[Hajo]

[mvBarracuda]

Heya and welcome to yet another PARPG news update! This one will be rather short and not so picture-heavy as the last ones. Most of us have been pretty busy lately, so the number of topics to write about is rather small.

First and foremost: we found out that shipping the upcoming techdemo release of PARPG in 2009 is not realistic anymore at this point. There is simply too much planned content still missing but we'll try our best to release the techdemo in early 2010; hopefully between late January and early March. I'm sure that's no news but this aspect needs to be underlined again: content licensing is simply a huge can of worms. We can hopefully ship the entire content of the techdemo under CC 3.0 BY-SA terms but it looks like at least some used textures that reside in our SVN repository and won't ship with the game will be licensed under different terms. For details check the blog.

Open source enthuasiast Sindwiller posted a work in progress audio track. Head over to our forums and feel free to provide feedback. We plan to feature the final version of the track in our first techdemo release.

The objects directory has been recently restructured and kaydeth created a first test version of the win32 installer. Furthermore we also recently discovered a performance bottleneck that shows up if you have a lot of map instances. Furtunately we were able to profile the issue and the FIFE devs plan to improve performance in this field in one of their upcoming releases.

The techdemo characters have been further fleshed out; both at the wiki as well as their ingame scripts in SVN.

Sirren created a bunch of furniture, including beds. All the new models including the used textures can be found in the media section of our SVN repository now!

Now one last personal remark from my side. Unfortunately a lot of university-related tasks have been piling up over the course of the last weeks. I'm simply not good at multitasking so for now I have to take a break until the Christmas holidays to finally finish two still outstanding papers. Don't worry, I'll be be back to bring you the next (short) news update some time between Christmas and New Year's Eve. Stay tuned!

Read the full news update at the PARPG development blog.

And here's the teaser for this week: a gate. Hey, but at least we figured out how to properly apply alphablending whenever the player characters walks under the way archway!

[Hajo]

I must say, this picture makes the posting above very hard to read, because I need to scroll left and right each line ...

Maybe you can scale the image to 800 or less pixels width? That would be helpful, thanks.

Other than that, congrats for having made it to Coyotes monthly list of role playing games :)

[mvBarracuda]

Good point! Replaced it with a clickable 500px thumbnail version.

[mvBarracuda]

Heya and welcome to yet another PARPG news update. We hope you had pleasant holidays and wild New Year's Eve parties :-)

Some of us just returned from their holiday break and now it's time to find out who's still around and can help us to release our first techdemo in early 2010.

This said: open source enthusiast Sindwiller is definately still around and released an updated but yet still work in progress version of his Snow may never end audio track. Feel free to give it a listen and let us know what you think.

While our programmers have been enjoying a well-deserved rest, the FIFE team has been working on a new stable release (the first one after 18 months!) of their open source engine that is utilized by PARPG as well. If things go as planned, their 0.3.0 release will be shipped at 2010/20/01. With some massive luck, the new experimental view code that is currently in testing stages, will make it into the release as well. We've tested the code ourselves and although there are some smaller bugs left, performance improvements have been massive on some systems :-)

Zenbitz hasn't been lazy over the holidays, but rather continued to work on the dialog scripts, so feel free to check out the latest dialogs in action.

Looks like our concept artists don't celebrate Christmas; at least I have no idea when they were able to find the time to pump out a massive number of new character portraits. Last but not least, we're doing some hidden product placement to advertize a long time favourite indie RPG project that recently released a first combat demo of their game.

Read the full news update at the PARPG blog to find out which game it is: PARPG development blog

And as mentioned above, here's one of the new portraits, say hello to Jacob:



That's all for today, next news update scheduled for Monday, 18th of January.

[mvBarracuda]

Heya and welcome to yet another PARPG news update! We've finally made it: the first techdemo release of PARPG is available for Linux, Mac and Win32 :-)

Win32:
* PARPG techdemo 1 r522 Win32 installer

Linux, Mac, BSD variants:
* FIFE r3236 source package (needed to run PARPG)
* PARPG techdemo 1 r522 source package

You can find detailed instructions how to install PARPG on your system at our blog.

My permanent departure:
This said: 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.

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.

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: martin DOT vohland AT googlemail DOT com.

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.

[Jinroh]

Looks cool. I'll download it later. hehe.

I hope you can get some more people to take over and finish it for you. ^_^
_________________
Mao Mao Games
The wolf and his mate howl, taking solace in the silver moon. Pressing ever foreward to see what the future holds.