LGDB - Linux game database

If you happen to have tested the latest fixpack for MacOSX it would be great to hear about that! If noone reports back trouble with that I will repackage the test release this week. Check the before-last blog entry for the download details.

324 downloads so far in less than one month with minimum publicity (no Happypenguin or Freshmeat entry or other major sites yet). I'm happy to see these numbers. :) Otherwise have a nice football time or whatever if you hate soccer. :D

Qubodup @ freegamer has just uploaded a high quality (720p) video to youtube of jcrpg's latest SVN revision's playtest. Thanks qubodup, you're the FOSS demi-god recording genious! If no-one shows up with new test results reporting bugs, i'll soon repackage the 'Almost Pristine' release and republish and will do a bigger promotion @ different sites. This video nicely shows how you can explore the hybrid old-school tiled outdoors combined with smooth terrain!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBTaJfzI6sU

If you run into shader problems on your Mac, plese use this new fixpack (unzip in game's dir overwriting all the stuff): link. Probably other nvidia owners might be affected by this, if you get an error in your log related to 'mod' (modulo), try this hotfix.

Fix pack for 'Almost Pristine' release is here for you to download and test!

Fixing a few things:

- MacOS nVidia crash (const int in shaders for float values are not acceptable with MacOS nv driver)
- Background terrain color flickering with nvidia cards
- Depth of field shader for lower precision cards is now working, without blurring whole screen
- Zooming unit texts are now not oversized after multiple zooming
- Adding missing binary cache for OBJ models
- Mouse look is now switched OFF when entering combat

Thanks for all your testing. Please give this fix pack another try soon, so I can roll out and announce the release later for major publicity (happypenguin, freshmeat etc.) as well...

Grab the package, unzip it in the game's folder, overwriting all (including your jCRPG-engine dir and all its content). This one is only for the latest release.

No luck with the new driver release (im using the testing repo of Arch to grab it for my notebook): gma965 still crashes: java: brw_wm_surface_state.c:591: brw_update_renderbuffer_surface: Assertion `brw->has_surface_tile_offset || (tile_x == 0 && tile_y == 0)' failed.Rant, rant, rant, why did they spoil this with crashy assertions. :/(Commenting out the assertion, things run flawlessly. With this...it crashes)

Currently working on ironing out nVidia related shader issues. Like... Depth of Field precision issues came into picture. Solved. Next thing is : light is flickering on the terrain with nVidia cards. Another fatal error with character creation is fixed. After fixing these i'll roll out another release this time with bigger publicity. Thanks for all the folks who helped to discover the problems with the new release! (especially: qubodup, tidbit, people at Hungarian Unix Portal.)

And yeah, happy 3rd birthday jClassicRPG. :D

So far I've received very valuable feedback from some of those who have tested the new release. Yesterday I even uploaded a fixed package to sf.net based on some crash report.

Today tidbit reported issues with DepthOfField effect, for him nvidia + windowXP combo results in a fully blurred scene. Obviously this isn't okay. So far he's the only one having such trouble. It would be nice to have some feedback if it works for you or not. (You can switch on / off DoF in options menu.)

tidbit also had some random crashes with OpenAL bundled with jcrpg. Do you have trouble with it? So far he's the only one reporting that kind of crash.

The more feedback, the earlier these things might get fixed.

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

"
- Ported to Ardor3D engine, to resolve stability issues
- New buildings (by tidbit)
- New voicpacks (by various contributors)
- Bugfixes
- New secondary terrain added for large view distance
- Corrected Shadow and Depth of Field effect
"

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

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

If you wish to make the dev happy, don't forget to donate some bucks to the project through paypal (at the left side of the blog, the links positions your browser there). It will help to keep the enthusiasm high and reassure the exhausted developer. It still needs ~-$327$ (see Project Budget on the left side of the blog) to have a 0 budget regarding the music creation costs.

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

Next step in the project plan is to work out dialoges/trading/quest system, so after this technical release, we'll concentrate on gameplay elements again.

Under Macintosh you will need to run the jClassicRPG.sh from console as clicking it might not start it if your OSX is not configured to run it as script. Please note that most probably game won't run with Intel video cards as recent Intel GPU driver releases under Windows and Linux caused the game to stop working.

It's too late in the night here to write a proper release post. Anyways grab the package from the sf.net site if you feel the urge. :) Link. Proper Download/Install instructions under the Download link as usual!
PS: Quick fix for some smaller issues done...uploading a whole new package. Sorry! (Fixing: audio crash when out of channels after combat, logs are now written to User Appdata/home instead of the game directory) Going to post link in the official announcement post soon here.
PS2: Done. Link above now points to the fixed zip.

The freshly refactored site of Ardor3D engine contains jClassicRPG as one of its highlighted projects. It's grand to see our humble project on the site of the great engine. The release with Ardor3D is really close, I have even produced a test tar.gz with the recently updated ant task. I've repaired some fresh smaller bugs and integrated the remaining voicepacks contributed by Bunches, Rigardi and MaximB. Thanks folks! :) The planned date of release is next monday... hopefully it will be met. I need to test things on Windows and nVidia yet and then it's ready.

As the tasks related to migrating to Ardor3D are all done I've started to work towards the release. Out of two remaining content integration task just completed one: new shop and guardpost buildings (by tidbit) are now placed in towns of humans and boarmen. I still need to integrate those voicepacks that landed the contribution depot some months ago. Project soon to celebrate its 3rd birthday, hopefully with a brand new test release. :)

The new official SVN root is now https://javacrpg.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/javacrpg/jClassicRPG/ . jME2 based code is moved to jme2_obsolete/ branch. Qubodup, the almighty FOSS genius is already helping with testing the newly committed game code. He checked out SVN, installed maven tool to be able to compile the jCRPG-engine subproject (using 'mvn clean install' command). I've already fixed some issues and updated some documentation. If you like the idea, you can try to help test the SVN codebase this way, before the release will be out. If you have an Intel GPU I cannot promise it will run (I already wrote about this here). Most probably it won't. Nvidia and Ati should be fine. Hopefully this may change with later releases of Intel drivers (it used to work with older drivers...).

Time spent on squasing the few remaining bugs and adding parameterization to the starting view distance of the new clipmap terrain (which made possible the usual arbitrary setting of the old tiles view distance) means that all of things related to the Ardor3D based release are in place now. I still want to do some profiling and updating the content hieararchy before commiting the stuff and rolling out the release. Stay tuned... :)

Smaller news is that save games, screenshots and created characters are going to be saved in your home directory under '.jclassicrpg' sub-directory -- instead of the game's main directory's sub-directories. Packaging the release will be easier for distribution package maintainers (if there are any...I know of one package only tho' - for OpenSuSE -, but later there might be more packagers as the project gets more complete). Other lesser tweaks happened since last post, leaving around 2-3 things on the TODO list before committing and releasing the first Ardor3D version of jcrpg.

It takes a heap of time to get the things really polished and perfectly working. I've stumbled upon a dozen of smaller things that block the way. 80% of them eliminated, so the code is getting into shape. A few still left on the list but I hope to get those done in the next week or so. Well, just to name one heavier problem that took hours to conquer was Terrain reloading... starting at a different point than new game's origo rendered it ruined..now it's origo is the saved coordinate of the player and that way it's working flawlessly.

tidbit is restlessly helping out the content side. This time a new guardpost has been raised from the ground. Thanks tidbit!

I have some bad news, some newly inserted 'assert' codes in the current stable and development version of Intel GPU driver for linux (gma965 that I know of) is making the game stop just upon starting... I hate to say, but without removing those assertions directly in the driver game won't start for you. If removed, it works okay... ATi and nVidia drivers are both working nice under Linux/Windows - except ATi's framebuffer doesnt render texture shadows (Rikard @ ardor3d pointed me to some sites were people had the same issue, thanks), so you can assume that the shadows of the foliage won't be rendered (under both Win/Linux). nVidia is perfectly fine again.

I've been messing with the Depth of Field render pass today, porting it from jme2 to Ardor3D. Finally it worked out quite nicely! Could find my previous fault I made when ported an ogre3d example to jme2 - near blur wasn't working. The new ported version is fully functional and a tad bit more optimal as well as the depth buffer generated by drawing the root pass is used instead of generating a new one. Focal plane, nearblur and farblur depth are all parameterized. I'll polish it a bit more. Thanks Rikard of the Ardor3D team for helping the process with many useful pieces of advice!

Texture baked realtime on terrain with TexturedGeometryClipmapTerrain is starting to get into shape. The baked texture isnt going to be of high qualty, to prevent CPU overburden. As the heights of the terrain point are exactly matching the old tiled terrain heights it blends more or less okay with the old system. In the game while walking around it's really fast. But the loading of the saved games takes about twice as long. Anyway now it's possible to see the faraway deserts, mountains etc. I'll try to look into adding some kind of vegetation to the further away parts too, but the edges wherre the detailed vegetation meets with the low detail... might look too rough...it will need some experimentation... Well the terrain still needs a proper Normal buffer calculation as well, hope to see that Ardor3D terrain codebase is going to get that someday.

Pleased to inform you that in the recent weeks tidbit created some nice new 3D content, namely new buildings for a temple and a shop. Thanks! Meanwhile I've been pushing the tests/validation of the ported code, squashing some upcoming problems and bugs. It looks like it is steadily becoming more and more finalized. Latest improvement was the restructuring of the directories containing textures and creating a separated media-raw hierarchy which servers as convenient base for batch converting images to the different detail levels and ultimately to DDS file format. I'm happy to tell that now 98% of the images are converted to DDS with mipmaps with AMD ATi's Compressonator and that all of these finally got their proper detail level versions (high/middle/low/low_png) obsoleting most of the textures found in the 'common' category. The DDS part was hiding some traps for me, for now I had to change to use the Compressonator instead of the GIMP DDS plugin as that one was generating DDS with missing mipmap levels somehow - interestingly it was okay under Linux + ATi, that way I didnt notice until I tested it under Windows where it presented small gaps in the texture. (Another thing that I should rant about is Intel's driver -- works under Linux but the UI part crashes under Windows + Intel GPU... this is still unresolved, funny thing is that if I downgraded to a 3 years old Windows Intel GPU driver the crash went away.)

I can proudly report that conversion of code to Ardor3D is fully completed! Water reflection, particle effects, load/reload is now working nicely. Next comes testing and profiling, further stressing stability and memory consumption before I consider the whole story to be finished regarding Ardor3D. I have some performance regressions, but I couldn't yet correctly set up the use of DisplayLists with Ardor3D's SceneCompiler. BTW water reflection looks nice...