Author Archive
Radio silence
We’ve reached the cache in the evening. It’s the most remote place we’re keeping our stuff in. Small, desolated shack on the mountain stock, close to a big lake. Believe it or not, we have a generator stashed there, hopefully in working condition. But… Does the radio we’ve been carrying all the way from the bunker work at all?
1… 2… 3… Hello, is anybody out there? 1… 2… 3… Hello? Does anybody read me?
I know you’ve all been waiting too long for this batch of news. Harsh winter is hitting our little place in the middle of nowhere, covered with waist-deep snow. The winter that seems to be like a white odyssey. After two loud years, we seem to have a couple of quiet ones. Things are happening, just the snow slows us more than we’d expect, days suddenly got shorter, last of our dogs were eaten long ago, and we’re pulling the sled on our own. Snowshoes, cold and hunger. We’re not out of our rations though, so we’ll keep on moving with slow, steady speed, hoping for a community of cheerful people, their full plates and warm shelters behind every hill we’ve been approaching.
During this period when our batteries were dead, and we were lost in the wild cold lands, quite a lot things happened.
First of all – we have quite a lively fork, PPARPG, lead by Arikel, most widely known due to formerly being involved in The Mana World. You’ll find the project at IRC: #pparpg on freenode, and the code is here: https://github.com/arikel/PPARPG . In a nutshell, PPARPG is 3D game set more or less in mood and world of PARPG, and the game is based on Panda 3D engine. We’re happily sharing all possible resources and hoping for success.
What’s even more surprising, is MrWillis, Rowan the Preacher and Q_x are working together on a sideproject: traditional game, that seems to be a cross-breed between paragraph and board game. You can browse the mailinglist here: http://groups.google.com/group/parpg-sideproject
Also good news: after over a year of being lost, Shevy found his way back to our snowy place. He wrote our last post, so you probably knew this before. He has been given some rusty nails and an old hammer to keep our formal stuff in one piece. After neglecting our docs for a while – we call it a major overhaul!
Beliar codes quite a lot, repairing and adding new features to our code, like tweaking NPCs behavior, or working on a scripting system. Finally, he has also made and successfully tested a build system, also releasing some files that are packed and ready to check them out:http://sourceforge.net/projects/parpg/files/snapshots/.
These are not small things, I think. Every single one of those deserved a separate blog post, separate cheerful “yaay!”, quite a bit of excitement on its own. The bitter truth is every single village we’ve approached so far was abandoned, scavenged and empty, everything that we thought was smoke coming out of a friendly home was a delusion our hungry brains tricked us with, just to keep us going. And man, this winter – will it ever end?
No revolution is going to happen at any time soon? (now with the stamp on our logo)
Fast forward
If you are curious, we have hit our 650-th code commit. The development is really fast this days.
We are working to have really easy and rich interface for a player to interact with. Vaporice fixed our internal console so that it accepts pythonic input, and Domtron Vox provided scrolling map with a mouse (plus using some fancy cursors) instead of binding the camera to the character, like it was before. And thanks to Beliar we finally have a really nice game menu, and after a long time, player is finally able to solve the beer quest! (its more than a simple quest – the result varies, depending on the quality of the resources used when brewing the beer)
We are still working on many essential features, it is quite normal state of things when starting. But really having this game both basically playable and good looking (maybe even ready for building a part of an actual content, who knows…) is a step that proves the philosophy of the project works as expected.
Starting an adventure in the Graphics Department should be less confusing for all the new artists, hopefully. From managing and coordinating a host of scattered ToDo lists, we switched to working mainly with the tickets. There has been also a small cleanup made in the docs, so that all the important things are now in the wiki. Learning and searching for something interesting to do should be really easy now. We are also willing to make inter-department work easier, mostly between the writers and graphics department to produce high quality artwork.
Any plans for the nearest future, you may ask? Well, we are preparing for a major step in the code development – implementing of the RPG mechanics.
And what is going on in the Graphics Department? Well, strangely enough, Q_x announced he will make a prototype of a novel music playback engine, that will change the uninterrupted playback accordingly to what is going on inside the game.As always we’re waiting with our arms wide open for as many new crew members, as our forums and IRC channel can handle. Dear reader, if you think this is a good idea to have a game like this – it looks like we need some help really badly now. And if you want to help this project to become a part of our common reality, be prepared for a really cheerful welcome
Towards a busy summertime
Welcome to yet another PARPG update! After the storm the project is still afloat, but let’s start from the beginning.
First of all, we assumed the only way to continue would be with headless type of management. At least until someone with proper management background or skill comes along or someone takes enough initiative to become the de facto project lead. There have been some substantial changes made to the way we operate to accomadate this. We all know the current state of the project and the direction that PARPG is heading in and so our duties are more elastic now. There is some infrastructure, mindstate and workflow mess that needs that needs to be taken care of. We all intend to seek out things to do or wait until some pop up for us. We will all help each other, rely on each other and support each other in our work; communicate what we need, expect or what would help to make progress. No one and no task is to be left alone.
With these conclusions in mind, the project is aiming to release a playable demo ASAP. Playable in this case means a working basic quest engine – so that player would be able to solve a simple beer quest. Beliar is making big leaps forward in pursuit hit this goal. During only last week he fixed some issues with saving the game state, add a new “Look” option to the inventory items, cleaned up the code just in case someone will show up.
When some of us are gone, what happened in 2D department you may ask? Well, its not as 2D-ish as you would expect 
. Gaspard made a proposal for a new quest “Radio Gaga”. JustinOperable is trying to step up to fill a major void in the team and is attempting to learn Blender so he can make 3d models for the project until a more skilled modeler comes along. We also have our first three, trivial GUI-related sound effects proposed. Also, two of us (JustinOperable and I) worked to write this entry. And a little injection of new 2D artwork was made, mainly new inventory items.
Qubodup was kind enough to cover our progress with his video (and helped to post this entry too ). You can watch it here:
PARPG – Alpha Version of open source Linux Post-Apocalyptic RPG
Whats with the project then? Not “barely afloat” like it was in April. Not stalled or ceased. Yes, yes, we are alive and kicking.
We still need you, dear reader. Any experienced pair of hands cannot be overvalued. We have a whole world to create, almost every quest, phrase, location or item needs your invention to happen.
Everyone is also encouraged to play dice with UH-Guard. Lets keep the forums and our dialog around the project alive 
