Virtual Kingdoms

Rest assured progress is continuing on KQ the Betrayer. I encountered a problem with running kq with liblua5.1-0-dev installed on Jaunty Jackalope. It would crash on startup with the error “could not parse ./scripts/global.lob” Switching to the liblua50-dev package and completely removing the 5.1-0-dev package and then recompiling fixed the problem. I’m pretty sure it used to work on Intrepid, but I could be mistaken. In other news we added a couple of new tiles this week.

The betrayer’s engine was quite outdated compared to recent development on KQ. I think it was based off a 2006 or 2007 release. Something had to be done, so I decided to refork KQ and try to keep the engine up to date this time. I have finished the reforking. The Betrayer Subversion “trunk” is up to date with the KQ cvs. As well as having the changes that I have made: Portrait dialogues, 4 player parties, varying store prices, new graphics, and a few other minor changes. Some of the new changes that the KQlives team added are a lua console in debug mode, translation support, and bug fixes. Now I need to work on the story, some side quests and balancing. Then it will be time for another release. (I’m shooting for sometime this summer)

I found a workaround to get sound to work for kqthebetrayer (or kq) in Ubuntu 9.04 or higher. The problem has to with pulseaudio so killing pulse will do the trick. I tried the pulse suspender but that didn’t work for me.

killall pulseaudio
And then just start kq.

Pulse is placed over the top of alsa so your sound should continue to work. You can easily restart pulse by doing a . Maybe I will just remove pulse all together, it doesn’t seem to help anything. But that will have to wait until after I get Jaunty Jackalope. All the great new pulseaudio features and utilities aren’t even installed as default. So it just works worse then before. Great design choice. I tried arch the other day but I don’t really want to go through the trouble of trying to get xorg and kde or gnome to work. I followed their instructions and it didn’t work. So for now it looks like I will stick with Ubuntu where I can spend my time working on my game instead of on trying to get the operating system to work. I used virtualbox to test it out which was a lot better then having to repartition just to test arch. Virtualbox is at the point where it has better functionality than vmware, and its free. Can’t argue with that.

KQ the Betrayer is now on Ohloh, the open source network. Mainly because their data crawler already added it last December. So I figured I might as well make their information accurate and up to date. Some of the info is actually pretty cool.

Well I haven’t given up on work on the Betrayer. I recently added support for up to a 4 player party. There are still some visual problems with interface menus but its fully functional.

the new battlescreen which supports 4 players

And I have been playing a free linear story-based RPG named Last Scenario. Its a very professional looking game with a few exceptions(one random enemy is a wooden wall and another was a rolleyes which was just a rolling eyes smiley. Yeah lame). My current playtime is at around 15 hours. I will give a full review later.

WB announced that they are delaying the Half Blood Prince till July 21 2009. So that they can make more money. At least the wait between the HBP and the DH wont be as long. The Twilight movie is scheduled to take the November 21 slot instead. Now there’s no movies to look forward to this year, for me at least.

Work on the betrayer has been stagnant partly because I went on a trip to the East Coast. but It will go forward sooner or later.

Yesterday my project got approved so KQ the Betrayer is now on Sourceforge.net You can go take a look. The download is still the demo that I had up before. But the source on SVN is the very latest.

The other day I read an article by Matt Asay linked on LinuxToday called Google’s festering problem with the AGPL He recommended to all open source developers to dump Google Code because of Google’s refusal to host any projects under the Affero GNU Public License. I found a simpler explanation of the topic by Russell Beattie “Something like the AGPL which requires server-side modifications to also be released is a direct threat to their way of doing business.” And another reason came up this week for me to try sourceforge, so I thought why not try and get the Betrayer hosted by them? You do have to go through a lot of forms to get your project approved, but I think it will be worth it. My guess is that the their will be more traffic then before.

Go to the downloads page on the Googlecode Project Page. There are three different types, A source tarball, Debian Package, and Windows Installer.

The Debian Package will not work with a Classic KQLives install. If you don’t have Classic KQ installed then it doesnt matter. It should work. Though the Debian Package has showed some weird dependency problems.

If you run a make install on the source package it will overwrite an existing install of KQLives. If you just “make” it and not “make install” It will work fine in the selected directory.
One note -KQtheBetrayer will not ruin save files for the original KQLives.

Questions? Comments? Go to the KQ the Betrayer 0.2.6 Release thread.

I finally succeeded in creating a Windows binary for KQ the Betrayer, due largely to the help of the [kqlives-main] mailing list. What I ended up doing was using Mingw32 and Msys. The KQLIVES team put up all the dependencies for kq on their sourceforge download page which made it a whole lot easier. It compiled right from the box. Though the lua interpreter isnt working correctly. So it didnt compile the lua files to .lob correctly but I can just do that on my development setup on linux.

When I release the Kqthebetrayer demo in February or March there will now be a windows binary to go with it for all you windows users out there. The demo will feature over 20 original maps and a decent amount of tileset changes. I also increased the limit of entities from 41. Its currently at 47 entities. I uploaded some screenshots to the kqthebetrayer page

I guess the next step is to figure out how to do a linux package.

On the game itself I haven’t done that much recently. But as you can see now I have a page up(see at the top of the page). I also now have a project page on google code. http://code.google.com/p/kqthebetrayer/ If you want to download the very latest subversion release go right ahead. I think having it up on subversion will make it easier for me to edit it on different machines. I hope to release a demo by December 25th. So check back for details.