Allacrost is an active project once again. I returned in September after being inspired by the new release of Valyria Tear, our sister project. I've been hard at work and rebuilding a team to finish what we started. We're actually not that far off from being ready to start producing release candidates. Here's a summary of what's going on with Allacrost right now:
I'm in the process of making vast improvements to our editor and the way in which we store and process map data. Map creation had been far too time-consuming and frustrating of a process and these improvements will make that process so, so much more enjoyable to do.
The only major hurdles that remain for us to complete this release are to (1) produce our remaining maps, (2) write the scripting for them, and (3) finish the missing art and sound content that we need.
I've been writing a series of retrospective posts about the history of this project, discussing what decisions were made and why, and chronicaling our mistakes and successes. (Believe it or not, this project is ten years old!). Hopefully it will help others learn how to find success with their own open source projects.
Right now we're shooting to make our next development release (a release snapshot) available in the first quarter or first half of 2015. If we keep our current pace, I think we hae a good shot of achieving that goal. Our Roadmap has been updated, so you can see just how far we've come and what we have left to do before this release is ready. Finally, we could use some additional help. Specifically, we're looking for people with the following skills:
Map Designer: use our (new and improved) editor to layout maps and write Lua scripts to make them come alive. Really awesome to do because you get to pull in the work that everyone else has done and build the game from those pieces.
2D Artists: we use (and contribute) a lot of art from this community, but we always need more. We have one artist right now that is doing a phenomenal job, and he'd love to have someone to collaborate with. To see what type of art we create for Allacrost, check out the Artwork Categories page on our wiki.
C++/Lua programmer: we have a lot of "nice-to-have" features we'd like to make available in this release. We have a stable, mature, and well-documented code base for you to play with. Whether you're interested in working on the game engine, logic, or scripting, we can surely find something that you'd like to work on.
Thanks! I'll update this thread in the future with any important updates or major releases.
Okay, I made the edit and I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. Only took me about 5 minutes. I tried an animation rate of 200ms per frame because the 150ms looked just a tad too fast to me. But 200ms looks a tad too slow. So maybe 175ms is the magic number to try?
One thing I noticed as I worked closely with this animation is that the base of the fire doesn't animate much at alll. This is fine, but it might look slightly more awesome if the inner white circle were to expand and contract slightly during the animation. That might be a lot of work to get it to look right though and I'm not sure if it's worth the effort involved.
Awesome, I love your improvements. I'm pulling the latest version into a new tileset I'm making for now. Do you expect to be making any further changes to the base of the fire? If not, I'll get to work on an alteration that removes the firewood so that it can be placed upon anything to make it look like it's on fire.
I like the 5 frame animation better, but it's really hard to tell as the two animations are very similar in quality. I think it's a great improvement over the old animation, nice work! I do have a couple suggestions for how it could be improved though.
1) The parts of the flame that jump up above the main fire stand out because they don't seem to have the same level of detail in the shading of the flames at the base. Particularly the large orange sections in the middle of the flame bursts seem almost "cartoonish" in comparison with the flame at the base. In this resepect, I feel your older animation was superior because it did not suffer this problem. Fixing it might be as simple as just increasing the level of shading in these branching flames and reducing the amount of contiguous sections of one color.
2) This is incredibly minor, but it seems a little odd to me that the flames jump up to the same height on the sides of the fire as they do in the center. Do a google image search for "camp fire" and maybe you'll see what I mean looking through some of the photos there. The fire is sort of shaped like an upside-down cone. The highest reaching flames are formed from the center of the fire, and the apex height gradually drops as you get further out from the center.
I'm planning to make extensive use of this animation in the next release of Allacrost as well. I'm going to make an edit it to to remove the wood underneath so that it can be used for setting the top of anything on fire, such as a building or tree.
Hi everyone. I thought I'd bump this topic since it's been a while. Unfortunately, the project did go through a temporary death for much of 2011 and 2012. I got busy with other things in my life, and so did everyone else so everything kind of stagnated. I've spent the last two months breathing life back into the project and it's now under active development once again. Yesterday I recorded a video showing the current state of the game along with commentary about it and some of the design decisions that we're currently debating on. If you have a few minutes to check it out, the link is below.
I'll be more active in this community again and I'm working on filling in our missing artwork at the moment, both with material from OGA and what I can make myself. If you'd like to help out (in any capacity), we'd be happy to have you. We especially need artists and game designers (people who tie together code and content to make maps, events, etc).
Aww, thanks man! This looks great and it will really help us out a lot. Your timing couldn't have been any better either, as I'm going to get to work on our castle town tileset tomorrow.
I was doing some cleaning on our FTP tonight and discovered that we do indeed have a female version as MrBeast asked. I also found frames for a child, and it seems that these images have three additional frames for the sideways directions. These were done several years ago so I completely forgot about them. I believe we decided against using 8 frames for the sidways animation because it was a lot of extra work and it was easier at the time to just have the same number of frames for each direction. I updated the description of this entry and added the new images. Enjoy!
Woah, Allacrost was shipped with your distro Pompei2? What distro was that? That's the first time I've heard of our software being included like that. Really cool! Yeah, that version you played was probably one of the demo 0.2.x ones. We're finally done with releasing demos and ar e now moving on to the full game.
Myckel, yeah the reason why it wasn't longer than 20 minutes was because we don't have the artwork yet to create our next map (a castle/town). I've been working on creating artwork for it myself because we have no artists on the team currently doing map art. :( The crab-like boss (its actually a giant scorpion) does need to be improved. Its placeholder art that still needs to be shaded and given detail. Its on our long list of things to do. Also the release you played was a development release, which is basically an unfinished snapshot of what our next release is going to be. We're still missing over half of the maps for that release, so don't worry, there's more to come. :)
Allacrost is an active project once again. I returned in September after being inspired by the new release of Valyria Tear, our sister project. I've been hard at work and rebuilding a team to finish what we started. We're actually not that far off from being ready to start producing release candidates. Here's a summary of what's going on with Allacrost right now:
Right now we're shooting to make our next development release (a release snapshot) available in the first quarter or first half of 2015. If we keep our current pace, I think we hae a good shot of achieving that goal. Our Roadmap has been updated, so you can see just how far we've come and what we have left to do before this release is ready. Finally, we could use some additional help. Specifically, we're looking for people with the following skills:
Thanks! I'll update this thread in the future with any important updates or major releases.
Okay, I made the edit and I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. Only took me about 5 minutes. I tried an animation rate of 200ms per frame because the 150ms looked just a tad too fast to me. But 200ms looks a tad too slow. So maybe 175ms is the magic number to try?
One thing I noticed as I worked closely with this animation is that the base of the fire doesn't animate much at alll. This is fine, but it might look slightly more awesome if the inner white circle were to expand and contract slightly during the animation. That might be a lot of work to get it to look right though and I'm not sure if it's worth the effort involved.
Awesome, I love your improvements. I'm pulling the latest version into a new tileset I'm making for now. Do you expect to be making any further changes to the base of the fire? If not, I'll get to work on an alteration that removes the firewood so that it can be placed upon anything to make it look like it's on fire.
I like the 5 frame animation better, but it's really hard to tell as the two animations are very similar in quality. I think it's a great improvement over the old animation, nice work! I do have a couple suggestions for how it could be improved though.
1) The parts of the flame that jump up above the main fire stand out because they don't seem to have the same level of detail in the shading of the flames at the base. Particularly the large orange sections in the middle of the flame bursts seem almost "cartoonish" in comparison with the flame at the base. In this resepect, I feel your older animation was superior because it did not suffer this problem. Fixing it might be as simple as just increasing the level of shading in these branching flames and reducing the amount of contiguous sections of one color.
2) This is incredibly minor, but it seems a little odd to me that the flames jump up to the same height on the sides of the fire as they do in the center. Do a google image search for "camp fire" and maybe you'll see what I mean looking through some of the photos there. The fire is sort of shaped like an upside-down cone. The highest reaching flames are formed from the center of the fire, and the apex height gradually drops as you get further out from the center.
I'm planning to make extensive use of this animation in the next release of Allacrost as well. I'm going to make an edit it to to remove the wood underneath so that it can be used for setting the top of anything on fire, such as a building or tree.
Hi everyone. I thought I'd bump this topic since it's been a while. Unfortunately, the project did go through a temporary death for much of 2011 and 2012. I got busy with other things in my life, and so did everyone else so everything kind of stagnated. I've spent the last two months breathing life back into the project and it's now under active development once again. Yesterday I recorded a video showing the current state of the game along with commentary about it and some of the design decisions that we're currently debating on. If you have a few minutes to check it out, the link is below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9scSYkFK5o
I'll be more active in this community again and I'm working on filling in our missing artwork at the moment, both with material from OGA and what I can make myself. If you'd like to help out (in any capacity), we'd be happy to have you. We especially need artists and game designers (people who tie together code and content to make maps, events, etc).
Aww, thanks man! This looks great and it will really help us out a lot. Your timing couldn't have been any better either, as I'm going to get to work on our castle town tileset tomorrow.
Wow, I really like the flora and trees. Nice work!
I was doing some cleaning on our FTP tonight and discovered that we do indeed have a female version as MrBeast asked. I also found frames for a child, and it seems that these images have three additional frames for the sideways directions. These were done several years ago so I completely forgot about them. I believe we decided against using 8 frames for the sidways animation because it was a lot of extra work and it was easier at the time to just have the same number of frames for each direction. I updated the description of this entry and added the new images. Enjoy!
Woah, Allacrost was shipped with your distro Pompei2? What distro was that? That's the first time I've heard of our software being included like that. Really cool! Yeah, that version you played was probably one of the demo 0.2.x ones. We're finally done with releasing demos and ar e now moving on to the full game.
Myckel, yeah the reason why it wasn't longer than 20 minutes was because we don't have the artwork yet to create our next map (a castle/town). I've been working on creating artwork for it myself because we have no artists on the team currently doing map art. :( The crab-like boss (its actually a giant scorpion) does need to be improved. Its placeholder art that still needs to be shaded and given detail. Its on our long list of things to do. Also the release you played was a development release, which is basically an unfinished snapshot of what our next release is going to be. We're still missing over half of the maps for that release, so don't worry, there's more to come. :)
http://www.opengameart.org/content/castle-exterior-tiles
Wish I had more time to work on this to make a few different more, but I'm leaving for vacation tomorrow.
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