We are happy to announce FreedroidRPG 0.11 - release candidate 1. FreedroidRPG 0.11 represents one year of work on the game, and has therefore significantly evolved since 0.10.3.

Rc1 is about 2 weeks late from the original date intended, mostly due to good feedback on the pre-rc1, that has allowed us to squish quite a few bugs. Hopefully rc1 will be equally successful in cleaning out the remaining issues which will most likely push back rc2 by two weeks as well.

The list of changes since FreedroidRPG 0.10.3 is huge and consists of bug fixes, performance improvements, interface work notably for the leveleditor, and game content improvements.

Here are the most important points:

• Content
• modified the endgame scenario and started integrating the Hell Fortress, adding 2 more levels
• added a secret research center level
• changed town to make it more "lifelike" and easier to find yourself around
• modified start level to improve richness of content
• added and rebalanced weapons. There now are a few melee weapons, projectile pistols and rifles, and futuristic energy weapons.
• changed and rebalanced programs, including added a new default skill to help tux from overheating. Makes a "magic user" character a possible and interesting alternative.
• new music tracks
• Engine
• the savegame system has been rewritten to use plain text instead of binary dumps. This allows compatibility of savegames between platforms and makes them hand-editable, and usable for bug reporting.
• using a texture atlas for floor tiles in OpenGL mode yields a 20%+ performance improvement
• fixed many bugs in robot AI
• using a better collision detection algorithm, and pathfind bots waypoint routes, in an attempt to reduce bots getting into walls
• full translation support for game data based on gettext
• Leveleditor
• undo/redo feature
• nicer buttons in the interface
• changed the mouse interface to match The Sims editor more closely (move with right button pressed, place tile with left click)
• ability to place line of walls by dragging the mouse
• ability to fill a given rectangle with floor tiles by dragging
• "quickbar" for favorite tiles

Credits for this release.

We have slowly started to prepare for the release of FreedroidRPG v 0.11. First step is to provide a current version of the game, 0.11pre-rc, which should already be available here for download. In 1 week we will freeze the trunk from accepting new content for a period while we prepare and release an RC1 and later an RC2 before we reach v0.11 Final. More can be read in the wiki.

Please test the new versions and file bug reports about issues you find so we can make this a good release.

A team of three students (Kaisa Anttila, Markku Väisänen and Sami Mylly) from the University of Oulu in Finland recently conducted an usability study on FreedroidRPG, which results are now available.

They basically studied the game from a player point of view in order to find out what could be done to improve the user experience, basing themselves on different precise criterias. The two documents they produced will be useful to anybody who wants to contribute to FreedroidRPG : it lists issues in a way that are easy for a newcomer to understand and try to think of a solution for.

A text report and slides are available on the UsabilityStudy page of our wiki. If you feel annoyed by one of the things they listed, just think of a possible solution, and try to send us a patch!

We recently received word from a major game edition company, that they had a strong interest in FreedroidRPG and wanted to buy the rights and pay Arthur to work on it. They required a rewrite of the engine in full 3D, which was started two weeks ago. Due to our lack of content contributors, maps and dialogs will be provided by the publisher's own staff. The game is expected to be released in May 2009 as a proprietary game and will sell at approximately 30EUR. As a bonus, source code and data will be available on CD for as little as 3000EUR. We expect to start taking preorders within a few weeks as soon as legal agreements have been fully settled. We'll tell you more about this, including the company name, when our NDA is over!

Since people are still showing up on IRC asking about this... Check the date.... It's an April fools joke! ;)

The FreedroidRPG team hoped to become a mentoring organization at Google Summer of Code 2008.
Unfortunately we have not been selected, despite our detailed project ideas list and our commitment in the writing of the application. Google Summer of Code organizers were kind enough to tell us what should have been improved, and we will apply again next year with those things fixed, hopefully with a better outcome this time!
In the meantime, if you are looking for some work this summer, and have interest in game development, we have a few exciting challenges for you on the project ideas list!

Iwan Gabovitch (aka qubodup) contributed new screenshots.
Arthur cleaned up the wiki to make it slightly less outdated and much more readable, check it out!

FreedroidRPG was recently modified to be fully localized. It now relies solely on gettext() for that.
The Launchpad page was updated with the new translation templates and is now ready for production.
Your contributions are appreciated!

First of all, happy new year to all of our users!
After the publication of the english dialog script, that can be used to translate the dialogs in the game, we're happy to let you know that a page was set up on launchpad.net for the translation of in-game text (this doesn't yet include item descriptions because we do not know how to do it...). Feel free to help, for example by creating .po files for your language and starting the translation!