Welcome to FreeDroidRPG's monthly progress report for the month of August!

Programming department

  • Matei Pavaluca improved the interface of the built-in level editor, making the process of level creation much simpler and more intuitive: map labels, enemies and their relevant information can be placed, moved around and edited inside the editor and using the mouse, rather through a text file.
  • Cătălin Badea changed the way the user interface is handled: instead of scaling a single image to fit the resolution, which sometimes produced ugly, pixelated images, each UI component is broken down into several pieces, enabling proper scaling and stretching.
  • The handling of NPCs and shops has been de-hardcoded, and is now easier as it does not require re-compiling the game. By Xenux.
  • The player's maximum health is now calculated using a new formula, explained here. Thanks to Xenux.

Writing department

  • Miles McCammon added some more one-liners for the droids to say while they resolve to hack every living thing into pieces.
  • The clumsy system of subdialogs is slowly but surely being replaced with the new dialog topics, by Maria Grazia Alastra and Xenux.

Mapping department

  • Matthias Krüger made many changes to the game's levels throughout the month to make them more aesthetic, accessible and orderly.

Some of the smaller changes:

  • A validator has been implemented for map labels, thanks to Józef Kucia.
  • Bryan C fixed a bug where the portrait of the droid in the hacking screen would not be aligned correctly or even shown.
  • A water beautify function has been implemented in the editor to automatically optimize the appearance of water borders. By Józef Kucia.
  • A small but noticeable delay when switching from a weapon that required one type of Tux animation to a weapon that required another was fixed, by Józef Kucia.
  • Innumerable tweaks, polishes, bugfixes and more bugfixes in all departments by all contributors.

All in all, 129 changes were committed in August.

August is only the summary of the achievements of the students who worked on FreeDroidRPG during the course of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC); for 17 weeks, our 4 students, Maria Grazia Alastra, Cătălin Badea, Matei Pavaluca and Józef Kucia worked hard on improving different aspects of the game, submitting many patches, making changes under the hood, fixing bugs and having some of their work mentioned here. A big Thank You to our GSoC students!

As always, we wish to thank every contributor, and urge anyone with an idea, request, question or correction to contact us; if you find a nasty fat bug, visit our bug tracker, and if you want to take on an issue yourself, submit a patch for it! If you do, you might even find your name on this list!

-The FreeDroidRPG Team