoyable games were those where technology made at best a cameo appearance. There’s a lesson to be learned from this I’m sure…

Ludum Dare gathering Montpellier

Back in my home-town I’d helped organise a second Ludum Dare real-world gathering through our association “Baptême du jeu” which now has a blog and a logo. I was off in Paris during the event, but apparently things went really well, so I suppose it’s not all bad I’ll try to mention some of the better projects that came out of the jam, if not here then on the French tumblr blog.

For my part I entered the Processing prototype I wrote for the Paris jam, minus all the Arduino code for the pulse sensor which was either found online or written by the others (or a bit of both). The source-code is available on github – my first ever time using Processing as it happens

That’s all for now – I may write up some thoughts on CHI 2013 when I have some time. For now though I’ll simple say that researchers, especially in Human-Computer Interactions, are rather odd people