Happy New Year to everyone!

Hey!

Just in time to wish you all a Happy New Year to you and your family! :)

While on it, here is a little update, just before 2013 ends. ;)

- Mountain Shrine dungeon in progress!
The Mountain Shrine is now considered made on paper (at least a first suitable version to work on.) and I started to map and script the first rooms. So, we're slowly but surely reaching the end of this first Episode. ;)
I also made and added a first version of the battle background there, prepared the encountered monsters, ...

Time to face the Shrine critters...

- Proper ending credits:
This one was a personal priority for me before the Episode I release, I must say.
I now added support to properly list everyone involved in the project (consciously or not) when you reach the end of the current episode.

- Visuals:
The game's look'n'feel has been improved in several area recently:
- The map stamina bar (telling you how long you can run for) has been redone and IMHO improved. :)
- Bronann standard attacks's visuals have been slightly improved/fixed.
- The boot menu will now hint you about what resolution the game is running.
- Broken/unavailable translations will now be disabled in the corresponding menu, and the game will also tell you what is the currently selected language.

- Support for non 4:3 resolusions
A long-desired feature which is permitting you to now play in 1366x768 for instance (a usual resolution for the current laptops ;])
For now, only a limited set of resolution were statically added, once the migration to SDL 2.x will be complete, I'll add support for the resolutions declared by the system the game is running on.


- i18n / Translations :
Spanish translation support was added thanks to jahalic :)
And Galician and Russian translations were updated/fixed by Gallecio et dimproject respectively.

I also fixed the bug preventing the map titles to properly display when playing in Russian by adding support for custom fonts loading (and reloading) depending on the current language selected.

This also means Asian languages should now be properly supported using specific fonts for them. :)
Any translator tempted?

- Bugfixes / Other small improvements:
There has been the usual set of bugfixes and small improvements during the last month, but more proeminently:

The joysticks D-Pad / Hats handling is now fully working. :)

The scripting API is now handling Images as objects and no more as integer indexes. This permitted me to now handle image script code quite the same way I do for the C++ side, and permits a lot more of flexibility there.

The map mode, menu mode, particle engine, ... have seen simplifications and cleanups.

I also started working toward support for status effects in the map and menu mode. This led to some simplification of the way to display status effects which is now supported in every game mode.
What is left is to add the core logic support to load and properly updates the active effects in the menu and map modes.

Stay tuned and again, a Happy New Year!

Elbrus Shrine...

Hi all,

Here is what has been done this month in Valyria Tear!

First of all, the Episode I last dungeon is slowly but surely advancing on our side. I wouldn't like to spoil it all, but here is something I can already show you:

The Shrine entrance...

Some will recognize the excellent work done in the Liberated Pixel Cup adapted for Valyria here. An adaptation that took some time already... ;)


During that time, on the development side :

 Support for a key to toggle the minimap view has been added. A feature dedicated to BioHazardX. ;)

 Work has been also done to properly support the XBox 360 pad and D-Pads or Hats in general.
There is still a small issue preventing you to use the D-Pad to move your character in the map mode, I'll advise you to use the L button for that until this is properly solved. :)

 I'm also in the process of prettifying the characters battle attacks, by adding new animations, dust and weapon slash effects,  ...

 Last but not least at all, I spent something like two weeks working on a big overhaul of Text Rendering management.
 That part of the code was a bit rusty, and bearing historical workarounds (including mine), making it something heavy. I previously fixed the most ostensible heaviness there (one year ago in fact, wow) by turning the glyph cache from a std::map to a std::vector leading to better performance when parsing it.

 Previously, the texts rendered on screen were computed on each draw call for Option Boxes (used as selectable lists) and Text Boxes (Main text Gui objects with word wrapping support and other nice features).
Only one class (TextImage) was made with the concern of rendering the text only once and reuse the text texture at draw calls as a normal image.

I thus made the Option Boxes and Text Boxes use Text images wherever possible while checking for recomputing only what's necessary and when necessary and made many other tweaks that came along the way. (Cached the Font objects within text styles, made the shadow colors only recomputed when necessary, ...)

The script supervisor is now also using Text Images, meaning that showing some text through scripting isn't killing FPS anymore.

It turned out well, as I earned an average of ~20 FPS on my low-end laptop when dealing with the menu mode, for instance, where there's a lot of text to draw, and the FPS are much more stable and higher in general now.

Voilà ! I hope I didn't lose you in the middle of my geeky explanations. ;)

Stay tuned!

Going into the dungeon...

Hi all, :)

Among other exciting things (just like new Valyria Tear's ports), here is what has been done last month:

I worked mainly on the next two story maps, which will lead our heroes into the last Episode I dungeon entrance:

The high mountain part, just before the shrine entrance.

Lilou and I have been working on paper on the dungeon design (again and again) and agreed on something. (Believe me, that's the main point! ;])

I also added Lilou's horse into the game, and worked on adding shoulders for the new portraits that were missing those.
I also tweaked certain dialogues and added a proper battle AI to Banesore in the village now the game has support for it, making the battle a bit better tuned.
Finally, I added a new optional quest in the starting village. The well-known and venerable 'Find the chicken' quest!

Development-wise, I've been working first on something one person of my primary audience (aka my sister) was requesting since a long, long time. Something I will call edge detection or soft-edges since I was unable to find an official name for that. (might be my own fault) ;)

Briefly, our Hero was previously stopped by walls even when touching them even on edges. Now, it will slide away from them and keep on walking. On another hand, the character won't slide against people he can talk to, treasures, and other interact-able items, to preserve the gameplay.
Here is an example when walking south:

I also added a star icon in front of the currently selected language in the option menu as requested by Aapo, and finally added a missing API scripting function used to properly start an event after a dialogue without tangling the map game states! Quite obscure isn't it? But believe me, it was necessary. ;)

Last but not least, I finally got around removing the GL renderer used to display tiles in the Map Editor, and use an actual Qt Renderer instead!
This permitted to untangle the engine and editor code, remove a lot of unnecessary dependencies for the editor, and leave it out of the way on the port to SDL2. (It previously was broken in the SDL2 port).

Translation wise, I also thank dimproject who made the full game translation into Russian!

OpenDungeons:
I've also been working a lot on compiling OpenDungeons dependencies for Windows (FOSS Dungeon Keeper in the making), and if you're interested to help, feel free to drop by!


Stay tuned!

Valyria Tear 0.6.0 on Maemo5/N900

Hi everyone,

Thanks to the work of Aapo Rantalainen, Valyria Tear can now be run on N900 with quite surprisingly few
issues for a first version.
Big kudos to him!!

Here is the announcement and below a video!

0.6.0 Release!

Hi there,

Good news!

After a few good days in bugfixing, adding the missing little pieces needed to make the 0.6.0 release something polished enough for a pleasant flight, it is now DONE!!

The release is out and you can go grab it in the Downloads section!

Thanks a lot to the whole team that took the time to test and report feedback. :)

The following main parts were fixed if your interested:
- Fixed second boss skills
- Fixed the battle stats initialization that weren't proper for certain cases.
- Finally added the Crystal voicecasts.

Here is also the full changelog between the rc1 and the final release.

Enjoy!

0.6.0 Release candidate 1 out!

Hi there! :)

The new Valyria Tear intermediate release is out!



You'll find the source package and the Windows installer in the Downloads section.

Compared to the HEIR1 Release, this release is providing most notably the following things:

- Many, many, many bugfixes and performance improvements.
- The characters actual weapon is shown in battles, along with weaponless attack support.
- Custom minimap support.
- New art!
- Battle enemies scriptable AI support.
- Better scripted battle events.
- Equipment and Battle status effect support in battles.
- UI theme change support.
- Menu mode UI stats info display improvements.
- Translated into 4 languages (French, Galician Italian, and German) - Come and add your own!
- Map enemies using patrol way points.
- Scripted puzzle objects.
- and of course, more of the story :)

 This release is not only my own work but also the one of a lot of involved and noteworthy people! Thanks a lot guys and girls!

Mountain background

Hi everyone :) Just a small update to tell that we've now got a new battle background thanks to Tamara Ramsay!

This wonderful new piece of art was partially funded thanks to the very first donation received! The donator wants to stay anonymous but I thank both this person and Tamara very warmly for the help :)

I thus opened a donation log to make clear of what is happening with the money given.

Cheers,

New NPCs portraits!

Hi all,

Thanks to Anthony44, and after a call for new characters portraits thanks to an idea of BioHazardX, two new portraits have successfully landed into the master repository:

Thanks to everyone helping to make this happen!

Summertime

Hi everyone,

First of all, I wish you all to get the time needed to relax and rest a bit before entering the second half of this year. :)

Having a break is necessary sometimes, and so I did for a few enjoyable days, hence the lack of news here!
But that doesn't mean development on Valyria Tear has ceased! Quite the reverse in fact... ;)

- Full Battle status effect support!

The characters stats and status effect systems have been greatly simplified and lifted (Almost completely been rewritten in fact), to bring full passive (read: from equipment) and active (read: from spells and hits) effects support in battles!
As a result, elemental status effects, poison and regen support is now fully working in battles!

This is leading me to introduce the elements that will be existing in Valyria Tear :
Fire, Water, Air, Earth, Life, Death, and Neutral. (Neutral being the strongest one.)

All that, along with trading support made, and spirit support started on equipment, will permit to improve the heroes' equipment and/or learn new skills through it, or thanks to spirits!

Some of you may have already seen that some ore is collectable, by the way. ;)


- UI theme change

Authenticate also added UI Theme change support in the boot option menu. Making the former Allacrostian theme available to those who fancy it. :)
This is also exciting as more themes could be added later, making the overall game a more personal experience...







- Custom minimap support

Some work was done on minimaps, first to make them use less memory when being created procedurally, but also to fix some little glitches and add custom minimap support! I still need to add the missing ones but here is an example between the procedural way (on the left), and a custom one (on the right):

- Path finding support to map enemies

The bad fellows that were striving to catch you in the dungeon maps just got smarter! Enemies will now use pathfinding to wander but also to chase after your hero. Also, as I fancied it, I added waypoint support, meaning that certain enemies will patrol on certain map points.

- Story

The two first maps of the Mt. Elbrus are as of now technically finished, with some eye candy missing. This makes the count of missing maps before the next intermediate release to 4 or 5 depending on how things will turn out.

Will your heroes escape from the dark soldiers? Time will tell... ;)



- Bug fixes, and other development hell news

As an ending note, I'll say that this project has reached something like 300% of the features I thought I would add before the Episode I Release, and the work done is far from being mine only.

Thanks a lot to Ikarus, codergreen, authenticate, endoalir, logzero, NaN and BioHazardX for their help in bug fixing and work on the uneasy technical stuff, just as adding support for MSVC2012 compilation, or precompiled headers support (helping with the compilation time.)

A lot of work is still awaiting, but we're very close from another release now.

Stay tuned!

Groundwork

Hi there!

Already a month since the last piece of news so I wanted to make a little one. ;)

New skills

As said in the title, a lot of groundwork has happened in preparation of the global game scale. In short, about 60 skills were added in the in box to support the equipment upgrade system the player will be able to later use.

On the left, you can see an example of a later spell you'll be able to cast to protect your team against Earth based attacks!

I've added the necessary items you'll need to find or buy to later improve your equipment, and add spirit slots to it! I won't spoil it all but spirits will help you obtain new spells based on how you'll combine them on your equipment.

I thus added support to earn new skills through equipment. This will likely make the game more strategical and more fun. ;)
A lot of work remains but it's already coming along nicely so far.

New skills in the debug menu

Story

The two next maps linked to the story have also been added, and the heroes will soon have to evade the bad guy's army in order to survive this. (Mwahaha!)
The pursuit maps are ready on paper and I hope to put out a new intermediate release afterwards, just before the second dungeon.


Bug fix and other improvements

The title tells it. A ton of bugfixes have happen since last month and keep on coming, making the next release more stable than ever!
Also, Ablu helped fixing the icon installation on linux distributions, hasufell helped fixing path installations, and authenticate just spotted two nasty bugs leading to crashes. :D

The bug fixes aren't all made of code though. Many graphics were slightly improved along with the addition of support for images offsets, permitting to add back its shadow to the Fenrir, and fixing the grass clumps being previously cut on their bottom edge, for instance.


Translations

A special note for translation with the ever wonderful job of BioHazardX and NaN in updating the Italian and German translations.
A special guest also came along and not only fixed certain English typos but also added the Galician (gl) translation. A big thanks to Gallaecio for that.

Knitter also started the Portuguese (pt_PT) translation so this might soon become a reality, too. :)

Stay tuned!

The Villains

Hi everyone! :)

I must say I wanted to wait a bit more before presenting what's new in Valyria Tear, but since a lot of time already flew away, I'll do a quick piece of news now!

First things first, let's start with a small teaser ;)

Let me introduce the great first Villain you'll encounter in the game. The mysterious and malevolent Country Lord Banesore.

In the development version, the story goes to the point where Bronann meets that bad guy. As it was the heaviest thing so far I had to script/prepare sprites for, I'm quite happy it's more or less done. :D

I'll now be able to focus on adding the next part of the story, which is a bit lighter in term of scripting and should also be more interesting for the people in need of action! ;)

- Passive Status effect and elements

But this is not only what happened last month, IkarusDowned added support for passive equipment effects in battles, meaning that you will now be able to use (future) upgraded swords and other equipment pieces, giving bonus in attack, or defense.

The status/party, the shop mode, and the menu equipment windows have been upgraded to properly show different equipment effects in a common fashion, and with icons, which will tell the link between stats and effects:

The omni-sword, a piece of equipment used to test the extreme display case.

- Other improvements

The game will now remember which repeatable dialogues you have seen and show a bubble only on new npc dialogues. This will be a great help to get to know whom you talked with.

Common game data are now loaded once instead of loading them each time a game mode was loaded, which leads to less audio crashes and better overall performance!

I also took the time to properly try and fix joystick support. Valyria Tear should now be fully playable using your favourite pad!

- Save data and OSX ports

Valyria Tear will now use standard paths for settings and save files, for both Windows and Linux, and auto-copy the data which was in the old location.

Also, thanks to Socapex's work, OSX support for Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion has been upgraded and improved, and test builds are available in the downloads section! :D

Small Bugfix release

Hi all,

Following a nice reminder by Ablu, I uploaded a bugfix release of the Half-Episode I release aka 0.5.1.
You will find it in the download section.

The only change is a fix in the shop mode, preventing a crash when buying in certain cases.

Be sure to get this version if you're in the middle of it :)

Best Regards,

Return to the village

Hi everyone, :)

Here is a little summary of what has been done last month in Valyria Tear:

First of all, let me thank Brian Callahan for porting Valyria Tear to OpenBSD (See the download page) and helping me to adapt back my own code for that. :)

Now, let's start with the two major features developed by IkarusDowned and Codergreen which are basically finished and have been merged in the master branch. This means Valyria Tear now has minimap and trade support! :D

The minimaps are auto-generated from map data, making them seamless when designing maps (yeah), additional features, like displaying map exits, or interesting spots will likely happen a bit later but it's already very great to see it in full use. So, I thank again very warmly Ikarus for this feature. :)

at night at the forest entrance, with a minimap ;)

Trading support will also help the gaming experience as a key point, since it will permit me to propose improvement to equipment against special materials, sell rare wares with special conditions, among other things, so that the player will later be able to tune up his/her equipment for the next dungeon!

Trading support, with the additional required items to get the stuff!

You may have noticed the forest entrance is displayed at night, as I indeed added the story part where the characters goes back to the village while night falls dynamically on your return. I intentionally stopped the game before the actual arrival to the village as the village content is sill WIP at the moment. More in the next piece of news! (Sorry Shirish ;]). Still, here is a small teaser:

Soldiers!

- Other little things

You might have noticed that I added a nameplate under the name of character, which should help with the name readability. The idea isn't mine as it was simply disabled code from Allacrost missing the needed graphics but still this is refreshing. :)

The battles also have a new stamina bar (seen on the right when fighting) and several other small tweaks have been made in the same trend.

- Contextual and c-format strings translation support

In the other area of the game, I added contextual translation support and c-formatted strings (i.e.: "Paul has %u Drunes."), both permitting to help translators in their hard work, based on their requests.

- Balancing

McMic and BioHazardX also requested to get the first new skills a little bit earlier in game and talked about the enemy experience points rewards in general, leading to a global rescale of enemy XP, and Drunes (gold). In order to stay relevant and fair, I made a spreadsheet giving me hints on how much XP and drunes a monster was worth based on its stats, weakness, items and skills, and used that as a base to rescale everything.
The result isn't a spectacular change as it only led to tweaks here and there to those values. The most noticeable change was a fix to the mistake in the HP of the Fenrir second encounter.
I thank everyone for their polite and sensible feedback on those points.

- Performance

The fading system was also simplified to no longer apply a color on each and every image on every draw calls and use an overlay instead. This has simplified the draw code for the images and other elements of this kind and should lead to a slight but welcome increase in performance. I, myself, have no longer slow downs in the shop mode (why not?) and while fading in and out. :)

- Map data format

Another key work was also done on map data :
The map tile data and the map scripts are now two separate files. This has several advantages:
- The map load time has decreased in general.
- The map data is reusable and is reused when returning to the village without the need to twist the village center script even more.
- This permits also to remove the max length cap the scripts could have as the map editor would then no longer load the map file after reaching that cap.

This move has also got another goal. I'm currently planning to remove the use of a setenv() function in the map data script and simply use a normal table, and drop context switching support, as this (even strong) feature is only used once and isn't very friendly in term of data handling. This can later be readded  with the support of loading several map data files at the same time, but I'll sincerely go without, for now, if at all.

Why all that? Because I'll then be able to start working on creating a tiled plugin and use Tiled as the Valyria Tear map editor, and this, for obvious reasons due to the fantastic maturity of this open source tool. :)

Thanks a lot for reading!

OSX test packages!

Hi all,

As Socapex said it, happened to own a mac, willing to have a go at testing Valyria?

A testing package for Mountain Lion has been made here:

http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=76&t=4232

And soon for Snow Leopard!

A big thanks to him for doing that uneasy job.

Have fun!

Full Episode I dev started

Hi all, :)

Almost twenty days have followed the first finished Valyria Tear release, and here is what happened since then:

The main feature I have been working on for almost two weeks was the separation of the weapon layer from the main characters layer, making it possible to display a custom weapon animation corresponding to the current character's equipment! And I'm happy to say this is now true at least for the battle mode. :)

Another key point I wanted to see done before moving on was the ability to setup a scripted death sequence for battle enemies. It went along much more nicely than I thought and it's now a reality:

Bronann handling his wood sword, and the boss dying in a custom way...

And, this is not everything we made:

Key items can now be weapons, equipment or everything else as the "Key" flag of key items is now a simple tag, and not a item type anymore, permitting me to clearly set the characters starting equipment as key items, and make it visible in the menu window.

I also made physical objects support scriptable event triggering when "talking" to them, and this permitted me for instance, to make Olivia's cat meow or Lilly's dog bark, as many people were requesting this ;) , but it will also permit me to add hidden switches, and so on...

Something that was quite requested also, is the fact to be able to select the language at first run. This is now done and the game will prompt the language menu and accept common keys to select it before displaying the help window in the right language, making new players much more at ease from the start.

And of course, I started to script the next part of the story, finishing the after crystal appearance scene, and preparing the return to village phase. More to come on it, for sure. ;)

Last but not least, Ikarus also made his part of work by being in the finals of preparing new dungeons minimap support:

New WIP minimap support by IkarusDowned :)

Stay tuned!

Final release of Half-Episode I

Hi all,

The first Valyria Tear release of half the episode I has reached its final state!
Note: The windows installer and the Linux source package should be available in a few hours. The packages are ready!! Enjoy!

And here is what has been done since the last release candidate (aka RC2):

First of, the game is using new musics in battles and in the caves area, permitting to give back to Allacrost by letting it breath with its own musical mood. I hope you'll enjoy the new music as I did play with the new ones for several days to make sure of the replacement.
A big and never-ending thanks to OpenGameArt.org as the many quality and free contributions there made this step rather easy, for that change, but also for everything linked to open sourced art in general.

I'm also taking the opportunity to thank again the quality while fast-paced work of IkarusDowned, who simply finished the quest log, which is looking quite useable now:

New Quest Log, now with completion text and location images of the quest start

He also worked on the beginning of a map (and minimap!) support in game, and the world map is already a very usable feature, see for yourself:

The current WIP World Map, entirely configurable :)

Let's not forget the work of Codergreen who actually reached a milestone in the refresh of the shop mode. The new shop is now much simpler to use and quicker to get stuff from or sell to, and I thank him warmly for that.

Simply select the item you want to buy/sell, use the left or right key to add/remove, confirm and you're done.

Trade support is also on the roll and should be ready for the next release!

The new code should also be lighter, both in readability and in performance, as it seemingly was for me:

The new shop! from Codergreen

As for the misc things, many, many smaller things have made their way through and were added or fixed for this latest release, I'm taking the opportunity to thanks Shirish (among many others) for the thorough playtests he's done and the bugs reported:

- Many optimizations, removal of global variables, in lua scripts.

- Made the engine able to drop a global table before reinserting data in it, thus preventing the read of outdated data and preventing potential crashes and the loading of invalid save data.

- Addition of missing dialogues where the players consensus found relevant.

- Refactor and cleanup in the settings code, also adding the missing joystick keys, removing unused ones in the options:

New joystick options

I also thank NaN and BioHazard for their feedback and their continuous translation updates.

And finally Roots, for his will to keep collaborating with us, while struggling to bring Allacrost in a more and more interesting and enjoyable state. :) You might soon have the possibility to play two RPGs instead of one!

Now that this episode part is done and in feature freeze, the next version of Valyria Tear will feature what's next in the story, along with many new features!

Stay tuned!

Release Candidate 2

Hi everyone,

After a lot of work, the release candidate 2 of our first release is here and can be downloaded here.

This time, I provided both a windows installer, and a linux source package, fully tested against official packaging rules thanks the marvelous help of Ablu. :)

What changed since the previous pre-release?

In short:
- Addition of the actual introduction of the game.
- Quest log in the menu thanks to IkarusDowned.
- New reorganized battle command menu.
- Many new graphics and small updates in the maps.
- Translation of the all dialogues and the main GUI options in every available languages (German, Italian, English and French) thanks to the help of BioHazardX and NaN.
- Simplified and more interactive first battle tutorial dialogue.
- Made the linux source installable and thus packageable.
- Many, many other bug fixes.

We also tried to answer all the feedback received on the forums and by other means and tweaked many things based on that, even if certain are still pending.

Also, a Mac port requested!! If you're a mac developer, and willing to help on that part, I couldn't be more happy, feel free to get in touch. :)

Stay tuned!

Nice video review on FOSSGamers

Hi,

Just saw a video of Valyria Tear in the RPG category of FOSSGamers:
https://www.youtube.com/user/FOSSGamers

Here it is (The video was made by ChemBroTronNo1):

Amazing!

Happy New Year!

2013, here we are.

And here are some news from what happened since the end of December :)

Making the Christmas release has been quite a ride, both very entertaining, and taking a lot of energy, and I've been quite happy to take a back seat for a few days and enjoy spending time with my family and also enjoy other's work done on Valyria as well. ;)

A lot of new activity has also happened during the second of those few days, as some of you already reacted on the forums, by mails, or by opening issues, and I wanted to say that even if I say, 'err, no!' to your feature request or your crazy ideas, I do appreciate you both took the time to try the game, and took the time to take your virtual paper and pen to write back your impressions.

As qubodup said, while answering all the questions and the requests is recommended, it's not always possible. Thus, I'll keep trying to take in account all the questions, flames, impressions, thoughts, requests made for the game while trying also not to forget the story we first wanted to tell, and the game we first wanted to make.

But enough speech, let's look at what happened thanks to the work and feedback of what on can now call the 'Valyria Tear Team'!

Let's first start with Roots, who actually did all the balancing work made on items, and enemies, along with working on improving the loading of the characters stats handling code. (already present in the Christmas release). I couldn't talk about that earlier being short of time, but I still wanted to point that out.


As for the menu mode, IkarusDowned did a lot of master work on it, rewriting all the way the sub-menus are loaded and handled to be more readable and maintainable, and adding support to be able to quick-equip an item from the inventory.

Not only that, but he also added the first working version of a Quest Log! Work is still being done on it, but it's already nice looking, and merged the Formation and Status menu into one.

Codergreen isn't resting as he's steadily working toward a simplified shop mode, which is almost working so far. More to come on this!

As for me, if you've tried the X-Mas release and finished it, you'll know what happened at the end. And I've reused a part of it to add the actual introduction of the game.



While keeping polishing the Half-Episode I content, I've also been trying to answer the call of reports made both on the forums and in issues by adding hints gently provided by qubodup on the first hide'n'seek "quest", updating translations also gently provided by NaN (German), and BioHazardX (Italian).




I also fixed the fade out not done when quick changing maps, turned the music fade out/in into states making them correctly handled when restoring the music state in-game, and several other adjustments like the addition of a key quick-help at game start that some will appreciate:

Last but not least, I've simplified the first battle tutorial dialogue to make it more readable and not entering the details too much, especially for characters that have only one skill, and players that might be completely new, and added a nice 'look here!' hand cursor animation. ;)

A new actual release candidate is planned to be out in a few days from now, so I hope you'll enjoy the new features and bug fixes done on it compared to the 2012 release.

Regards,