February 2012 Progress Report

Thu Mar 01 2012

This is FreeDroidRPG's 12th monthly progress report, celebrating a full year of great reports about great progress! In this year, no less than 132 items were listed in these reports, and they have covered many important additions to the game. We hope you, the community, have enjoyed the reports and found them helpful in keeping up with the development of the game, and that future reports will be filled with even more changes and improvements. Speaking of which, here are some of the things the team was up to during the past month:

Programming department

  • Vending machines have been implemented, and currently they sell various consumable items such as coolants and nutrients. By Miles McCammon.

Graphics department

  • Three designs for the vending machines have been included, thanks to Infrared and Miles McCammon.

Among the smaller changes:

  • The moving target Tux, the player character, follows has been restricted to a maximum of 2 units away from Tux, to allow better control with the keyboard. By Vinayak Garg.
  • Arthur Huillet fixed a bug that allowed destroying an already destroyed enemy.
  • The code for the Graphic User Interface has been factorized and made more efficient by fluzz.

All in all, 19 changes were committed in February.

As always, we want to thank everyone who contributed to the game during the month and during the year, and remind everyone that if there's something bugging you about the game you can always tell us about it, file an official report about it or even take a shot at fixing it. If you do, you might even be featured on this list next month!

-The FreeDroidRPG Team


FOSDEM talk: "Anatomy of a role playing game"

Sat Feb 11 2012

Arthur's talk was delivered at FOSDEM with great success. Audience feedback was positive.

The video is available on Youtube, thanks to the people involved in recording video and sound. Watch it here.


January 2012 Progress Report

Wed Feb 01 2012

Hello, and welcome to FreeDroidRPG's first monthly progress report for 2012! Here are some of the highlights of what's been happening:

Programming department

  • The formula for calculating the cost for repairing a hacked bot has been improved and simplified, as specified here. Thanks to Sebastian Offermann.
  • Excelling at the takeover minigame now has its rewards; if few charges were used by the player, the heat cost will be smaller to match. By Sebastian Offermann.

Graphics department

  • Matthias Krüger replaced the inventory images of some items with images of a higher resolution.
  • A bug was fixed that involved the list of animated obstacles in a level and caused the creation and saving of obstacles with negative index values was fixed, thanks to fluzz.

Writing department

  • The dialog with Dixon has been restructured and reworked a little; cookies have been replaced with variables; also, the peaceful players may find they have some more options. By Sebastian Offermann and Xenux.
  • Sebastian Offermann and Matthias Krüger gave the dialogs a general cleanup, with cookies replaced by variables, extra spaces removed, bugs and typos squashed (yes, typos can be squashed. We checked) and other improvements and simplification.

Some of the smaller changes:

  • If the player chooses to repair a hacked bot but then chooses to destroy it through the wonderful hcf.py, the costs of the repairs would not apply. Thanks to Matthias Krüger.

All in all, 23 changes were made in January.

We wish to thank everyone who contributed and helped improve the game. If you have an idea, something that bugs you or an issue you want to fix, don't be afraid to contact us and talk about it, tell us what's bugging your game or try to fix it yourself. Try it, you might even find your name on this list!

It is well worth mentioning that Arthur Huillet is going to do a talk about FreeDroidRPG in FOSDEM on Sunday, February 5th. The talk is titled "Anatomy of a Role Playing Game", and if you're attending, you might even get a T-shirt showing some of the bots! Oh joy!

-The FreeDroidRPG Team


December 2011 Progress Report

Sun Jan 01 2012

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


FreedroidRPG 0.15

Fri Dec 23 2011

FreedroidRPG 0.15 is out - just in time for Christmas!

0.15 was made from 0.15rc2 without changes - if you are playing rc2, you don't need to upgrade.