You just haven’t earned it yet, baby
Posted by mvbarracuda on February 1st, 2010
Heya and welcome to yet another PARPG news update! We’ve got something exciting to announce today: the scheduled release date of the first public PARPG techdemo!
Project management department
But before we get to that, some important personal announcement from my side: I’m sorry to make this step, but I’ll have to take a temporary break from the project for the next two months to focus on my studies. There are still a bunch of papers that I have to finish and I’m incredibly bad a multitasking. Don’t worry, I’ll be back but for now I just need more time to sort out my life.
This said: fortunately PARPG developer shevegen decided to step up and will take care of project management duties for the time being. I’ll elaborate on the details below.
Project meeting
As previously announced here at the blog: we have held an IRC meeting last Saturday to discuss the most important current issues and to pick up some steam again. Thanks to everyone who took the time to actually be around and contribute to it. Here’s a quick rundown of the results of the meeting:
Developer activity
The sad news is: right now we’re extremely short of active developers who can help us moving the project towards a first public release. One major headache has been the lack of actual conflict resolution power in the different departments. Fortunately PARPG programmer maximinus is back from his baby break and decided to step up again, acting as senior programmer and head of the department. Having a formal lead hopefully helps to resolve conflicts in the future.
Transition to FIFE 0.3
Good news from the FIFE team! They’ve recently released version 0.3.0 of their isometric game engine and it looks like they’re on a good way towards more frequent release in the next couple of months. Unfortunately the view_performance branch improvements didn’t make it into this release but we’re still hoping that the changes get merged into the FIFE trunk before we ship our first PARPG techdemo.
One of the most important improvements of FIFE 0.3.0 is the more standard-compliant module import scheme. With the new release, you’re not bound to a hardcoded folder structure anymore but your FIFE-based game can reside anywhere as long as the engine is properly installed. Unfortunately the new module import scheme made some changes to PARPG necessary and as we’re short of active devs right now, Zero-Projekt developer chewie has helped us out by porting PARPG to the FIFE 0.3.0 architecture. Additional kudos go to pirum for providing the actual DIFF to apply and to maximinus for the patch review and bringing it into SVN.
Unfortunately there is still one unresolved problem with our PARPG map editor at the moment. We’re using a custom maploader and mapsaver for the editor and as FIFE doesn’t provide a clean way to utilize these custom loaders, we had to implement it with a rather hacky approach in the past. This approach does not work anymore with FIFE 0.3.0 so we’re currently investigating how we can fix it. FIFE will provide a clean interface for utilizing custom loaders in one of the its releases, but until then, we’re bound to finding some kind of hacky workaround again.
Techdemo release schedule
While open source projects often follow the principle of releasing early and often, it’s also natural that projects want to make a good first impression and therefore take some extra time to deliver a somewhat polished first public release. We’ll have to be brutally honest and admit that with the current lack of active developers, we won’t be able to pull off a polished first release even if we wanted to. Therefore our plans have slightly changed.
One of the few things we can hopefully address before we ship a first release is the status of the QuestEngine. It has to be extended so that users can actually play through our small quests without having to utilize the ingame console. Even in case we can’t make that happen until then, we want to annouce that the release of the first public PARPG techdemo is scheduled for Wednesday, 10th of March.
Here’s the plan: we’ll try to fix as many obvious bugs as possible (including the lack of QuestEngine functionality) until the end of February. After that we’ll move into release preparation mode and work out how to package what we’ll have at that point. A first public release will hopefully help to attract additional new contributors.
My temporary departure
As mentioned above: I’ll have to take a break from PARPG to sort out my life and to finally finish some papers for university. It’s not a topic I’m eager to talk about in detail but I can say that the last months should have been more productive studies-wise. Partially because of my involvement in this project and also because I terribly suck at multitasking.
The fine young lad shevy stepped up and will take care of my duties while I’m away. He has full access to pretty much the whole PARPG infrastructure so he can set up new SVN & trac accounts and take care of all the other tasks which are part of the project management position. I’ve compiled a list of important tasks to provide some guidance and I’m positive that he’s the right guy for the job! Good luck and kudos for stepping up 
Full meeting log
In case you’re interested in the details, you can check out the full log of the IRC meeting, starting at the 2010-01-30T15:26:32 timestamp, here: http://logs.unknown-horizons.org/%23parpg/%23parpg.2010-01-30.log
That’s all concerning PARPG for today.
Next news update will be brought to you by the fine shevy. See you back in April and all the best to the brave PARPG devs who hold the fort while I’m away.
Back from the dead part II
Posted by mvbarracuda on January 28th, 2010
Heya dear PARPG community members and developers.
As you might have noticed: I’m back from the dead but unfortunately I have to take a longer break from the project to sort out my real life. We’re currently in a quite critical stage of the project and there are still quite some steps in front of us before we can ship our first techdemo release.
This said: there are important topics to be discussed, e.g.:
- Who’s still active and can contribute to the project at this point?
- How do we want to continue towards our first release?
- How can the project best cope with my temporary departure?
- How can we address the problem of a lack of clear code architecture? How can we try to attract an expert in the field who could help us out?
Therefore I want to invite every interested community member and even more important every developer who contributed to PARPG at some point to attend this important meeting.
A more complete list of topics can be found here: Important PARPG project meeting
Unfortunately we only know that the meeting will be held at Saturday, 30th of January 2010. That’s already this Saturday!
The actual meeting time will depend upon which developers want to attend the meeting. Due having developers from all over the world, we might have to leave out one or two devs; or they would have to get up for it in the middle of the night. That’s surely not a good solution but there’s no real alternative to it in such open source projects where developers are spread around the globe.
If you want to take part in the meeting, please let us know at the forums AND tell us when you would have time for the meeting. The final meeting time will be set tomorrow at 6PM GMT! I’ll update the blog posting with the meeting time as soon as it has been decided.
Edit by shevy:
The meeting will start Saturday (tomorrow) at 15:30 GMT
Come and join, please, no matter if you can only attend earlier or later.
Meeting thread at the forums: http://forums.parpg.net/index.php?topic=644.0
Regards,
mvbarracuda
PARPG SVN r461 video
Posted by mvbarracuda on January 6th, 2010
An update just got in. Open source veteran and long time project supporter qubodup grabbed the latest version of PARPG from SVN and recorded a video of it. Feel free to check it out at youtube:
Kudos to qubodup for his continued support
The Jonestown portrait massacre
Posted by mvbarracuda on January 4th, 2010
Heya and welcome to yet another PARPG news update! The holidays are over so it’s now back to work for us Still moving towards the release of our first techdemo.
Project management department
As already mentioned in the introduction: most of us had to take a break from the project in December and over the holidays to spend some time with the family and to recharge our batteries. The original plan was to post this update some time after Christmas, but seeing that most of us were still on a break, I’ve postponed this news update until today. The plan is to shoot everyone on the team a short email, hoping that a bunch of devs will be back in action over the course of the next week.
We’ll give you a more accurate picture of our resources in the next news update; right now we don’t really know who can invest time into PARPG in early 2010 to finish our first techdemo release.
Audio department
We reported about Sindwiller’s contributions in the audio department in our last update in December and while most of us have been enjoying the break from the project, Sindwiller has continueed to work on his audio track in the meanwhile. The current version is still work in progress but the volume level has been normalized and a couple of other details have been tweaked, so feel free to check it out: Snow may never end – work in progress audio track by Sindwiller
Programming department
Altough our own programming department has been rather busy due the holidays, there are some exciting news to report nevertheless. First and foremost: the FIFE team plans to ship a new stable release after there hasn’t been such a release in one and a half years! Stay tuned for FIFE 0.3.0 and let’s hope that they can manage to finish the work on it until the scheduled 2010/01/20 release date.
We at PARPG have been always using the latest SVN version of FIFE so the lack of new official releases did not really affect us. But if you would have to compile a complete list of changes and improvements over the last 2008.1 release, you might need to invest a couple of days to not miss anything. So that’s a huge step for the FIFE team and we keep our fingers crossed that FIFE development will flourish over the course of the next months and years. A release date announcement can be found at the FIFE blog: FIFE 0.3.0 release date annoucement
We do keep our fingers even more crossed that one specific improvement makes it into this 0.3.0 release. As mentioned in our last PARPG news update: we’ve encountered performance issues that showed up when you used FIFE in combination with very large maps due the huge number of map instances. The underlying problem has been identified by a number of developers, including PARPG programmer amo-ej1, so FIFE guru phoku decided to look into rewriting FIFE’s view code.
Although the rewritten code does already reside in a branch in FIFE’s SVN repository, it has not been merged back into the FIFE trunk yet. There are still a number of smaller problems, but they can be hopefully fixed soon so every FIFE-based project can profit from the vastly improved performance of the new code. We’ve tested it on a number of system ourselves and encountered improved performance up to 400% (read: yes, that’s four times as fast as before) on some systems in combination with our profiling map. If you’re interested in the details and/or would like to test the branch yourself, head over to our forums and check out this thread: testing the view_performance branch with PARPG
Writing department
While most of us enjoyed their free time, zenbitz continueed to work on the ingame dialog scripts. Feel free to test the latest version of them yourself!
Graphics department
In case you wondered about the title of the news update and what the heck it is supposed to mean. Well, we saved the best for last So here we go, a whole bunch of new portraits, created by our concept artists. Most of them have been drawn by Gaspard, with the exception of the Ula portrait, which has been created by JustinOperable. Enjoy them
Camilla
Synnove
Hoadir, the husky
Kimmo
Jacob
Ula
Character pinups
There are actually even more new and refined portraits at our wiki gallery. E.g. an updated version of the female guard shown before or Dig, the bouncer, created by comscar. Feel free to check them all out.
That’s all concerning PARPG for today.
Last but not least: the fine folks at Iron Tower Studios released a first combat demo of their upcoming post apoc ancient Rome indie RPG Age of Decadence. Their persistence in continuing to create a game against a lot of odds and especially their fair, open and transparent way of community interaction has always been a great source of inspiration to me and without their example, PARPG might not have been founded at all. So to give credit where credit is due, check out their combat demo and feel free to head over to their forums to provide feedback. They actually care about it
Next news update scheduled for Monday, 18th of January. See you then.
Tear you apart
Posted by mvbarracuda on December 1st, 2009
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:
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!
Obstacle 2
Posted by mvbarracuda on November 17th, 2009
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:
Gaspard also created a snow panomara concept entitled 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:
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:
EGO furthermore also created a lone explorer concept art piece. Enjoy it:
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:
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:
That’s all for today. Next news update scheduled for Monday, 30th of November. See you then
Mirror, mirror on the wall …
Posted by mvbarracuda on November 2nd, 2009
… 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: 
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:
Farmer:
That’s all for today. Next news update scheduled for Monday, 16nd of November. See you then
Taylor-made (sic!) strategies
Posted by mvbarracuda on October 20th, 2009
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:
3d artist Sirren created the first building for the upcoming techdemo – a guard tower:
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:
That’s all for today. Next news update scheduled for Monday, 2nd of November. See you then
Press release #1 available
Posted by mvbarracuda on October 9th, 2009
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.
PARPG promo kit available
Posted by mvbarracuda on October 7th, 2009
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
