Virtual Kingdoms

Do not worry I am still working on KQ the Betrayer. Recently I have been doing a lot of mapwork which is quite a time intensive process. It makes me think that if I were to ever work on a new game I would seriously look into procedural level generation.

I read a lot of comments about the release of the Silver Lining Ep 1 and one that stuck out to me went along these lines: The narrator tells you that you really do not want to explore the basement, when you are clicking on it for expressly that purpose. i.e. The narrator shouldn’t tell you what you want to do.
I am definitely guilty of thinking along those lines for KtB. I thought it would help a little in creating a sense of urgency to your task at hand. But mostly it comes into the laziness of the developer who didn’t put that area in. So I decided maybe I should add some extra detail not that its necessary, but it hopefully will make the game world feel more complete and “alive”. But it takes time to do. Perhaps I will go back and add more detail, and side quests once the main story is finally finished.

A little while ago I put together a small graphical python tool to help in the creation of monsters for The Betrayer. (It was also for a University project). It isn’t much but it displays all the information for a monster in an easier to read(and to edit) format then the game’s data files. Eventually I will need to go back through KtB from the beginning and create monsters for the whole game. Which is not something I am looking forward to. This tool will make that process a lot easier. It currently hides in the trunk/data/editor folder on svn. It is released under the GPLv2 and with some small modification will work for KQLives’ monsters as well.
Items are currently hard coded in the source of the game so adding or removing items will cause a lot of havoc. Hopefully all items will eventually be moved to Lua scripts. Of course then I would have to write an item editor as well. A Free/Open Source developer’s work is never done.

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.