RPGDX > Forums > Projects / Screenshots > PARPG - a post-apocalyptic RPG in early planning stages

mvBarracuda · Posted: Thu Aug 06, 2009 5:54 pm Post subject:

You're my Waterloo ... I'll be your Stanley Park. Heya and welcome to yet another PARPG news update. I know that you're prolly disappointed due the lack of the updates lately and I'm truly sorry about it. The project went through a bunch of problems lately, university-related deadlines are nearing and my procrastination mentality didn't help either. As I'm still rather busy today, here's little newsflash rather than a full featured update. Hope you enjoy it nevertheless.

A bunch of problems popped up in the programming department but we can hopefully cope with all of them in the long run nevertheless. The graphics department has been really hardworking lately and new concept art and renders have found their way into our wiki gallery.

The writing department will flesh out their storyline proposal until the end of August and we'll decide upon one proposal within one week after that. Last but not least PARPG can be finally found at sourceforge now as well: http://sourceforge.net/projects/parpg/

Read the full news update at the PARPG development blog.

If you wonder about the lack of news updates lately: I felt a bit like looked into a really icy cavern. Like that one:

mvBarracuda · Posted: Wed Aug 19, 2009 1:40 pm Post subject:

It's time for flash, newsflash Gordon! Heya and welcome to yet another PARPG news update. I'm still quite busy with writing papers for university but as I got 1.5 weeks until I need to hand in the next one, there is sufficent time to finally post an update here. Enjoy!

For the ones who wondered: our SVN directory structure recently changed a bit, so if you got problems checking out the latest files, head over the blog and read about the details. The new programmers on the team are making good progress when it comes to cleaning up the code base and we've agreed upon establishing a so called board of programmers. The three members of the board will decide about the future direction of the department and act as mediators in cases where we can't agree upon a certain approach.

In the graphics department there are a bunch of new 3d models and pieces of concept art to take a look at. We've got an animated player character now (idle & walk animations), others have designed Soviet soldiers and improvised crossbows. Furthermore one of the concept artists created a first GUI mockup while another one created a bunch of props that could be pretty useful when it's cold outside.

Zenbitz came up with proposals for levelless character progression, ways how to play the game as well a state of the world setting.

Read the full news update at the PARPG development blog.

So having at least a solid idea of the next steps to tackle, I can only say: forward march!

Verious · Mage Joined: 06 Jan 2004 Posts: 409 Location: Online

The animations look good, but I think the feet are a little too far apart in the left animation. The feet and legs (below the knees) currently appear to flair out at the bottom; they should be narrower than shoulder width instead of equal to the shoulder width.

Keep the updates coming!

mvBarracuda · Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 1:51 pm Post subject:

Heya and welcome to yet another PARPG news update. Sorry for the lack of updates lately but I had to take a break from the project to sort out a bunch of problems in real life. Now I'm finally back, reunited to PARPG. Let's get started right away, the vast majority of the news update will covers our plans for the first public release of PARPG that we hope to ship around the end of the year.

We were holding an IRC meeting of the entire development team recently to discuss the plans for our first public release. This update is mainly a rephrased extended version of the meeting notes. If you're interested in all the small details, check out the full meeting log!

One of the new programmers on the team, or1andov, started to work on the dialog engine of PARPG and you can already see some first results of his work in our SVN repository. Caution: beware of his funny dialog humour despite still missing API documentation and general code annotations :-)

Furthermore we'll agreed upon the code-related features that we would like to implement for techdemo 1 as well about the graphics assets that we would like to show. The graphics assets will mainly depend on the writing of the two quests that are planned for this first official PARPG release. If you're interested in the details, check out the threads about these quests at the writing board of the forums!

Read the full news update at the PARPG development blog.

That's all for today. Next news update scheduled for Monday, 19th of October. See you then :-) And now: animation gallore by Sirren.

Hajo · Posted: Wed Oct 07, 2009 7:50 am Post subject:

I'd start my very personal quest of migrating to the warmest spot left on the icy planet.

I hope you find enough arctic climate fans for your tech demo :)

Malignus · Scholar Joined: 12 May 2009 Posts: 198

You're planning to have this released in less than three months? That's awfully ambitious. Maybe you should aim for a slightly longer release schedule?

mvBarracuda · Posted: Wed Oct 07, 2009 5:06 pm Post subject:

Hmm I think we can actually release a first version until the end of the year. Release often, release early :-)

mvBarracuda · Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2009 9:57 am Post subject:

Just wanted to let you know, that we've recently published a first press release at our blog. The press release basically summarizes the most vital information about the project and is accompanied by a promotion kit that contains selected screenshots, animations, renders and concept art pieces. Check out the press release at our blog.

mvBarracuda · Posted: Tue Oct 20, 2009 4:46 pm Post subject:

Heya and welcome to yet another PARPG news update. Two weeks have passed since the last regular one and I have to say that they were rather eventful for the development team. Let's jump into the news update right away.

Our first press release has been a success and the project got featured in the news section of old school Fallout fansite NMA.

Our programmers finally managed to customize the FIFE map editor for our purposes and a first map editor tutorial is in the making. Zenbitz and shevegen stepped up in the meanwhile and have started to flesh out the quests that are planned for our first techdemo release.

A fellow Russian Flash programmer created a web application to test Sirren's rendered characters and Fallout modding veteran Continuum modeled a junkhouse residing on a fundament of barrels. In the meanwhile Sirren created his first building for the upcoming techdemo as well: a guard tower.

Read the full news update at the PARPG development blog.

That's all for today. Next news update scheduled for Monday, 2nd of November. See you then :-)

And here's your visual teaser for today's update. A quite nice looking guard character portrait created by concept artist JustinOperable:

Hajo · Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 8:12 am Post subject:

Wow, you really got a lot of people working on this project. I'm amazed of your team building and managing skills :)

Also good to have some news in the otherwise so very dead forums ...

BadMrBox · Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 1:24 pm Post subject:

mvBarracuda · Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2009 6:39 pm Post subject:

Heya and welcome to yet another PARPG news update. This time the question of the week is: Mirror mirror on the wall, who has the fairest portrait of them all? You decide!

To cope with the complexity of creating an entire large-scale game, we've recently agreed to start using Trac and especially its ticket feature for all departments as it turned out to be a great help for our programmers.

The programming department established a weekly round table meeting. Feel free to be around, they meet every Saturday, 6PM GMT at the project's IRC channel.

Map changing has been finally fixed so you can now return to map as well without crashing PARPG anymore. Furthermore the work on the quest_engine has been started and finally load and save functionality are working again as well.

The introduction articles of the writing and graphics departments have been recently revamped and placeholder dialog has been replaced with actual character lines for the techdemo. Say hello to the drunkard!

The settings of the Blender rendering setup have been documented at the wiki, hoping that 3d artists who use different 3d modeling packages might be able to use this kind of information to set up their tool of choice for PARPG.

Our wiki gallery finally features a (yet _very_ small) screenshot section and you can now decide which portrait you like best.

Read the full news update at the PARPG development blog.

That's all for today. Next news update scheduled for Monday, 16nd of November. See you then :-)

And here's my personal favourite: Gaspard's hatman portrait:

mvBarracuda · Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 3:55 pm Post subject:

Note: I've adjusted the contact information in the starting post. Please DO NOT get in contact with me via email or PM if you would like to get involved in PARPG.

Personally answering every application turned out to be a lot of stress and as I'm rather busy right now, we have to send you to the introduction board of our forums, where you can get involved in the project. I know it sucks that you have to register there but it turned out to be the only viable solution for us at this point. Application emails have been piling up during busy weeks and I simply didn't have the time to check out all of them and reply to them in a way that each serious application would have deserved to be replied to. Thanks for your understanding.

But let's get to the news update right now! Sometimes there seem to be an endless number of obstacles to jump over in the course of developing a large scale game from scratch. In the end it all comes down to persistence to work through all of this. This said: heya and welcome to yet another PARPG news update!

Let's start with a short FIFE-related note: if you're running the SVN version of PARPG on your Windows system, make sure you check out the new FIFE Win32 DevKit. The FIFE team recently updated their DevKit to address a really annoying guichan issue and furthermore also moved from Python 2.5 to Python 2.6. Our download guide has been updated according to it so make sure to check it out!

On the code front amo-ej1 created a dialog validation tool that will help the writers to verify that the dialog files don't contain any syntactical errors. Furthermore: saritor started to refactor our GUI code in a branch, an architecture proposal can be found at the wiki.

Here's a quick rundown of the events in the graphics department. New artist on the team comscar created the portrait of a snow shoveler in cooperation with veteran Gaspard. As Gaspard has been on a drawing spree lately, he also had a stab at this snow panorama.

Continuum modeled a collection of rusty barrels while new artist on the team EGO created two mockups of the techdemo mall area. While EGO was on a run he also created a lone explorer concept.

Looks like the situation in the concept art department is improving lately: Q_x is new on the team as well and contributed a main menu concept right away. We have also updated the wiki gallery over the course of the last two weeks and added additionals screenshots there.

I know that I sound like a broken record but we're still short of 3d artists :-( You would like to help us out of our misery? Please don't hesitate to introduce yourself at our forums!

Read the full news update at the PARPG development blog.

That's all for today. Next news update scheduled for Monday, 30th of November. See you then :-)

As we're still short of 3d artists at the moment, concept art veteran zeli had a stab at 3d modeling again. Not bad for the start:

Hajo · Posted: Fri Nov 20, 2009 12:34 pm Post subject:

mvBarracuda · Posted: Fri Nov 20, 2009 12:50 pm Post subject:

Thanks a bunch Hajo :-) Your continued feedback is really appreciated.