FIFE community & development blog







Dec 1, 2009 0

Post-Apocalyptic RPG blog: Tear you apart

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.

Project management department

The first and the prolly most important news is that it turned out that releasing our first techdemo of PARPG won’t happen in 2009. We’re still working hard to ship it in early 2010 (hopefully between late January and early March), but there is simply too much planned content missing at this point to ship it this year. We’re sorry that it will take longer than originally planned but you still got the option to check out what we already have in place by testing the SVN version of PARPG.

One aspect of game development which gave us a lot of headaches are licensing issues. For the code it’s rather simple: we’ll publish all Python scripts under GPL 3.0. However for the non-code assets, things are more tricky. I don’t have the time to go into too many details but one of the main problems is that it’s often hard to find good textures licensed under terms that permit commercial distribution as well. To address this problem Q_x created a list of asset websites that have published their material under terms which are compatible with our chosen CC 3.0 BY-SA license.

In reality it’s actually way more complicated because a lot of asset websites actually do not permit that their textures are sold or redistributed at other texture websites. But as soon as you actually apply the texture to a model and render it, the resulting render is not affected by these NC and restrictive redistribution clauses according to their license. My gut feeling tells me that the resulting renders are actually derivative works as they’re based on the textures and should therefore be infected by the NC and restricted redistribution clauses but I guess it’s okay to sell and redistribute the renders nevertheless as their license seems to permit that.

Hopefully we can ship the entire techdemo 1 content under CC 3.0 BY-SA terms. That just means the actual content that is used in the game. We might need to ship the source versions (e.g. models and textures) of the techdemo content under different licenses, especially whenever NC textures were used. It should hopefully not affect distribution of the PARPG game, just the distribution of our media assets sources library. The only conclusion I have right now is that licenses are simply a huge can of worms. Having to worry about all these aspects takes away a lot of the fun that game development is. It’s necessary nevertheless and we’ll come up with a solid solution for techdemo 1.

Audio department

Finally some news from the audio front again. Open source enthusiast Sindwiller posted a work in progress version of a track he’s currently working on at the forums. Feel free to check it out and provide feedback. We can hopefully feature the final version of it in our first techdemo release.

Programming department

We finally started to restructure the objects directory to get rid of the rather ugly and confusing objects/objects directory. Objects/objects has been split up into objects/items (smaller objects that characters can actually pick up) and objects/scenery. If you’re interested in the details, head over to our forums.

Win32 developer Kaydeth looked into creating a first test version of the upcoming Win32 PARPG techdemo installer. We’re using NSIS for this purpose and so far things look good. There are still some tweaks to be made, e.g. offering users the choice to install ActivePython 2.6 as well as PyYaml; furthermore we’re still having some problems with Vista / Win7 UAC but we’re positive that we can fix them before we ship a release. If you want to test Kaydeth’s test installer, check out this thread at the forums.

We’ve been experimenting with map sizes for the techdemo lately and ran into a performance bottleneck that shows up if you have a map with many (> 20000) map instances. It turned out that FIFE’s view code is not that well optimized in this regard. PARPG developer amo-ej1 profiled the issue and reported back about his findings at the forums. Furthermore he also documented the necessary steps to profile PARPG at our wiki. The FIFE devs plan to have a look into the problem in their 0.3.2 release. This release is planned for mid 2010. So for now, we’ll simply go for maps that feature less than 20k instances and we should be pretty much on the save side performance-wise.

Writing department

A little news flash from our writing department: Zenbitz did recently flesh out the inn area of the techdemo including the denizens of this location. He has been rather hardworking on the dialogues of several techdemo characters as well and commited their scripts into SVN over the course of the last weeks. You can talk to several characters now, so feel free to check it out yourself by giving the SVN version of PARPG a shot.

Graphics department

This news update is not as image-heavy as some of the ones before. Our graphics artists have been quite busy as Christmas is nearing. Nevertheless 3d artist Sirren found the time to create several pieces of furniture, including beds.

He furthermore also created a gate that’s part of the outer boundary of the techdemo area. Python programmer Or1andov implemented alpha blending for the gate (and other objects that reside on a layer above the characters) so your view is not blocked while walking around under specific map instances. I actually had to split up the pillars of the gate into several 70px wide pieces to work around z-ordering issues. Fortunately Zenbitz ported amo-ej1’s image slicing script to PIL (the Python Imaging Library). The original version of the image slicing script was utilizing PythonMagick. And as PythonMagick has to be built from source and the build process is quite complicated, there was no easy way to get the script working on non-*NIX systems. Fortunately that’s not the case anymore with the PIL version.

In case you’re interested in all the details of the process of getting the gate into the game, check out this thread at the forums. All the other are surely happy to see a screenshot at least:
Gate screenshot

One last note: I recently had the time to bring some assets, that had been lying around in Trac but hadn’t been commited into the repository yet, into SVN. In case you want to check them out, head over to the media part of the SVN trunk.

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!

Nov 23, 2009 0

FIFE: Code::Blocks build issues on Win32 resolved

Heya dear FIFE community!

Just a short note about the Code::Blocks build issues that showed up on Win32 when using an SVN snapshot of the Code::Blocks IDE. It seems that the problems were rather caused by Code::Blocks itself and were unrelated to FIFE.

If you still have problems building FIFE via Code::Blocks on Win32, follow these steps:

If you still got problems with building FIFE from SVN sources via Code::Blocks, add a comment to this trac ticket. Happy hacking!

Nov 17, 2009 0

Post-Apocalyptic RPG blog: Obstacle 2

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!

Project management department

As a bunch of interested community members have checked out the SVN versions of PARPG, here’s a somewhat important announcement. The FIFE development team recently released a new version of their Win32 DevKit (which has been formerly known as the Win32 compile SDK). In case you’re running an SVN version of PARPG on your Windows system, you should switch to the new DevKit as soon as possible as the old 2008.1-r1 compile SDK will stop to work as soon as you update your FIFE checkout. The new DevKit addresses a very annoying guichan utf8 issue and furthermore introduces Python 2.6 support. That also means you’ll actually need Python 2.6 to run FIFE-based games on Windows and furthermore you’ll also need PyYaml for Python 2.6 to run PARPG.

I don’t want to go into any details here at the blog. If you run PARPG on Win32 right now, check out these two articles:

In case you can’t get PARPG working with the new DevKit, head over to our forums.

Programming department

As this is a _very_ image heavy update, I’ll keep programming-related remarks rather short in this time. amo-ej1 created a dialog checking tool that helps the writers to validate their scripts. Saritor started to refactor our GUI code and created an architecture proposal for the GUI module at the wiki as well.

Graphics department

Let’s welcome new artist comscar on the team! His handdrawn snow shoveler concept has been digitalized and refined by veteran Gaspard:
Snow shoveler

Gaspard also created a snow panomara concept entitled Alone in the wilds:
Alone in the wilds

Fallout modding veteran Continuum created a set of rusty barrels. The model together with the textures that have been taken from burningwell.rog can be now found in SVN as well:
Collection of barrels

Unfortunately I forgot to cover the creations of new artist on the team EGO in the last news update, so let’s take care of it this time. He created a mockup of the techdemo mall location that can be used as source of inspiration by our 3d artists:
Mall #1

Mall #2

EGO furthermore also created a lone explorer concept art piece. Enjoy it:
Lone explorer

I promised a whole bunch of new images in this update, so you’ll get a whole bunch! Let’s also welcome Q_x on the team who created this main menu mockup:
Main menu mockup

We introduced a screenshots section at the gallery in the last news update. In the course of the last two weeks we’ve updated it with a couple of older shots that hadn’t been added yet. Feel free to check it out.

I know that I sound like a broken record but we’re still short of 3d artists who could model objects for the upcoming techdemo with their modeling tool of choice. In case you’re interested in getting involved, please introduce yourself at the forums.

As we are still short of 3d artists right now, concept artist Zeli had a stab at 3d modeling and created his first model for PARPG: a multi level building. Looks like he has a hand for this:
Multi level building

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

Nov 16, 2009 2

FIFE: New FIFE Win32 DevKit available

The FIFE team is proud to announce the release an updated version of the Win32 DevKit!

New project management

Before we get to the DevKit I would like to say some personal words first. FIFE has been recently taken over by prock, who had contributed to FIFE in the past and who will now act as new project manager. Together with vtchill and cheesesucker they’re trying to get FIFE development back on track. All the best to you lads and I’m really glad that the project now seems in good hands again. There is a release planned but there is no agreed upon release date yet. We can hopefully see an updated stable FIFE package around the end of this year / in early 2010 if everything goes as planned. Stay tuned and all the best to the brave devs who decided to revive FIFE development :-)

What is the Win32 DevKit?

But back to the original point of this article: What is the Win32 DevKit? It’s the new name of the tool package that was formerly known as the Win32 compile SDK. The purpose hasn’t shifted with the name change; the Win32 DevKit still tries to make building FIFE on Windows systems as easy as possible by bundling some required tools together with precompiled 3rd party libraries that FIFE utilizes.

Besides the new name, we also introduced a new version scheme for the package. Future DevKits will follow the FIFE_Win32_DevKit_[month][year] pattern.

Download

You can grab the package in two flavours: an installer and a 7zip archive. While the 7zip version is slightly smaller in size, the installer leaves the choice support for which compiler (MinGW, MSVC 2005, MSVC 2008) to install to the user.

Grab the packages here:

Changes since the 2008.1-r1 compile SDK

  • Updated SDL to 1.2.14
  • Updated guichan to 0.8.2; applied key.hpp utf8 workaround, built against updated SDL lib
  • Updated mingw to 4.4.1-tdm-2 from http://tdragon.net/recentgcc
  • Updated Python to 2.6 and got rid of debug lib versions for MSVC that were not actually used. Read: Python 2.5 will NOT work with FIFE anymore, you’ll need to install a Python 2.6 client!
  • Updated SWIG to 1.3.40

Known issues

For some odd reason, Code::Blocks support broke at some point in the past. If you build FIFE with Code::Blocks right now, the build process itself won’t show any problems, but the resulting binary is borked somehow. This needs closer investigation but it’s unlikely that it’s related to the new DevKit. Therefore we can hopefully address the problem with a small fix to the Code::Blocks build template in SVN and don’t have to update the DevKit again to restore proper Code::Blocks support.

Further notes

You’ll need the new Win32 DevKit to build SVN trunk revision 3073 and newer. The old 2008.1-r1 compile SDK will not work with newer revisions anymore!

We furthermore recently changed the default location where the 3rd party dependency DLLs get copied to. They will now reside in FIFE/engine/swigwrappers/python instead of in every single FIFE client directory as it has been in the past. The reason why I changed the path is that Win32 searches for them in the FIFE/engine/swigwrappers/python directory first because that’s where the _fife.pyd binary lies. The old location of the DLLs could lead to DLL clashes as Win32 would search in PATH directories first before looking for them in the FIFE clients directories.

This lead to a problem for one user who tried to get the recent UH release working on his system. The new approach does come with drawbacks, especially as we plan to support C++ game creation with FIFE as well. A new place for the DLLs should be found in the long run but FIFE/engine/swigwrappers/python will do it for now.

The November 2009 DevKit has been a joint effort by FIFE developer Cheesesucker and former FIFE dev mvBarracuda. This said: the November 2009 DevKit will be the last release from my side. I’ve maintained the package for a couple of years and it’s time for me to move on and focus on PARPG. The project is in good hands now so I’m positive that somebody else will update the DevKit in the future when the necessity arises.

Quick and dirty copy and paste install guide from the README:

Installation / build process
===============================
1. Check out the latest engine sources from SVN or update your SVN checkout in case you have already checked out from SVN before:
Repository URL: http://fife.svn.cvsdude.com/engine/trunk

2. Get ActivePython 2.6 and install it to a location of your choice:

http://downloads.activestate.com/ActivePython/windows/2.6/ActivePython-2.6.4.8-win32-x86.msi

3. In case you’ve built FIFE with an older compile SDK in the past, run [FIFE]\build\win32\delete_sdk.bat to get rid of the old SDK files

4. Extraction process
4.1 Extract the content of the compile SDK to: [FIFE]\build\win32\
4.2 Check if there is an [FIFE]\build\win32\applications folder; if it’s in place, you know that you extracted the SDK into the correct location. One possible issue is that you’ve checked out the whole engine SVN repository instead of just trunk. In this case extract the compile SDK to: [FIFE]\trunk\build\win32 (if you want to compile trunk, otherwhise it needs to be extracted into the build\win32 directory of the branch that you want to compile)

5.1 Run [FIFE]\trunk\build\win32\update_project_files.bat.
5.2 Build files for each supported IDE can be found in the sub-directories of [FIFE]\build\win32\build_environments (code_blocks, scons, visual_studio_8, visual_studio_9).

6. The final dynamic library (_fife.pyd) is automatically moved to: [FIFE]\engine

7. Depending on the IDE you have utilized for building FIFE you either need to run [FIFE]\build\win32\update_dlls_mingw.bat (in case you built FIFE with code::blocks or scons), [FIFE]\build\win32\update_dlls_msvc2005.bat (Visual Studio 2005) or [FIFE]\build\win32\update_dlls_msvc2008.bat (Visual Studio 2008).

8. You can now start your custom FIFE build by launching the python scripts that reside in the subdirectories of [FIFE]\clients

Nov 5, 2009 0

Unknown Horizons News: Release 2009.2a, Mailinglist and Status update

Hi everyone,
it's time for a short status update on Unknown Horizons development.
Our release has been out for about 2 weeks now and we have had more downloads than ever before and have broken the 1000 downloads on one day mark for the first time ever!

News content:
  • 2009.2a
  • Mailinglist
  • Statusupdate
2009.2a
We have released a 2009.2a version of Unknown Horizons Linux packages which fixes a few bugs in the release. The repository packages have been updated as well. If you are still using the original 2009.2 release, be sure to upgrade.

Mailinglist
We have created an Unknown Horizons mailinglist at http://lists.unknown-horizons.org. The boards have been visited rarely and we think that a mailinglist is a better alternative as you get all the newest posts delivered to your email inbox. We will also be doing more development discussion on the mailinglist to allow people in different timezones and with difficult time schedules to participate on UH development easily. The mailinglists will also act as an archive for important design decisions.
Chances are fairly high that we will be closing down the boards rather soon and move all public discussion to the mailinglist. We currently only have one mailinglist uh-users. This might be split into uh-dev, uh-users and uh-announce at some time in the future, if the mailinglists become adopted widely.
The mailinglist will be a place for users to get help, share ideas and give us feedback on our work, so subscribe now at http://lists.unknown-horizons.org.  If you do not want to subscribe, you can read the archive here.
Note: For bug reporting please stick to http://trac.unknown-horizons.org

Statusupdate
New changes:
  • Buildings can now update their graphics when they advance in level
  • More work on the scenario files
  • Some new graphics and small gui improvements
  • Lots of small fixes
That was it for todays news.
So long,
Nihathrael

Nov 2, 2009 0

Post-Apocalyptic RPG blog: Mirror, mirror on the wall …

… who has the fairest portrait of them all? Heya and welcome to yet another PARPG news update.

Let’s start with a little disclaimer before we take a closer look at the events of the last two weeks. I’ve mentioned this in the past but as days since the last news update have been quite productive for us, there is more and more progress that I could cover in such a news update. But the news updates would take far longer to write and would be very long-winded if I would actually do that. This said: if you’re interested in all the little details, there are various ways to stay up to date:

I’ll try to avoid missing any major contributions but sometimes it simply happens, especially in busy weeks. If you want to see something specific featured in a news update, simply give me a gentle pointer by posting in the news update thread at the forums.

Project management department

With the project growing and growing over time and considering there has been quite some developer fluctuation it gets harder and harder to coordinate the departments and to keep track of progress and tasks we still have to take care of. Our programming department copes pretty well with it though despite a whole bunch of developers who are involved in the field. This is mostly due using the Trac software for coordination and progress tracking purposes.

While we were a bit worried about using Trac for all departments as it takes some time to figure out how to use it, alternative workflows turned out to be more complicated and/or frustrating. So we’ve started to move more and more tasks to Trac tickets so we can keep track of who’s working on what, which tasks have already been tackled and which ones we still have to take care of before we can tag a milestone as completed. We’re aware that this will be a rather long process but this announcement is basically the first step to utilize Trac more and more as it’s pretty much impossible to handle such a complex project otherwhise. If you’re interested in the details that lead to this conclusion, check out the discussion at the forums.

Programming department

The programmers have agreed upon establishing a short weekly round table meeting to talk about who is currently working on what and to clear up any questions and problems that came up in the process of tackling these tasks. The meetings take place every Saturday, 6PM GMT at the IRC channel of the project. If you’re interested in the results of first two weekly meetings recently held, check out the meetings section at the wiki.

Our programming staff was able to implement a couple of new features and fixes over the course of the last two weeks. Saritor, who has been around for quite some time, submitted a larger map change patch so you can finally move to other maps now (and back again as well) without crashing PARPG. As the other devs were quite pleased with Saritor’s contributions, he’s now a core developer on the team. Which is basically just a fancy term for a developer who has earned the special trust of the others and therefore gains write access to the SVN repository. Congrats and we’re looking forward to tackling this project together :-)

New Python developer on the team Vaporice has started to flesh out a proposal how the quest engine could work in PARPG. The submitted code can be now found in SVN after it had been reviewed. And there are more good news to cover: Kaydeth recently fixed save and load functionality so you can finally save the game and load it again as well.

Writing department

Zenbitz recently revamped the starting page of the writing department at the wiki. It should be a bit easier for new interested writers to get started now.

This said: he also worked on ingame dialog and the drunkard character now features his written lines. Feel free to check it out yourself by testing the latest SVN version of PARPG. For those who don’t mind waiting until the techdemo release, here’s at least a sneak peek: Drunkard dialog

Graphics department

Concept artist Gaspard got inspired by zenbitz and recently started to clean up the graphics department starting page as well. In the meanwhile Zimble documented the settings of the Blender rendering setup at the wiki. At the moment we’re trying to attract additional 3d artists and as we don’t want to limit them to using a specific 3d modeling package, we have to figure out how to recreate the setup in terms of camera position, shadows/lighting, etc. in different 3d tools. Hopefully somebody can actually use the documented information to set up his favourite tool for PARPG and start to contribute art to the project.

While there have been ups and downs in all departments, the graphics department, especially the 3d art section of it has caused us some major headaches simply because there is a lot of content to be created for our first techdemo and the number of active developers in this department is rather small. We’re still hoping that more 3d artists get interested in PARPG but the first public release might actually help to spread the word about the project and reach artists who didn’t know about the project before. Let’s see how that works out.

We recently added a screenshot section to our wiki gallery, so feel free to check it out. Right now there is only one screenshot (the drunkard dialog) but I’m sure that it will fill up nicely over the course of the next weeks. This said: there is more new content to see at the gallery. Gaspard also created a whole bunch of new character portraits. Here are just two of them; the others can be found at the gallery.

Hatman:
Hatman by Gaspard

Farmer:
Hatman by Gaspard

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

Oct 20, 2009 0

Post-Apocalyptic RPG blog: Taylor-made (sic!) strategies

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.

Project management department

We’ve published our first official press release at the blog recently and sent it out to two websites, hoping that they would pick up the story in their news sections. Fortunately the old school Fallout fansite nma-fallout.com covered it and we’re quite grateful for their support to help spreading the word about PARPG. Feedback has been generally positive, if you’re interested in the details check out the news discussion thread at their forums. We thank NMA admin Brother None for his continued support of the project!

Programming department

There are a bunch of potential topics to cover in the programming department but I want to focus on the prolly most important one first: PARPG developer or1andov ported the FIFE map editor for PARPG so it’s now possible to create and edit PARPG-specific maps via the editor instead of doing it by hand. The editor has been working since quite some time on Linux but it took us a few days to figure out some specific win32 problems that held us back from using it on this platform. Fortunately Kaydeth found the culprit in the end and fixed the issue.

The FIFE map editor is a great tool but it’s not the most user friendly one; there is definately room for improvement in this field. We’re currently working on a map editor tutorial but there are still a lot of aspects of the tutorial that we will have to flesh out in the course of the next weeks. I’m rather short of time right now but hopefully I can continue to work on it, especially on the weekends.

The last two weeks have been quite productive for the entire programming department. New Python programmer amo-ej1 created a tool to automatize XML animation file generation for agents (=(non-)player character(s)). You can grab a copy of it at our Subversion repository. In the meanwhile Kaydeth continued to clean up the code base to ensure that it’s compatible with the PEP 8 Python coding standard proposal.

I can’t cover all of the recent developments in the department in detail. So if you would like to know more, please check the full project timeline of the last two weeks at Trac.

Writing department

The work on the techdemo is coming along quite nicely in the writing department. Game mechanics designer zenbitz and community member shevegen decided to step up by starting to flesh out the techdemo quests article at the wiki. Feel free to lend them a hand by contributing. Both of them can be often found at the IRC channel of the project so you’ve got a good chance to get a hold of them there.

Graphics department

Despite the small workforce in the graphics department at this point, there is quite some progress to report in this field. Fallout modding veteran Continuum created a junkhouse residing on a fundament of barrels:
Junkhouse render by Continuum

3d artist Sirren created the first building for the upcoming techdemo – a guard tower:
Guard tower render by Sirren

You surely remember Sirren’s agent animations that have been covered in some of the recent news updates? Russian Flash developer Dragon created a little web application to show the animations in action. In case you haven’t checked them out yet as you didn’t want to build FIFE from SVN sources, feel free to give his app a test: http://lab.dragonnoid.ru/flash/isometry/

Last but in no way least, concept artist JustinOperable created a first character portrait for the upcoming techdemo. Check out his awesome drawing of the female guard character that will be used as portrait for the dialog interface:
Female guard portrait by JustinOperable

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

Oct 17, 2009 0

Unknown Horizons News: Unknown Horizons 2009.2 released

Unknown Horizons Release 2009.2

The Unknown Horizons development team is proud to present our new release 2009.2.
This is a fairly stable version, but is to be concidered a development release. Its purpose is to give interested players and developers a chance to test our current state of development.

What is new?
We have made many improvements to our previous release, 2009.1. Here is a list of the most important changes:

  • Entirely reworked consumation and productivity for more interesting gameplay
  • Basic scenario/campaign functionality via simple YAML files
  • Demo scenario in form of a short tutorial
  • Settlers can now level up
  • New resources
  • New buildings: farm and school (school is still looking for nice gfx)
  • Improved graphics and building preview
  • New sounds effects
  • Wild life
  • More stable then ever before ;-)
For the full list of changes see the changelog or for even more detail the overview of svn commits in the Trac Timeline.

Known Issues
  • Boatbuilder toggle inactive/active still buggy.
  • Some minor texts will change distance between each other incorrectly in the GUI.
  • Some messages will not fit on the graphic for the message
We are working on resolving these issues in a future release. For a full list of all known problems visit the Trac Milestone 2009.2.
If you happen to find a new bug (which is quite possible in this development release) please create a ticket at Trac or send us an email. Both including:
  • The full error message.
  • A detailed description of what you were doing when the bug occured to give us a chance to reproduce the problem.
The more detailed your ticket is, the easier we will find and fix the bug. Thanks in advance.

The Future
Plans for the next release:
  • Further improve the campaign functionality
  • Implement second increment completely
  • Improve random map feature
  • Balancing

Download Links
Visit our downloads page for the newest downlads.

Hopefully you enjoy this release. We would appreciate if you share any feedback or criticism you have by joining our IRC channel or by contributing to a discussion in our forums.

Have fun,
Team Unknown Horizons

 

Oct 9, 2009 0

Post-Apocalyptic RPG blog: Press release #1 available

We recently decided to spread the news about the project to a larger audience, hoping to attract some new contributors this way as well. Here’s our first press release that we’ll send out to two smaller websites today; hopefully at least one of them picks it up and features it in their news section. Don’t wonder: the press release features all sorts of information that you already know if you’ve followed the project over the course of the last weeks and months. It’s rather meant to summarize some vital points, not to introduce any new information for the insiders.

About PARPG

PARPG – short form for Post-Apocalyptic RPG – is an isometric 2D roleplaying game inspired by classics of the golden age of the genre such as Fallout, Arcanum and Planescape: Torment, while being set in the harsh winter of post-nuclear Scandinavia.

It is the undertaking of an independent development team to create an old school RPG in the spirit of the aforementioned games while offering the game itself and all tools created as free downloads. The complete source code of the game and tools as well as of all assets (maps, graphics, text, music, etc.) are released under open source licenses. PARPG is entirely written in Python and powered by the open source game engine FIFE.

Project and team philosophy

The work on PARPG began in early February 2009 and over the course of the last months a team has assembled to create a single player roleplaying experience. We have decided to use isometric 2d graphics instead of trying to tackle the complexity of a 3d engine. The undertaking is ambitious enough so the team would rather focus on the game play of PARPG than to compete with commercial projects in a battle for the best next gen graphics glitz that you can’t win as an indie developer anyway.

PARPG is meant to feature meaningful choices and consequences throughout the course of the game. There will be multiple paths to complete quests including non-violent ways. Combat will be fought in a turnbased manner, inspired by the combat mechanics of the first two Fallout games. Furthermore we are aiming for well-written detailed branching tree dialogs.

What sets PARPG apart from other independent RPGs is both the non-profit nature of the project as well as the open development philosophy behind it. The entire development wiki as well as the forums are public; the same goes for the SVN repository where the sourcecode and all assets are stored. This way interested community members can always grab the latest version of the game and test it themselves.

A first release

While there is still a long way to go before we will see a full featured release of PARPG, we would like to release a tech demo of PARPG as soon as possible. This first release is planned for the end of 2009 and will hopefully already feature a simple inventory / object / looting model, basic branching tree dialog, a first customized version of the FIFE map editor to create PARPG maps as well as load and save functionality.

Looking for additional contributors

Creating a complex roleplaying game is an ambitious undertaking so the team appreciates every helping hand. While there are open positions in all development departments (programming, graphics, audio, game mechanics, writing) we would like to emphasize the we are currently in severe need of additional 3d graphic artists. You can use your modeling tool of choice and while we can offer no monetary compensation due the non-profit nature of the project, getting your models into a release surely makes a good portfolio piece.

If you would like to lend us a hand, don’t hesitate and get in contact with us by introducing yourself at our forums. If you want to talk to the developers you can join the IRC channel of the project as well.

Additional information

Now you are curious and would like to know more about the project? Check out the development blog, the project wiki or head over to the gallery for all the eye candy.

Promo kit

A promo kit has been released for everyone who would like to cover the press release. The kit features a selection of concept art pieces, renders, animations and screenshots, released under Creative Commons 3.0 BY-SA. Please check the included readme.txt for details.

Oct 7, 2009 0

Post-Apocalyptic RPG blog: PARPG promo kit available

Heya and welcome to a short instant news update.

Now that we’re moving into the direction of a first public release of an although very small and rather limited techdemo of PARPG, we would like to spread the word about the project to a bigger audience. We’ve compiled a first promo kit containing selected animations, concept art pieces, renders and screenshots. The material provided in this kit is meant to be used by everyone who would like to help spreading the word about the project. All material released under CC 3.0 BY-SA.

Check out the included readme.txt file for all details. You can grab the first edition of the promo kit here: PARPG promo kit October 2009

 

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