Alternate Reality X - Release 2.1

After taking almost a year between the first and second demo releases for Alternate Reality X (ARX), I've vowed to release updated versions more frequently. However I have been really busy with work and been away on holiday so I've made very little progress since the demo release at the beginning of August 2010.

I have started working on the City character creation and now have it at the point that it's mostly complete. I still need to fix a few things such as the colour of the counters and music / sound effect timing. I'm not attempting to match every element of the original character creation sequence but hopefully people will understand that. I'm rather spend the time on key parts of the game such as combat and shop functionality.

My graphic card issues are now resolved so I have ARX running at about 60 frames a second - much better than the previous 6 frames!

Over at the ARX forums there a number of bug reports which I will try to resolve in the next few days. Possibly the worse is the teleport bug which places you outside the level 2 map. I think this will be due to me using level 1 teleport coordinates when adding the level 2 dungeon map. Thanks to dalimar for pointing these out.

I'm hoping to finish off the city character creation sequence and fix these bugs for a small 2.1 update release sometime this week.

Alternate Reality - Graphic card woes

I was fortunate enough to be able to upgrade the old laptop I was using to a decent spec PC. Everything initially looked very positive. Windows 7 installed smoothly, detected all the right drivers and the PC seemed to perform very well. I installed Visual Studio 2008 Express which I am using to develop my Alternate Reality remake and everything compiled fine.

However when I ran Alternate Reality X (as I've now started calling it) but it was very slow. SFML (the media library I'm using for the project) uses OpenGL to produce all its graphic output and I'm also using OpenGL to produce the 3D view in the game. The onboard Intel graphics in the PC obviously doesn't have proper Windows 7 drivers which support OpenGL (despite the OpenGL logo being displayed within the graphic card driver tab within Windows).

The number 3 on the status bar below indicates the number of frames the game is currently running at with the alternate graphics option. It's not quite so bad with the original graphics which are smaller dimenstions. On my previous laptop (also using Intel graphics but with proper OpenGL supported Windows 7 drivers) the game ran around 30 frames a second. Sadly there seem to be no better drivers available.

I ordered a new graphics card with an NVidia chipset but didn't realise that the PC didn't have a PCI Express x16 slot! I'll get this sorted eventually. In the meantime I'll focus on parts of the game which aren't really affected by the slow speed.