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.

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

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:

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

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:

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

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:

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

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!

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

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.

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment

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.

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http://www.parpg.net - nuclear winter isometric old school RPG inspired by Fallout, Arcanum & Planescape: Torment