PARPG

[Monte Carlo]

if this ever gets off the ground and you need help with legal, you are welcome to contact me. I would consider doing the work for shares instead of cash because I really like the idea of supporting game developers.

 

I'm a business planning attorney in California.

 

 

So how about doing some pro bono then?

[mvBarracuda]

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:

 

[Jaesun]

Very nice.

[mvBarracuda]

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!

 

[mvBarracuda]

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.

 

 

 

 

Caution: the rendered outlines just look odd in the GIF version. The ingame version looks way better.

Edited October 6, 2009 by mvBarracuda

[Musopticon?]

Okay, that's seriously good 2d animation. Good going guys!

[J.E. Sawyer]

Looks cool. Keep up the good work!

[mvBarracuda]

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]

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:

 

[mvBarracuda]

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]

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:

[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!

 

[jaguars4ever]

Those are some fine looking portraits, Baracuda.

 

So any idea when this thing will be playable?

[mvBarracuda]

Those are some fine looking portraits, Baracuda.

 

So any idea when this thing will be playable?

Playable as in 1.0 release of a commercial game like Fallout, Arcanum, Planescape: Torment? Optimistic estimation: 2.5 years; but I think it's more realistic to assume that it will take at least around 4 years to create a game as content rich as the ones mentioned above. Nobody works on it full time, so there is no dev on the team you could squeeze 40-60 hours per week into it; all of us a have either a day job or are still in college.

 

This said, we're aiming to release a first _techdemo_ of PARPG in early 2010. Hopefully some time between the end of January and early March. But as always in volunteer projects, release date of the techdemo: when it's done.

 

The techdemo will feature a single location, a mall complex in Finland. There will be around 3-4 separate maps that feature different parts of the mall. A basic dialogue engine has been implemented so can talk to NPCs and hopefully we'll have two small quests for you to solve.

 

Besides that, there won't be any combat; don't count on it, it won't happen for the first techdemo. We plan to release updated versions of PARPG over the course of the next years until we will hopefully reach 1.0 status at some point. We'll definately try to release a 2nd techdemo in 2010 but let's finish the work on the first one for now.

[Lare Kikkeli]

Which mall?

[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.

[mvBarracuda]

I didn't intially post it in here, but we're currently workng to get the project back on the track and we're (slowly) moving towards a 2nd techdemo release.

 

We'll be mostly focusing on improving the engine at this point as there is too much functionality missing at this point to add new content; especially the content pipeline and tools aren't fleshed out yet.

 

Anyway, for all still interested in the project:

http://blog.parpg.net/2010/11/the-parpg-revival-experience/

 

I'll post another little update at the blog this week, covering our plans and the way towards techdemo 2.

 

EDIT: And there you go:

http://blog.parpg.net/2010/11/parpg-picnic-massacre-blues/

 

And a sneak peek of the new notebook GUI concept:

 

Btw.: Great work on Fallout: New Vegas! I really enjoyed the game and it was a great inspiration to revisit PARPG and give the project another try.

[Humodour]

Sweet, you're still going.

[sorophx]

so many attributes... it's going to be a bitch to balance. even Obsidian has problems with SPECIAL

[mvBarracuda]

so many attributes... it's going to be a bitch to balance. even Obsidian has problems with SPECIAL

Good point about balancing. It will be complicated indeed but PARPG has one advantage over commercial projects in this specific field. As the project will go through a whole series of public releases, we'll hopefully receive a lot of feedback in the process. So we can use that feedback for better balancing from release to release.

[Irrelevant]

What do you mean by balance? Making sure every skill is usefull? are they meant to compliment each other or encourage specific playstyles? The frequency of how each skill is used?

Edited December 2, 2010 by Irrelevant

[mvBarracuda]

Good point Irrelevant.

 

I think the main idea of balancing shouldn't be to make all possible characters builds equally easy/hard to play, but give at least a number of major different builds a chance to complete the game using different skills. A diplomat might have a harder time to complete the game but it should be possible nevertheless. I think that's pretty much how Fallout: New Vegas handled different character builds as well.

 

PARPG will surely have a different skill system so it's harder to max out many skills and you can't become a jack of all trades. Though FO: NV did far better in this field than Fallout 3 where you could easily max out a lot of skills in the later game.

[mvBarracuda]

PARPG now features a planet site:

http://planet.parpg.net/

 

Tracking the project progress has never been easier!