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!