Learning from others: FreedroidRPG

I have been following this game since a lot of years ago. I use to try it every 1-2 years or so and I wanted to check it now, as a few interesting things have been happening during GSoC. After a couple of problems I managed to get it from SVN and make it work.
As usual, FreedroidRPG is a solid rock game, stable and with enough features to make the gameplay fun. One of the most veteran RPGs, and perhaps the best among open source RPGs.
Whats the most annoying detail I found in this game? It is painfully slow. After 3 hours of playing, I have just completed 2 of the first quests. Compare to Mass Effect or Fallout (1, 2, 3, whatever), in the same time you surely have completed a dozen of quests and have pretty much know whats the story about.
So, after stopping to analyze, I think that any trivial quest that takes more than 20 minutes should be redesigned. Going to other town to recover X item shouldnt take endless hours of fighting, going back to repair items, fighting again and again, and again. Probably a lesson we all should consider.

Bullet 2.77 brings cloth simulation

Havent been able to check the official site (for some reason its not accessible for me), but a short reference in opengl.org mentions the new OpenCL based cloth simulation, contributed by AMD (but tested with ATI and Nvidia card, and also Apple hardware).  A quite interesting move, perhaps too late, to counter CUDA advances in physics field. In any case, we benefit from it.

SDL presents GSoC snapshot

Sam has released an special SDL snapshot with the work of Google Summer of Code. The additions are:

Addition of Multi-touch and Gesture Recognition support
by Jim Grandpre, mentored by Ryan C. Gordon (documentation in README.touch and README.gesture)
International Input for Windows
by Daniel Wyatt, mentored by Sam Lantinga (documentation at http://wiki.libsdl.org/moin.cgi/Tutorials/TextInput)
Shaped Windows under Linux, OSX, and Windows
by Eli Gottlieb, mentored by Andreas Schiffler (documentation at
http://wiki.libsdl.org/moin.cgi/SDL-gsoc2010_shaped_windows)
Android Port
by Paul Hunkin, mentored by Sam Lantinga (documentation in README.android)
XRender Support
by Sunny Sachanandani mentored by Sam Lantinga

Another small step towards SDL 1.3, which still has no release date.

New development platform

Ok, after a hardware upgrade (thanks to an generous donation) now I have jumped to Windows 7. Im quite eager to test Ogre D3D 10 renderer and see the new games like Metro 2033. The only drawback is that still have no support for reading my ext4 partitions, but Im working on that. Also, I reinstalled Gentoo, a really painful (and still unfinished) process.
Of course, my hardware is still far from what I need: an Intel Core 2 Duo 8400,  2Gb of RAM and a Radeon HD5770, all that installed in an Intel G43 motherboard. I like Intel mobos, even when they have the bad habit of not labeling it in a clear way. Also my old CRT is asking for a replacement, but thats another year of saving to get the required money for a 19" LCD. Also the PSU requires a replacement, preferrably by a reliable brand one. I have no complains about my old Delta Power, but well, would be nice to have a shiny new Corsair or Thermaltake. Im not concerned about hard drive, Im expecting another generous donation for the end of the year, consisting in a new hard drive.
Im quite pleased with Windows 7 perfomance. Im still getting used to the interface, but I think it was time to make the change. Also, my new Gentoo is working fine, except for a few details that I solve with time. Ran the Heaven demo and Im getting 15-17 FPS, without tessellation, which means that I probably should think again about selling the HD5770 while I still can get a good price (Im having offers here of $250) and buying the 1Gb Geforce 460. 
So, even when not totally happy, Im much better than before.

Blender 2.54

Just a quick post (more like a tweet) to let you know that Blender 2.54 has been released.

More OpenGL tutorials

Ok, I have to be more  open to other choices, never posted about DirectX here...
Today I have a couple of state-of-the-art tutorials, courtesy of opengl.org: Stereo OpenGL in C++ and Tessellation shaders.

Big accident

Yesterday I tried to reinstall my Linux using Calculate Linux. Gentoo portage is becoming a big mess, with packages totally forgotten, missing files and even packages asking for deps that do not exists. So, I had a few choices to replace it: Sabayon (never worked), Arch Linux and Calculate. Arch Linux seems a good choice, but they have removed official support for a package as important as ATI driver, leaving its support to the community. So, Calculate Linux seemed a good choice, considering that it is almost Gentoo (no exotic package manager).
Well, I download it, and booted. CLDX failed to start X or Xfce, perhaps because of my HD5770 not being supported yet. So, I had to look for some text based installer, and calculate seemed the best candidate. Indeed, calculate tried to install, but without asking my permission it quickly repartitioned and formatted my hard drive.
As I just have one hard drive, I lost work and information I had collected for around 5-6 years. The only work I saved was my project, stored in the SVN, and my last novels in progress, which I brought here to office some months ago. Yes, I should have a backup drive, but right now (and probably on the long term) I cant spend money on that.
So, if you are planning to test Calculate Linux, be careful!

Attaching objects to entities in Ogre

An old concern I had since I started my game project was how to implement item equip/unequip. No RPG is complete if you cant try your new dragon scale armor and see how it looks in your character. Well, I cant say I have the process under control, but I found that my idea wasnt so wrong.
Basically, Im using entity bones to attach stuff, via attachObjectToBone(). You can have specific bones for attaching items, or you can use existing bones. In my case, I successfully placed a helmet in my character's head. Well, close to it. Some offset correction is required. The object follows its parent bone animation. This seems to be the most used method in Ogre, an user told me in the IRC that he attached a sword to the robot mesh included in the demos. Of course, the robot has no hands, but it was a proof of concept. No need to split the character in several meshes (head, torso, etc).Of course, I still have a big issue: that method doesnt works for legs, which requires deforming the attached mesh in the knees.
Now Im thinking how to provide some basic level of character look customization, perhaps by dividing the mesh in subentities (by creating vertex groups in Blender). Each subentity can have its own material, including normal mapping.
By the way, a new Ogre exporter has been released, with small, but useful changes, like tangent info not being sent anymore to OgreXMLConverter (I found that problem a couple of ays ago) and the Subsurf modifier problem seems to be fixed now.

Unigine announces Oil Rush

Yesterday Unigine Corp. officially announced Oil Rush, a naval RTS game, which will be simultaneously released for Windows, Linux and PS3. The game has been in development internally at Unigine Corp. since 2009. In my opinion, this title was needed to showcase the potential of this engine, even when Unigine demos have earned a place as benchmarking tool in Phoronix Test Suite, it is not the same in other popular video hardware review sites for Windows. And, if you check the products list, you wont see any released title.
Another interesting detail is that Unigine Corp. is going for the Linux platform, traditionally forgotten by major game companies. The only meaning I see in this move is to prove that their engine allows developing for Linux in parallell with other platforms (usually game developers program for Windows and then port the finished product to Linux, which is a sure recipe for disaster) lowering costs.
I expect that all of you, Linux gamers, go and buy this Oil Rush.

Dont piss off your clients!

Your clients pay your salary, dont forget that. So, it is better if you make easy for them to pay you.
A couple of weeks ago I wanted to get some premium content in Regnum Online. My previous experience with premium content in online games was with Travian and its Pay by SMS system. Totally painless: you simply send an SMS from any of the supported countries, you get a code back and done, you have your gold.
But in Regnum Online, your account declared country must match the country from which the SMS is going to be sent. Well, not a big problem, the Tech Support can change update my account... except that Tech Support seems to take up to a month to attend the mail requests. If they attend them at all. Mine never was attended.
Ok, lets take the hard route: Paypal. I cant access my Paypal account from my country, so I have to use a proxy. Well, that shouldnt be a problem. Wrong, it is a problem. Regnum site checks the country from where you are accessing, if it doesnt matches your account country... again, you are in trouble.
In the end, I had to access Regnum site and change the proxy right before clicking the button to pay. But now they have a client that will no longer  pay for premium content.
I cant underestand the reasons to make paying for your services so complicated. Probably, we all should learn this lesson.