Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Hey there, :D

It's been quite some time, right?

Reidy (from Evolonline) even told me this blog needed some news so here we go :D

Then, you'll ask me, what happened since September?
Well, first of all, a lot of things on Valyria Tear of course:

OpenGL 2.0 and SDL 2.0!

Mainly, and also thanks to some hard work from authenticate, Valyria Tear has finished its transition to SDL2, as he fixed text rendering when using the newest SDL_ttf version, and I added the screen resolution auto-detection with a fallback to hard coded ones when it failed, and VSync/Swap tearing support thanks to SDL2 functionalities.

authenticate also fully made the work to make Valyria Tear use the OpenGL 2.0 norm and added support to use shaders to first emulate fixed pipeline support, but this will later permit to add cool effects! :D

1.1 version on going:

As for other changes, development on the 1.1 version has fully started. This version will focus on refactoring as you have seen and add support to a new skill system permitting you to select where you want to put your strength when your characters level up. Work will also be done on rebalancing the game and add different difficulty levels, and a brand-new autosave system, permitting to make the game experience much more enjoyable. :)

What's new?

I first added support to trigger a dialogue in any game mode and added a tutorial dialogue in Flora's shop. I also started working on a offline manual that will serve as a template for the ingame one. (Still need some work but I'm not that far.).
The text scrolling is also now configurable and I made it muck quicker per default to avoid Confirm key bashing when playing.

I also upgraded the audio code so that the map music doesn't restart from the beginning when leaving a battle and keeps playing in battles when it is the same than the map.

Last but not least, work is now being done to simplify the scripting API, streamline it a bit and make it less error-prone for the scripter.

In term of internalization, thanks to alexanderkjall and eugeneloza, the game has also been translated into Swedish and Ukrainian. :)

Moonrise also made Ubuntu packages for Valyria Tear.

And this is not everything...

OpenDungeons has reached the 0.4.9 milestone after a year of work! It now has multiplayer support a new GUI and a rock-solid core gameplay. Go grab it and get in touch with the team if you need info! :D

Hero of Allacrost development has taken off again, and work on art and on the map editor is now being done as witnessed on their forums. :)

I wish you all a nice year's ending. See you in 2015!