IRE - Latest News

IT-HE Roleplaying Game Engine

The progress log is available here: WORKLOG (updated sporadically)

08-01-2006 - Release 9.3 is available.

• Now uses Allegro 4.2
• Added optional new logic for handling the death of the hero. Previously the game would continue with other party members if the hero died. Now you can have the game halt instead (as with U6 and U7).
• Various improvements to the editor
• Fixed several serious bugs when loading maps, where the old map was not freed properly. This should also fix the bug where the game would crash out with the message 'could not find xxx' when restarting or changing maps. Fingers crossed.
• Fixed bugs involving large creatures such as dragons and jaguars, where they would not cross bridges, and also where they could walk through trees.
• Various optimisations, game should also use less CPU when idling

19-04-2005 - Oops

25-06-2004 - Release 9.2 is available.

• Fixed bug moving between maps where items would be distributed wrongly and you would end up with a cow in your pocket or some other nonsense
• Fixed similar bug where conversation flags and other data would not be stored and retrieved properly.
• Fixed bug in conversation involving conditional links (Ya'Do in Reign of the Just)

31-05-2004 - Release 9.1 is available.

• Improvements to frame-locking, especially with mouse control
• More pathfinder fixes
• Numerous optimisations
• Editor displays radius for trigger objects
• Editor now handles invalid objects intelligently again and asks the user what to do
• PNG image file support (from Michael Lefebvre)
• SDL audio support for Linux/UNIX (doesn't work in Windows, though)
• Triggers should now work correctly on large objects.
• Proper GNU configure script (from Michael Lefebvre)
• Various bug fixes

31-08-2003 - Release 9 is available.

These are the highlights (see the Status page for details):

• The game and editor are now frame-locked and will not run at insane speeds on very fast machines when the map is nearly empty.
• Works in DOS again (and shouldn't crash randomly on shutdown anymore ;)
• Censorware engine doesn't censor innocent words like 'scrap' anymore
• Vastly improved handling of large, rectangular objects by the pathfinder. This makes it possible for the dragon to move around the castle (no, this isn't in the released demo)
• Various esoteric fixes, and a few new special effect types
• Editor now uses a pick-list for editing statistics. Not as pretty but very much easier to maintain.
• Editor now saves User1 and User2 values (oops)
• Game now saves global variables in the savegame. However it should still be compatible with savegames from the previous release.
• Built with Allegro 4.0.3
• Lots of miscellaneous bugfixes (and it compiles cleanly with -Wall)
• Simplified the way config files are handled, but this is not backwards compatible. The Flat and Reign Of The Just have been repackaged for this new, simpler format.
• Dropped support for .rar files, datafiles are always loaded directly from a directory now.
• A few fixes to The Flat

29-08-2003 - Release 9 coming soon

Some of the more important features are:

• Game and editor are frame-locked and work properly on fast machines
• Configuration system was rationalised.
• Game packaging has changed.. .RAR archives are no longer used.
• DOS support is back again
• Various bugfixes and improvements to the savegames, but should still be backwards-compatible with 0.81.

23-02-2003 - BeOS version re-uploaded

13-02-2003 - Updated datafile for IRE 0.81

If this annoys, download the new 0.81a datafile from the downloads page.

22-01-2003 - Debian Package available

You can obtain the packages from: Here

12-01-2003 - IRE 0.81 update for Linux

A replacement base081L.zip has been uploaded but may take a while for the mirrors to sync. An update containing just the new executables is also available.

This is just a change in the way the program was linked, so there are no source updates, and this does not affect the Windows version.

10-01-2003 - IRE 0.81 source fix

IRE 0.81 was developed with a beta release of ALOGG 1.30. It seems that the interface has changed in the final ALOGG 1.30 release and compilation fails with the following error:

alsound.c: In function `StreamSong_start':
alsound.c:325: too few arguments to function `alogg_start_streaming_callbacks'
make: *** [alsound.o] Error 1

This does not affect any binary releases or people recompiling with FMOD.

31-12-2002 - Reign of the Just is released

Binaries are available for Windows and Linux, approximately 10MB each.

29-12-2002 - Release 8.1 is released.

These are the highlights (see the Status page for details):

• Menu support.
• Ability to start the game from a saved position instead of beginning a new game and then reloading
• Allogg support under Linux (Free-speech music playback)
• Savegame support has been rewritten and hopefully works more reliably
• A bunch of (esoteric) new features to the script
• Video mode selection in Windows finally looks as good as other platforms
• Room blanking fixes
• LHS support under Linux
• Lots of miscellaneous bugfixes
• DOS version is not working reliably but I don't know why. I'm hoping to have working DOS support again by the next release.

25-11-2002 - IRE 0.80 Updates

To make sure you get the new version, it is advisable to download from the Downloads page rather than the Sourceforge file releases, at least until the mirrors have had a chance to catch up.

Similarly, the Linux binary has a packaging error that prevented the editor from working, so a new base08l.zip file has been released too. This one is 1034277 bytes long.

21-11-2002 - Debian Package available

You can obtain the package from: Here

28-09-2002 - Release 8 is released.

These are the highlights (see the Status page for details):

• Mouse support, including regular point'n'click and the ability to move the player by holding down the right mouse button and dragging.
• When browsing a container inside the player's pocket, you can now go back up to the object it is inside.
• Ogg Vorbis streaming for music, courtesy of the FMOD audio library by Firelight Technologies Pty, Ltd.
• Special effects.
• New documentation of the script language (but not complete)
• Some syntax changes to the script.
  'wait' now has two parameters, not one. The second parameter is a flag, which should be either 'BLOCKING' or 'NONBLOCKING', depending on whether you want the screen animation to stop.
  'if_line_of_sight' has been replaced with 'get_line_of_sight' which loads a given variable with the distance away. A zero distance means no line of sight.
  The IS_RANGED flag has been replaced with 'stats.range', which contains the actual target range of the weapon. Code will need to be changed accordingly if you wrote your own combat routines.
  Arrays are now 1-based, not 0-based. The engine will shout if you try to access element 0 of an array.
  
• Book viewer for rapid conversation prototyping. For an example, start the game with 'ire -book flat/books/arkdiary.txt' This is most useful for testing conversations quickly.
• Resedit, the unmaintained resource editor is no longer provided because it is obsolete to the point of being dangerous. I found that I never used it myself anyway, except for calculating the size of large objects.
  So, I have added this feature to the world editor. If you run, for example, 'ed -area bed' ..the editor will launch straight into the large object calculator and display the bed object. You can choose any object in resource.txt. The area calculator has been enhanced somewhat and now displays the lines to be put into your object entry at the bottom of the screen.
  
• New, text-based world format
• Allegro upgraded to 4.02
• Plus the usual assortment of bug fixes.

23-12-2001 - Release 7 now available!

These are the highlights of 0.7:

• Multiple map support. Either by walking off the edge of the world, or using PEscript, e.g. for stairs and teleporters.
• Creature Eggs.
• At last, a complete absence of SEER, mainly due to gcc 3.0 not liking it. This has meant porting most of the demo scripts.
• Decorative Object support. This a really something of a kludge to save memory. Decoratives are used for objects such as trees which are all identical. Decoratives are all copies of the same object, which can save heaps of memory for a forest or similar. The demo does not have any.
• Data tables in the resource.txt file. They are basically lookup tables which can contain strings or integers. You can access them from PEscript with the get_data command. At present they are read-only. The 'sitting down on a chair' code in the demo uses this.
• The map editor can now animate map tiles. This is particularly useful for rivers and the sea, where you need to be able to see the water flow to edit it properly.
• New converation commands [append=""] and [random_page=""]
• Windows version now built as a console application, so you can see what it is doing as it starts up.
• Savegame code revamped. Savegames are now stored in the user's home directory under Unix and co, and in the game's working directory under Windows and DOS.
• Area blanking is now much improved, corners are dealt with correctly.
• Allegro upgraded to 4.00
• Plus the usual assortment number of bug fixes.

11-08-2001 - New TFM screenshot

22-04-2001 - Game modules page has returned

19-04-2001 - Release 6.8 Now available

15-04-2001 - Release 6.8 News

The engine is ready, but the sample environment (The Flat) isn't.

Of late, most of the effort has gone into the new game and extensions that the engine needs to support it, rather than improving The Flat.

These are the highlights of 0.68:

• BSD license.
• Lots of enhancements and bugfixes in the PE script language.
  • Support for Tile objects in PEscript.
  • When a PEscript crashes, a disassembly of the script is written to the logfile.
  • Support for arrays of objects.
  • Very crude support for AND and OR
• Object functions are now handled by PE scripts, instead of SEER.
  Currently a lot of these call a SEER function anyway, but not for long.
• Enhancements to the conversation script. New tokens, and the ability to censor swear words from the conversations if desired. :-)
• Symbolic links for NPCs.
• Support for objects bigger than 128 pixels wide.
• You can set the size of the game window.
• Areas you should not be able to see are now blanked like Ultima 6.
  This is incomplete and needs further work.
  
• Fixed bugs in keyboard handling.
• The latest version of Allegro is used so BeOS version is a lot better.

13-01-2001 - Moved to Sourceforge

Additionally, I have switched to the BSD license.

32-08-2000 - Release 6.5 Out Now

The demo environment is rather untidy (to say the least) and there are still a few rough edges, but it should be MUCH better than R6, at least as far as the engine itself is concerned.

25-07-2000 - Release 6.5 News

With luck and a following wind it should be released in a few weeks, with or without a Windows version of the binary. In the worst case scenario, Windows users will have to either make do with the DOS version, or compile it themselves.
If this happens, I will naturally post a Windows executable as soon as I have one to give.

The reasons it is late are as follows:

Massive Re-engineering

I rewrote an awful lot of tightly-knit code. Essentially I removed the ITG graphics library and SDL, replacing them with Allegro, which provides a uniform interface between DOS, Windows, BeOS and the Unices such as Linux.

What started out as an experiment rapidly got out of hand, eventually becoming mainstream code, as this change paid off by simplifying the code and making it somewhat more maintainable. The price was a small performance hit, since my graphics library was super-optimised for 16bpp and Allegro is far more generalised, and also it uncovered bugs in the code which had been previously hidden by the ITG for some reason.

Debugging

An awful amount of time was spent tracing bugs that eventually turned out to be caused by SEER!

Re-writing the graphics subsystems added problems of it's own which needed to be hunted down and rectified.

Feature Creep

What started out as a bugfix revision of R6 rapidly turned into something else.

After a revelation while showering I implemented static lighting, which was scheduled for Release 7. It hasn't contributed that much to the delay, on the other hand it hasn't helped at all.

The 'new scripting language' took on a life of it's own. It was only supposed to be experimental in R6.5, instead it is nearly ready to take over from SEER, which I had initially considered to be so much of a pipedream it wasn't on the roadmap at all!
Instead, it is now driving some of the game's most critical modules.

Serious extensions have been made to the conversation engine allowing NPCs to remember conversations with specific individuals. It also allows you to make copies of the same character (such as a guard) and each one will have separate memories.

The file format of the MZ1 map files has been replaced with one that uses .WAD file structure (I kid you not) for easier expansion, as a side-effect you can theoretically repair damaged MZ1 files by loading them into DEU or another WADfile utility and thereby replace the damaged blocks with ones from a different version of the level.

Windows

I am waiting for Windows binaries. Mike, who maintains the port has been very busy lately and the new code has not been that amenable to a Win32 port owing to the fact that MSVC is a pot of shite.

I managed to compile it with the Introductory version of MSVC which I have, but it prevents you from distributing binaries, even LIBs and DLLs.. and this is currently holding up the project since that means recompiling the libraries, a hard job made worse by the IDE doing nasty things of it's own. I hope to eventually produce a makefile so that it can be rebuilt without all the buggering around that the IDE entails.

None of the libraries were intended for MSVC, which is subtly different from GCC used on all the other platforms. When I actually managed to make Windows binaries with MSVC-Intro, I discovered that they would freeze Windows totally (reset time!), so even if I do get a Windows binary to play with, it might still need a lot of very tricky/dangerous bughunting before it is suitable for public use.

Thankyou for your patience.

17-01-2000 - Version 0.061 for Windows released

16-01-2000 - DEC Alpha port now available

27-12-1999 - IRE Release 6 is now available

-Detailed demo environment, with many Easter Eggs for you to discover.
-Linux and BeOS support for the editors
-Improved AI system with A-Star routefinding
-Advanced character tasking and scheduling
-Characters can now be male or female
-Balanced weight and health, improved status area
-Partial-invisibity (invisibility potion)
-Day and night
-Object animation can be random and animations can be spliced together
-Water that you can throw objects into and boats to cross it with
-Animating and scrolling map tiles (only sprites could animate before)
-Experimental support for sounds fading with distance
-PCX loader bugfixes (works with small images now)
-JPEG support (intended for backdrop images etc)
-Major overhaul of combat system, including guns and other ranged weapons
-Multicoloured font support
-Karma support
-Better fading
-User-definable calendar
-New black-and-white SVGA and MCGA video drivers for Riva-based cards in the DOS version
-A bank, featuring cashiers, ATMs, cashcards and the ability to deposit money
-More stable and many other bugfixes

IRE Release 6, coming soon

The release is waiting on the Windows port.

15th November 1999

5th November 1999

• The editors now work under Linux, and partly under BeOS
• Character AI is vastly improved, with NPC schedules and pathfinding
• Much better water that you can throw objects into
• Tiles can scroll in any direction and object animation is more flexible
• Primitive support for '2d sound effects'
• Support for Karma, Guns, custom calender and JPEG images
• DOS version supports 8bpp and VGA modes for cheap, nasty graphics cards
• And of course much, much more..

11th Aug 1999

There is an error on the documentation of take_quantity() and add_quantity().
Documentation reads the parameters as:
(OBJECT *container, int quantity, char *type)

In fact it is

(OBJECT *container, char *type, int quantity)

30th Jun 1999

28th Jun 1999

The source is packaged for release but still needs testing with Visual C.

27th Jun 1999

The source code for 0.05 will be released soon, hopefully tomorrow.
First I need to merge it with win32 source among other things..

11th Jun 1999

0.5 itself is coming on nicely and should be ready very soon.

A win32 port by Michael Rich is in its early stages, but not yet complete and will almost certainly not make 0.5.

4th Jun 1999

There have been massive changes to the way the world is handled internally, and many additions to the world format.
It is however backwards-compatible with the older format.

The game now runs much faster. On a P75 it now runs like the last version did on a P200.

The conversation system has been completely rewritten and is now based on a simple language similar to HTML.
It is so flexible it can also be used to make books, run the help system and probably much more I haven't yet thought of.

Again, the demo is even richer and more interactive, now with money, simple theft detection and bombs.

Rooftops support is back and totally rewritten: you will need to delete your old .mz2 files.

17th Apr 1999

The Editor would crash (because it was compiled with -O6 and the optimiser went insane).
A recompiled version is now available.

There were very stupid bugs in the Linux source code
The X11 driver works by pure luck. A source patch is available.

28 Mar 1999

The program has not changed outwardly, but there have been massive internal changes to allow for the new Linux support.
The rewritten VRM system sees native GCC code replaced with interpreted SeeR-C so that the compiled scripts are compatible with Linux.
The VRM programming API has changed a bit as a result.
Fixed bugs with objects under doors, bags, translucency in 16bpp and the player being hurt too many times.

20 Jan 1999

Release 0.4 is now available!

15 Jan 1999

The world structure has changed considerably and there have been slight changes to the file format of worlds.

The demo is richer and more interactive. Simple conversations are implemented and the editor can now work with objects inside containers.

The VRM system now requires gcc281, so you may need to upgrade to DJGPP 2.02 if you plan to edit scripts.

26 Nov 1998

Everything should be OK: Please let me know if you find any problems.

25 Nov 1998