A Happy New Year to the FreeDroidRPG community! This is FreeDroidRPG's monthly progress report for the month of December; our new year's resolution for 2012 is to make the best open source RPG ever! These are some of the things we managed to sneak in before 2011 closed, right after the release of version 0.15:

Writing department

  • Variables in dialogs now have a consistent form, following the rule: "A variable that is solely for one dialog starts with the dialog name". Thanks to Sebastian Offermann.
  • The npc_says, tux_says and cli_says functions now use arguments instead of the rather intrusive concatenation (which was marked by pairs of dots, or ..), which eases translation. Thanks to Xenux, Miles McCammon and Sebastian Offermann.
  • The has_item function now checks if the player has a certain item and not how much of it; instead, that is performed by the new count_item function. Thank to Sebastian Offermann.
  • Matthias Krüger, jANaM and Sebastian Offermann made various corrections to the language in several dialogs, as well as general reformatting and cleanup.

Some smaller changes:

  • Some sounds and sound functions were removed in a code cleanup, by Miles McCammon and Matthias Krüger.
  • Some parts of the code was translated from German into English. Thanks to Matthias Krüger.
  • The deprecated zpipe tool which was once used in the process of making graphics for the game has been removed! Graphics armies everywhere rejoice. Thanks to Matthias Krüger.
  • The calculations that are affected by the screen resolution are delayed until the video mode is initialized, which prevents bugs such as Tux (the player character) being off-center. Thanks to Józef Kucia.
  • The hardcoded resolutions are no longer listed in the resolution selection menu to prevent confusion. By Józef Kucia.
  • Lily Stone, the town's shopkeeper, now only traffics ammo to members of the Red Guard, as per new instructions. Of course, there are other ways to win her favor. By Miles McCammon.

All in all, 132 changes were committed in December.

Once again we wish to thank everyone who contributed, and ask anyone with an idea, request, bug report or fix to contact us, report that bug and maybe even submit a patch to fix it. Who knows, you might even find your name here next month!

It is also worth mentioning that several contributors have taken up on our suggestion from two months ago to wash their llamas, and since our code was compiling and our graphics were rendering, we decided to oblige them! We would never do it again, though. Ever.

-The FreeDroidRPG Team