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PARPG - a nuclear winter RPG moving towards a 2nd techdemo

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
Thanks Krash :)

A more serious reply concerning the release date question: the project is open source, so it's different in terms of release policy compared to commercial games. We'll release snapshots of the project over the course of the next months. Hopefully we can offer at least two different releases until the end of the year.

The plan is to have the story, setting and gameplay as well as the workflow for all departments laid out until the end of the year. After that the real work (read: implementation) starts that will take us at least another two but prolly realistically rather three or four years until we'll see a feature-complete 1.0 release of the PARPG. These are a lot of IFs but so far I'm rather happy with our progress and quite often surprised that we got some luck attracting quite talented and commited fellows.
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
Heya and welcome to yet another weekly PARPG news update! This time addressing all the doubters!

The programming departments' IRC meeting has been postponed but the writing and gameplay department meeting fortunately took place last Friday. We've discussed if you should be allowed to kill children in PARPG and if drugs should play a role in the game. Our artists have been incredibly busy over the course of the last week so can find a couple of new 3d renders as well as concept art drawings in our gallery now!

Proposals concerning the state of the game world as well as the what kind of characters stats should be featured in PARPG have been made. We'll have to decide between two different storyline proposals and mvBarracuda found out that pursuing a degree in modern history is not that useless!

Read the full news update at the PARPG development blog.

And we're glad that Seothen, a new concept artist on the team, took his time to portray the reaction of the common community member when he hears about PARPG for the first time and smiles in excitement and confidence in the project (this is for you, you know who you are):

 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
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:

Icycavern.png


PS: The cavern has been created by Codex veteran Kingston! :salute:
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
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!

Raider_270.gif
Raider_315.gif
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
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.

Long_coat_female_run.gif
Long_coat_female_pickup.gif
Long_coat_female_stand.gif
Long_coat_female_use.gif
Long_coat_female_walk.gif


Long_coat_male_run.gif
Long_coat_male_pickup.gif
Long_coat_male_stand.gif
Long_coat_male_use.gif
Long_coat_male_walk.gif


Male_farmer_1_run.gif
Male_farmer_1_pickup.gif
Male_farmer_1_stand.gif
Male_farmer_1_use.gif
Male_farmer_1_walk.gif


Male_traveler_1_run.gif
Male_traveler_1_pickup.gif
Male_traveler_1_stand.gif
Male_traveler_1_use.gif
Male_traveler_1_walk.gif


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

Quilty

Magister
Joined
Apr 11, 2008
Messages
2,406
Oh god yes, I need more 2D :love:

This looks fantastic, here's hoping it survives long enough to see the light of day.
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
It's still WIP. I think Sirren plans to overwork some of the animations before the end of the year and the first release. Right now the male and female long coat models look a bit too similar to me so he hopefully adds some small detail to better distinguish these two. Let's wait and see what the next news update brings :)
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
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

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
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

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
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:

Hatman.png
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
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:
 

baronjohn

Cipher
Joined
Nov 8, 2008
Messages
2,383
Location
USA
I want a game where tits don't show through armor/clothes. Looks like you have winter going, it's postapoc so there's no going to be much custom tailoring, they'll probably layer any clothes on to keep warm, women aren't going to want to advertise their sexuality, etc. So why does it look like they are wearing tank tops?
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
I assume you mean the female guard concept art baronjohn? Well, it's how the artist drew her. The only female ingame model looked almost exactly like the male one so we changed some aspects. Though we didn't increase the size of her chest but rather gave her long blonde hair. Should do the trick :)
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
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!

Screen-2009-11-30-20-23-22.png
 

Burning Bridges

Enviado de meu SM-G3502T usando Tapatalk
Joined
Apr 21, 2006
Messages
27,561
Location
Tampon Bay
This looks really very good. Actually, do you have a forum? I have experience with programming Ogre3d and might have a look.
 
Self-Ejected

BlitzKitchen

Self-Ejected
Patron
Joined
Jun 6, 2009
Messages
2,879
Codex 2012
I highly recommend making it so your maps have a no camera zone filled with scenery/landscape around them to give the impression that the land continues on. Black seas of nothing on map borders damage the game's atmosphere. A fog effect combined with scenery would be the best possible outcome and would make the edge of the maps look very nice.

mapexample.jpg
 

zenbitz

Scholar
Joined
Feb 2, 2009
Messages
295
good point blitzkitchen.

Our first map is a fortified mini-mall - so there will be a fence around most of it. But we should not forget to put in some sky/trees background.
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
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

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
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.
 

zenbitz

Scholar
Joined
Feb 2, 2009
Messages
295
I'm still here! But while I like doing the game design PARPG, I cannot do it ALL myself. I am committed to working on this project at least for another year.
 

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