Tag: SFML

Alternate Reality X – Release 0.41

Acrin1 Leave a comment

I’ve finally uploaded release 0.41 of Alternate Reality X to www.crpgdev.com – it’s only about 4 months late! Finally tackled some of the work on the City taverns and I’ll try and totally finish these for release 0.5. Tavern features still missing are buying rounds and friendship levels which determine whether you get help when you’re down and out or get refused entry to certain taverns. I’m also keen to add a save game facility as many people are asking for this.

Anyway here’s what’s included in this 0.41 release:

  • City Courier healer bug fixed
  • Use food packets and water flasks
  • Buy food and drink from City taverns
  • Basic recording of hunger, thirst and alcohol levels added
  • City Tavern jobs and memberships now available
  • Updated city map with correct signs and Arena walls (many thanks to Dalimar who did this work)
  • Added Trolls and Goblins palaces
  • Added Dungeon Chapel placeholder and music
  • Added fountains to Dungeon
  • Mini map and full screen map no longer slow down frame rate due to SFML 2.0 library
  • “Use” command now works during encounters
  • Mercenaries / Paladin guilds in Dungeon no longer crashes
  • No longer crashes when using the secret doors in the outer City walls to move from one map side to another
  • Mini map now displays during encounters
  • Lots of code reorganisaion behind the scenes

Feedback as always appreciated.

Stone of the Citadel: First screenshot

Acrin1 Leave a comment

As I mentioned previously I’ve already done some initial coding for Stone of the Citadel. I’ve played around with a few different displays based on other games and for the initial stages of building up some actual game content I’ve settled on a simple screen layout which you can see below.

Whilst not particularly exciting at this stage it gives me something solid to start working with and building on. Over the coming months expect the display to change dramatically though – everything from the 3D view, its dimensions, textures, layout, fonts and logo are all likely to change. I’ve spent some time getting my bitmap font routine working smoothly as there will be a lot of text and information within the game so it needs to be readable. I can easily use other fonts now this is in place.

Functionality wise all you can do just now is move around a simple test map with walls and doors. Performance of the 3D view slowed down a bit once I added all the menus and party roster but I know why this has happened and how to fix it.

I’m planning to switch over to SFML 2.0 from SFML 1.6 as I believe this will give me some options for improving performance. It’s also the future for SFML so I might as well start to become familiar with it.

Alternate Reality – Graphic card woes

Acrin1 Leave a comment

I was fortunate enough to be able to upgrade the old laptop I was using to a decent spec PC. Everything initially looked very positive. Windows 7 installed smoothly, detected all the right drivers and the PC seemed to perform very well. I installed Visual Studio 2008 Express which I am using to develop my Alternate Reality remake and everything compiled fine.

However when I ran Alternate Reality X (as I’ve now started calling it) but it was very slow. SFML (the media library I’m using for the project) uses OpenGL to produce all its graphic output and I’m also using OpenGL to produce the 3D view in the game. The onboard Intel graphics in the PC obviously doesn’t have proper Windows 7 drivers which support OpenGL (despite the OpenGL logo being displayed within the graphic card driver tab within Windows).

The number 3 on the status bar below indicates the number of frames the game is currently running at with the alternate graphics option. It’s not quite so bad with the original graphics which are smaller dimenstions. On my previous laptop (also using Intel graphics but with proper OpenGL supported Windows 7 drivers) the game ran around 30 frames a second. Sadly there seem to be no better drivers available.

I ordered a new graphics card with an NVidia chipset but didn’t realise that the PC didn’t have a PCI Express x16 slot! I’ll get this sorted eventually. In the meantime I’ll focus on parts of the game which aren’t really affected by the slow speed.

Simple and Fast Multimedia Library 1.0

Acrin1 Leave a comment

I’ve been having a look at the Simple and Fast Multimedia Library (SFML) and it seems quite interesting. You can find out more about it at:

http://sfml.sourceforge.net/

To quote from the website:

SFML is a portable and easy to use multimedia API written in C++. You can see it
as a modern, object-oriented alternative to SDL.SFML is composed of several
packages to perfectly suit your needs. You can use SFML as a minimal windowing
system to interface with OpenGL, or as a fully-featured multimedia library for
building games or interactive programs.

I’ll keep my eye on this one as it looks very promising and has some nice built in features. I’ve been looking for something that offers a balance between the low level of SDL and the higher level of say Allegro and SFML looks about the right balance for me.