The release rolled out more than a week ago, there's been over 300 downloads! I'm really happy about that. Team members and a few other piece of folks pumped back some useful notes and bits. Still it would be quite useful if more of those kind gamers who try it would give us a heads-up about how things worked out. So hereby I kindly call those of you interested in this piece of game to give us some more of feedback. Here at the blog (or blawg?) or the forums. It would certainly boost the enthusiasm to carry on! After all this game is not for its own sake only, but for the gamers too. Without players it all might seem worthless... So grab your keyboar(d)s please!

Here you can download the quick fix in case you have downloaded the game before this post (20091102 version) - those who have the new version (20091104) can skip this post.
The bug prevents you from loading the save games. Also the save game saved without this fix will not be working even with the fix. So it's recommended to update ASAP, before saving games! :) Soon I'll upload a full package too. Installation: unzip in the folder of the game, overwriting previous files.

EDIT: Full package uploaded now. Fresh downloaders use the new full package - you shouldnt do anything special, just go to download page and now everything should be okay. :)

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:

"
- New monsters/humanoids (by tidbit, TheAncientGoat)
- New animations for some beings (by tidbit)
- New town types (anatipion and yeti by tidbit)
- New buildings (by tidbit)
- New character voicepacks (by getter77 and qubodup)
- Generated Road System added
- Mouse support added (based on patches by mkienenb)
- Camera set to smooth turning in combat mode
- Options menu completed
- Very basic scenario support with seed choosing at New Game
- Intro text for scenario added
- Behavior skills are now used in perception
- Easier to use character creation
- World map window enhancements, graphics, town icons
- Enhanced shaders and more normal map textures
- Displaying percept beings in 3D in walk mode with fade shader
- Top button row for accessing windows
- Tooltip system added
- Optimized font rendering for UI elements
- Lamp light added (key L)
- Buffer pool debug OSD (key T)
- Many-many bugfixes, optimization, reference leak fixes
"

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 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 also let the remaining audio tracks to become free (CC-BY-SA without the non-commercial attribute). It still needs ~340$ (see Project Budget on the left side of the blog).

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. :)

Spread the good news. I have no time for a proper blogpost now, tomorrow I''ll do it. Anyway here is the link to the download zip: http://sourceforge.net/projects/javacrpg/files/jClassicRPG/svn_20091102/jcrpg-20091102.zip/download . Instructions still here: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/javacrpg/index.php?title=Download . Use the jcrpg.bat under Windows. chmod +x jcrpg.sh under Linux. ;)

Good news feature- and contributionwise. A quick feature idea born out of 'nowhere', as with the further development of the Entity'O'Meter and skills the code is now able to be aware who you can really percept/recognize, that way it's really straightforward to display those in the 3D world too! And that's already working well and committed to SVN. A little bit more care for the unit placement code and it's ready. I even wrote a little shader that modifies alpha channel of the fragment color to let the appearing units fade in and out instead of instantly popping up. Shaping it nicely. :) Check the owner of the house (the test NPC gorilla for all the humanoid towns :D) on the screenie.

Meanwhile our fearless 3D staff (embodied by tidbit) is ruthlessly treading on the path of The Federated Animation of Mostly All Beings in jCRPG. That means 3 new monsters got animation (idle,attack,damage): harpy, plant'o'bite, lizard. Big thanks to tidbit again! Also getter77 is providing nice new soundpacks to spice up the experience. It will be fun to play with the psychotic, the evil or the nice guy voices just contributed by him. :)

While the freegamedev.net forum is up again and the recovery of the posts and data is underway, the backup forum is still available. I want to keep the separated forum as a mean of alternative even after things get okay on the original forum, but I still think keeping jClassicRPG as a part of the fgd forum community is an important goal.

PS.: further refining placement, a test shot with a group of angry boarmages around. ;)

Polishing, polishing, polishing - that's what's being done right now. And nice contributions by our new community member getter77, an aspiring and talented game developer. Right now he has created a pair of male voicepacks (1 for psychotic and 1 for bully personality). Thanks getter77 (aka Brian)!

Meanwhile I've fired up gimp-normalmap + gimp-dds plugin again on my laptop, and started to spit out a dozen of normal/height/spec maps for the already present building/road/tree textures. The result is awesome. The heavy use of such mappings culminated a series of interesting bugs/detection of missing features of the shaders. Most of these problems are now resolved, also a new level of normal map shader detail is added to the Options menu (detailed shader can handle 2 lights blended). Also fog is now supported by those shaders - and the shadow render pass is also fixed to work correctly with those. Check the screenshots for shaders/mappings in action! :) On the second one you can catch tidbit's new stone base square for the anatipion towns. Release is very near now...

Options menu is again in focus. A few related bugs resolved now. Meanwhile tidbit has added cool new animations for the new humanoids (yeti and anatipion [which is walking, scorpion like people of desert]), all those got into the SVN too. Anatipions even have their own building models (done also by tidbit). Thank you!

More testing is under way. Even Windows 7 64 bit test version got its round after Vista64. (You'll have to be careful with Windows 7, like installing latest nvidia driver for nvidia cards, otherwise it doesn't work. Also it's recommended to use 32 bit Java under Windows, seems like 64 bit doesnt want to work with the supplied 64 bit lwjgl dlls.) Well, with my new mobo + CPU and my good 'old' 8800GTS, I've tried to boost the limits of view in game, game works nicely with a view distance of 100 now. Check screenshots.

Unfortunately a full system failure at the freegamedev.net machine results in a quite long outage in the forums services too. It's not yet sure if the forums can be normally restored. Let's hope it will get better, but in a week or more you can expect the forums to be down.

Brighter news is that the polishing of the release is progressing very well. Apart from adding a few more entity icons and probably sounds no other thing is planned to be coded, added before releasing.

EDIT: till it gets back, you can use this backup forum http://jcrpg.ath.cx/phpbb/

In brief: smooth camera turning added for combat plus zooming activated enemy title text for better understanding what's going on the battlefield; left over memory reference hunting to allow restarting/loading games multiple times without lag or OutOfMemory; new male character voice pack by qubodup added by qubodup personally, thank you; a dozen other smaller bugfixes; correcly working mouselook while moving; added starting-at-closest-shrine at starting new game; saving of Options menu settings implemented (now on you can use jcrpg.sh/bat instead of the special scripts for different detail levels and use Options menu to select/tweak the needed detal level and save). New content done by tidbit awaits integration (brand new humanoid base model and its home buildings). After adding those I'll start to give the really really final polishing to the release package (reviewing scripts and documents) and then......

Qubodup @ freegamer has reviewed a couple of 3D RPG aspirants of the FOSS scene, among them jClassicRPG got a few nice paragraphs and in-game videos too! Thanks qubodup! :) Videos: travel & battle, character creation. (As a a side note: a few smaller annoying bugs and 'features' along with a tough memory-leak related problem has been resolved since last post, all in SVN. Still polishing a bit before rolling out the test release.)

Yetis and igloo created by tidbit are marching gloriously into the SVN of jcrpg. :) As you can guess yetis live in igloo villages in the polar region.

Minelamp light switch (key 'L') is added, so you can see better things around you while walking in the dark. Currently unlimited use. More polishing here and there, cooperating with tidbit before releasing.

While TheAncientGoat's worpion monster and tidbit's Shrine model is now integrated along with a proper placement of it around the road blocks (btw, shrines help you resting, giving you relieve from monsters lurking around), I've run into other smaller things that needed care since long. So I couldn't resist to touch those codes - some refactoring, some new codes. Two major tasks were done regarding this: first the upgrade of the EntityOMeter with being type / distance / angle, second is the rewrite from scratch the player movement verification code (logical, not graphical!). This along with nicer code means that a half dozen skills are now worthy to level: mythology/ecology helps to recognize nearby creatures, survival/hide/secure will help you to evade/avoid them, tracking/architecture will help you to spot entities and tell distance, hide/disguise will cover your identity (this one not of much use yet), climbing/tumbling will let you pass over obstacled height (mountains, steep riversides). It's good to know that setting up your Behavior skills is turning those into 3 times more powerfull at skill checks (like when you try hiding, tracking etc.)! Another good news is that I've added a heap of tooltips to the skills. Things are slowly getting over the coding and content integration phase, steadily floating towards that overdue test release.

Usability and UI have been the primary focus for some time now. This time in a short way: player titled save games, better game slot info in load menu, colored icons for the populations of world map loaded from 32-bit depth 9x9 sized .ico files, busy screen for economy updates with multiple randomly chosen images, very basic scenario support with an intro text displayed in the new StoryPartDisplayWindow (scrolling, fading in). Also I've further tested under Windows Vista 64 bit, no crashes luckily.

Next two thing is addition of Calendar to the World Map and integrate content. Then release! :)

Polishing the UI is still the focus for a few days more. The addition of tooltip box is finished. Till now the character creation dropdown lists for Races and Professions got tooltip texts. It's quite easy to extend the tooltip system to most of the UI elements later if needed.

Another new feature made in: a new set of checkboxes were added to the turn act window (combat), which are reflecting if the given character's choice for action is valid or not for the turn. That way the player is able to spot which character's previous action is not doable in the current round, making it easier to see what's left to be set before starting next combat round.

Till recently I always were a bit uncertain how the previous 2D text rendering might work out on the long run. On screens with dense windows the FPS counter dropped down a bit too much for my taste. There are two different text rendering ways used in the game - one was used for the bottom log, the other for all the UI. The true type font renderer was used for all the UI elements - that renderer was creating a separate quad for each letters in a text. The monospace (bitmap based) text renderer was much nicer and more performant -- but it's working with its own font bitmap format only!

I looked at it and found that if I was able to create my own bitmap out of the current UI ttf font (Vinque), I could replace the slower method and use the low poly version instead. So two things followed by a big refactoring of the UI elements changed the whole UI into a faster performing sweetness. :D

First, I overrode the jME Text class (shape responsible for 2D texts) and thus overrode the default font bitmap path too. Second, I used FontForge to tweak the ttf font into a monospace font set exported into a new ttf set and using 'convert' of ImageMagick converted it into a bitmap. A little tweak with GIMP and voila, there goes the Vinque font and TextureState based font rendering of jME tuned for jClassicRPG. :) After that, a tideous process of reviewing all the UI element and window codes came. But it was worthy! On my Intel gfx card it can even double the FPS on the character creation screens! Saving a lot of polys and also scene graph elements, that's quite understandable. :)

Still working on the UI part, this time a lot of minor fixes and polishing of the mouse input was going on. Finally I decided to not wait for the top button icons to be contributed, instead 'do-it-yourself', created them by modifying different free icons or painting it myself. I hope you like it. You will be able to click them with the 'pointer mode' mouse, swap between the different windows - that is quite comfortable. :)

The other major upgrade is of the Character Creation part. Following the idea of TheAncientGoat @ freegamer, I changed the profession selection process. Instead of letting professions be chosen after tweaking the attributes to unknown minimums, now player can select a profession which automatically sets the minimum attribute levels that are required for the given profession. This makes it a lot more easier to select a profession. The other change is on the skill setting page - added a Reset button, which will reset the skill value set to the original values.

Next I can move back to enhancing the map. After that I will integrate the new 3D content (made by tidbit & TheAncientGoat). That done a test release is due - so there'll be a new release before moving on to the next chunk of bigger development goal (story/dialog/commerce system).

I have just fixed two issues related to Windows + the new mouse input. First, cursors under Windows rather be 32x32 or displayed corrupted - googled it up after a series of experimentation in Gimp with no success. Now all cursors resized to 32x32, to let it work as fine as under Linux. Second, main menu mouse input didnt work under Windows - solving it was to prepare the code for Windows specific file path separator. All committed into SVN repo.

MysticSkript visited us on IRC chat and told about a problem related to running latest release under Vista64bit. I figured out just today that the solution right now is to use x86 (32-bit) Java installation if you want to run the previous release. (SVN version should work with 64 bit Java and Vista64 tho' I haven't tested it yet.)

Now that mouse support is in, I have looked at the possible ways to use the mouse over the default ways of input on the keyboard that are now already possible by using the mouse. Of two major thing the first to have a ButtonRow on the top of the screen, which let's the player toggle the different windows and to start/stop camping (resting). The second thing is to let the player use the character portraits to raise the Inventory or Character sheet for the given character. Both of these are now in the SVN repo. Check the screenshot! :) I plan to add unique image buttons for the top ButtonRow's instead of the text. Also a nice background for the strip. Nicely done contributions for these two would be mostly welcome! (The image buttons for: MainMenu, Map, Camp, PartyOrder, Behavior [party members background skill selection for use while walking in normal mode], Act [do things like use an item, drink potion], Search [look for opening a door, trap, chest]. For size, look at the screenshot.)

Currently I have narrowed down my attention to the process of providing full mouse support for the UI. I've added mouse event processing to 70% of the UI elements already, and also cursor replacement, different cursor types for normal/scrolling/tuning values etc. Still more is to be done, the remaining UI element classes awaiting, along with the addition of new Close signs for the windows that lack them, reviewing the UI mechanisms of the already present windows. And of course more and more testing. :) Things are in SVN, so anyone interested can help in testing as well.
Update: spending some more hours on the matter today, now it's time to announce: the mouse support dev is completed and committed to SVN!