Programming department:

• Mappers can now disable the use of teleportation in certain levels, thanks to Pedro Arana. Matthias Krüger already put this feature to use in the arenas.
• Cătălin Badea widgetized the chat interface, making it more flexible and scalable to fit different screen resolutions.

Graphics department:

• Non-animated obstacles can now have animated light levels. Thanks to Józef Kucia.

Sound department:

• Different sounds for obstacle smashing can now be specified to different obstacle types, thanks to Michael Mendelson.

Writing department:

• Tybalt's dialog is now better formed, with an improved introduction and dialog topics among other enhancements. By Xenux.
• The player is now able to offer their help to Spencer in cleaning the warehouse. By Jann Horn.

• A loop in Dixon's dialog was fixed by Matthias Krüger; Thanks to Sudarshans for reporting!
• Miles McCammon fixed the way the game handles addon multiplicity; whole stacks of addons no longer disappear.
• Arthur Huillet and Matthias Krüger fixed a crash reated to Ewald's 296 droid, caused by the wrong function being used.
• Many other various tweaks and tidbits added and changed under the hood and behind the curtain and in all sorts of other funny places, by all contributors.

All in all, 37 changes were committed in April.

We once again wish to thank everyone who contributed, be they Slayer of Bugs (a title that is traded for a patch), Reporter of Errors (a title given out for free at the tracker), or Bestower of Feedback and Praise (a title handed personally at the various communication media). All of the roles are important, they all help the game become better, and they all have a good chance of showing up on this list next month!

Programming department:

• Undo and redo actions for enemies have been implemented in the level editor by Józef Kucia.

Writing department:

• The player is now better introduced to Bender, the strongest man in Town; his dialog has been restructured and makes better use of topics.

• Xenux corrected a bug with pasting map labels in the editor.
• A check for the programming language Python has been added to the automated configuration that takes place before compiling from the source, thanks to Józef Kucia.
• In-game screenshots, as well as thumbnails for saved games, are now saved in PNG format instead of the uncompressed BMP format. By Józef Kucia.

All in all, 53 changes were committed in March.

We would like to thank all of our contributors, and once again ask anyone with an idea, request or general sentiments about something in the game to tell us about it, complain about it or code about it. Who knows, maybe you'll find your name on this list next month!

But, of course, our greatest thanks must go to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a generous benefactor who has funded much of the project's progress and to whom we owe many a bowling night and beer party. As our contract with the Church requires, we will soon be making great changes to the game, including changing the player character's penguin model with that of a spaghetti noodle, changing all weapons in the game to shoot meat balls, and making the game proprietary. All sale profits will go toward beer purchases. May we all be touched by His noodly appendage.

git clone git://freedroid.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/freedroid/freedroid

- The FreedroidRPG Team

Programming department:

• Vending machines have been implemented, and currently they sell various consumable items such as coolants and nutrients. By Miles McCammon.

Graphics department:

• Three designs for the vending machines have been included, thanks to Infrared and Miles McCammon.

• The moving target Tux, the player character, follows has been restricted to a maximum of 2 units away from Tux, to allow better control with the keyboard. By Vinayak Garg.
• Arthur Huillet fixed a bug that allowed destroying an already destroyed enemy.
• The code for the Graphic User Interface has been factorized and made more efficient by fluzz.

All in all, 19 changes were committed in February.

As always, we want to thank everyone who contributed to the game during the month and during the year, and remind everyone that if there's something bugging you about the game you can always tell us about it, file an official report about it or even take a shot at fixing it. If you do, you might even be featured on this list next month!

Programming department:

• The formula for calculating the cost for repairing a hacked bot has been improved and simplified, as specified here. Thanks to Sebastian Offermann.
• Excelling at the takeover minigame now has its rewards; if few charges were used by the player, the heat cost will be smaller to match. By Sebastian Offermann.

Graphics department:

• Matthias Krüger replaced the inventory images of some items with images of a higher resolution.
• A bug was fixed that involved the list of animated obstacles in a level and caused the creation and saving of obstacles with negative index values was fixed, thanks to fluzz.

Writing department:

• The dialog with Dixon has been restructured and reworked a little; cookies have been replaced with variables; also, the peaceful players may find they have some more options. By Sebastian Offermann and Xenux.
• Sebastian Offermann and Matthias Krüger gave the dialogs a general cleanup, with cookies replaced by variables, extra spaces removed, bugs and typos squashed (yes, typos can be squashed. We checked) and other improvements and simplification.

• If the player chooses to repair a hacked bot but then chooses to destroy it through the wonderful hcf.py, the costs of the repairs would not apply. Thanks to Matthias Krüger.

All in all, 23 changes were made in January.

We wish to thank everyone who contributed and helped improve the game. If you have an idea, something that bugs you or an issue you want to fix, don't be afraid to contact us and talk about it, tell us what's bugging your game or try to fix it yourself. Try it, you might even find your name on this list!

It is well worth mentioning that Arthur Huillet is going to do a talk about FreeDroidRPG in FOSDEM on Sunday, February 5th. The talk is titled "Anatomy of a Role Playing Game", and if you're attending, you might even get a T-shirt showing some of the bots! Oh joy!

Writing department:

• Variables in dialogs now have a consistent form, following the rule: "A variable that is solely for one dialog starts with the dialog name". Thanks to Sebastian Offermann.
• The npc_says, tux_says and cli_says functions now use arguments instead of the rather intrusive concatenation (which was marked by pairs of dots, or ..), which eases translation. Thanks to Xenux, Miles McCammon and Sebastian Offermann.
• The has_item function now checks if the player has a certain item and not how much of it; instead, that is performed by the new count_item function. Thank to Sebastian Offermann.
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• Matthias Krüger, jANaM and Sebastian Offermann made various corrections to the language in several dialogs, as well as general reformatting and cleanup.

• Some sounds and sound functions were removed in a code cleanup, by Miles McCammon and Matthias Krüger.
• Some parts of the code was translated from German into English. Thanks to Matthias Krüger.
• The depracated zpipe tool which was once used in the proccess of making graphics for the game has been removed! Graphics armies everywhere rejoice. Thanks to Matthias Krüger.
• The calculations that are affected by the screen resolution are delayed until the video mode is initialized, which prevents bugs such as Tux (the player character) being off-center. Thanks to Józef Kucia.
• The hardcoded resolutions are no longer listed in the resolution selection menu to prevent confusion. By Józef Kucia.
• Lily Stone, the town's shopkeeper, now only traffics ammo to members of the Red Guard, as per new intructions. Of course, there are other ways to win her favor. By Miles McCammon.

All in all, 132 changes were committed in December.

Once again we wish to thank everyone who contributed, and ask anyone with an idea, request, bug report or fix to contact us, report that bug and maybe even submit a patch to fix it. Who knows, you might even find your name here next month!

It is also worth mentioning that several contributors have taken up on our suggestion from two months ago to wash their llamas, and since our code was compiling and our graphics were rendering, we decided to oblige them! We would never do it again, though. Ever.

• Multiple fixes in dialogs
• Fixed walls displayed incorrectly on MS Windows
• Added a Win32 installer