I've finished Empyrean Campaign - for now
I've played from beginning to Dark Oak Farm (about 3 hours) and currently there is no way out - in Nazia Underground there is a switch, that can't be triggered, so I'm assuming that this is the end for now.
I wanted to say - I really appreciate what you guys are doing and keep up that great work. I didn't find any bugs. The only odd thing I've discovered that when I activated only fantasycore and alpha-demo mods, I could create character (male Adventurer), get into the game and because I didn't want to play for now, I've saved and quit to menu, checked characters list (my character didn't have legs - I've uploaded a screenshot showing this) and quit the game. After that I tried to open the game - with no success. Process "flare" has been created, it used one core of my Quad-Core processor and nothing happenned, I couldn't even close that process. The only solution was put out alpha-demo mod from "mods" folder and launch the game. Putting alpha-demo in "mods" again did the same problem as described.
Besides that, I wanted to share some statistics of my character:
Scout / Paladin, level 10 (permadeath mode on), during 3 hours gameplay I've found one set item (trousers from Seagate's set), completed several sidequests (Family Crypt, Brother, the one with two statues), found Gravebloom and Black Quill.
Most of the time I didn't have any problem with difficulty level - mainly because the game was relatively easy. Problems begun upon entering Nazia Highlands, where spidders were spitting with Ember, goblins were fast and using shields, skeletons bashind with their shields. Enemies are fast, so run-and-gun approach doesn't work as well as it did when fighing with Seagate's Skeleton. At first, skills were preety weak and useless, but later I was constantly using piercing shot and ember shot - latter was doing preety well during most fights.
I can't imagine playing in permadeath mode with melee warrior, cause all those Ice Wyverns, mages and spiders are pretty tough enemies. But I'll try that in some time too.
There are some things I'd like to see in the future - more detailed journal (with completed quests beign written down), some gossip dialogs with NPC's, some lore which could be found anywhere... My main problem with the game for now is that there is no objective, which could be really motivating. For most of the time I didn't think that my main quest will be looking for writing utensils. Despite some side-quests, there is nothing really interesting in Flare's world and exploration isn't all that rewarding (I wished that there would be written anything on some of the gravestones).
Now I've got a question regarding translating - will there be an option to translate books contents? Is font used for them capable of showing characters, which appear in foreign languages as Polish, for example? (ó, ą, ł, ś, ć, ę, ź, ż, ń, ć)
For now I don't have any more questions or suggestions as I know that it's still to early to judge everything and more content will be added in the future. Keep up the great work and I believe that I'll be able to continue my adventure soon.
PS. While playing the game, I was preparing and updating Polish translation for engine's and empyrean_campaign's content on github - it should be available on master branch by now.
The font used for the game is LiberationSans-Regular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts
The font file is in mods/default/fonts, so you could install it and test it in any text editor to make sure :)
At least I hope that's the one you're talking about?
I'm sorry, but that's not the one I have in mind :)
I'm talking about fonts, that are used in books in the Empyrean campaign - Merchant's journal and Book of the Dead.
EDIT: By the way - is stash supposed to store items only for one character, if that character has permadeath mode on?
EDIT No. 2: I managed to open the gates in Nazia Underground, but the doors behind them don't have any destination set :P
First off, thanks for showing so much interest in our game.
The fonts used for books are in mods/empyrean_campaign/fonts/. I'm not sure if they have the glyphs you would need for Polish, though.
Yikes, that's not good. I will definitely look into fixing that.
On the content side of things, I actually prefer the amount of text to be limited. Action RPGs in the style of Flare don't really benefit from verbose dialog and books. I'm okay with leaving some things unexplained, and having the player fill in the gaps themselves. Plus it's less work for translators such as yourself.
Of course, I'm still working on more content, so maybe the end result will have a respectable amount of things to dig into.
Thank you very much for your answer.
About that bug - when I\ll be back home, I'll try to reproduce it - remove save file related with alpha_mod and put it back in mods folder.
I'll try write something in Polish with those fonts, too.
And about content - I don't think about having so much dialogs and lore books like in Diablo III (even if I think that it's really cool thing), but some short synopsis about some lands, like - who or what is Nazia? Who exactly was Ardwen and how did he managed to gather a force to build a town?
I really like that Unique items have their own short story.
And I have one suggestion - how about implementing something as a bestiary? Each record containing an enemy's picture, kill count and maybe some information being revealed with more kills - as absorb, health, damage...
I'm a really average programmer in C++, but I'd like to check some files in source and try to add a new page in the journal with such entries, if such an idea would fit your vision :)
EDIT: TexturaLiberaTenuisX (what a cool name) supports foreign characters, which is very cool. Now I've got important question (maybe not appropiate on this forum), but if I'd add Polish characters to Alex Brush in a software such as Font Forge, could I upload it on flare-game repository (as I think, it is released with open license)? Or do I have to look for solution, that doesn't affect original files?
I don't think a bestiary is really necessary. However, if we did want one, it wouldn't need to be implemented on the engine side with C++. We could use in-world books to provide a picture and a short blurb on the various enemies.
As for your font question, you can definitely modify that font to include in the flare-game repo. Here's an excerpt from the OFL faq:
I've managed to reproduce that bug with alpha_mod. I'll presents steps to do that below:
1) Enable "fantasycore" and "alpha_mod" in "Configuration->Mods" (fantasycore should be higher on the list)
2) Create new character and enter the game
3) I didn't move from starting point, eventually I've opened inventory, attacked air twice and then got back to main menu
4) In the main menu I could look at preview of existing character, go to "Configuration" menu. After that, I quit the game.
5) After that, every attempt to launch "Flare" looks like this - process "flare" is being created, eating exactly 25% of my Quad Processor - I couldn't kill process, and even launching from terminal didn't provide me any output. Launching another processes of "Flare" gives the same result. Only solution is turning off my machine.
Laptop specification: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Intel Core i5 Quad Core, Intel Graphics + nVidia GT520M Optimus (using only nVidia), 4GB RAM
After launching OS again, I've managed to bring "Flare" back to life. Here I'll describe how:
1) Go to save files location (in my case (HOME)/.local/share/Flare/saves)
2) Remove folder "flare0.19"
And now, either:
3a) Go to config folder (in my case (HOME)/.config/flare) and open "mods.txt"
4a) Remove "alpha_mod" from the list and save changes
OR
3b) In the game folder go to "mods" folder
4b) Cut "alpha_mod" folder and paste in anywhere higher (I pasted it in the game main folder)
5b) Launch the game, go to "Configuration->Mods" - on the right there is only fantasycore enabled, there is no alpha_mod - do any change, either enable empyrean_campaign, disable fantasycore - whatever you do with mods, save changes and quit the game
After that:
6) Get "alpha_mod" folder back to "mods"
7) Launch the game
8) Now you can once again enable "fantasycore" and "alpha_mod". The game will run just fine, as long as you don't create new character in "alpha_mod" and will not quit the game.
Other things:
1)I like the idea of in-world books describing monsters, simple enough and fullfiling my point enough. If it fits development plan, It'd make me happy.
2) If there are some texts in the game, that I would like to translate, but aren't placed in "data.*.po" file, can I somehow add entries of those texts myself, to make them translatable? I tried to place "-1 Dagger" from merchants_journal.txt in the same pattern, as previous translatable texts, but it didn't work.
3) I managed to modify font, so when I'll add all glyphs I need, I'll upload it on github. I checked if it works with the game by original font with my modified version in fonts folder of empyrean_campaign, adding some texts directly in "merchants_journal.txt" with polish characters, launching the game and opening Abasi's journal.
4) Minotaur Necromancers AI needs some tweaks - they are capable of summoning skeletons, healing them and running like mad - I have nothing against it, besides they very often come so close to my character and they never attack directly, but I can easily smack them. If they can't attack, they shouldn't come so close to player.
I was able to reproduce the bug where Flare failed to launch when alpha_demo was enabled. As it turns out, there was a regression in one of our GetText functions. It is fixed now in the latest falre-engine git master.
I've also updated xgettext.py so that it can add the "text" entries from book definitions to data.pot. So they can be translated now.
And yes, the Minotaur Necromancer definitely needs some adjustments. We haven't really done that style of enemy in Flare yet, so it's a lot of experimenting.
Thank you very much for your attention, now that bug is no more.
I've added Polish glyphs to AlexBrush-Regular, now they can be seen, when used in merchants_journal.txt. I sent pull request with updated font.
For now I don't have any complaints or problems. Now I'm getting through campaign once again - this time with melee warrior - I've beaten Seagate, so I'm doing better than I thought - and I don't have any great items (only the best dagger I've seen so far and pants from St. Maria's Garb)
Thanks. I've merged your pull request and added you to the Credits page: https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-game/wiki/Credits#fonts
Thank you very much.
I had to reinstall my OS (now I have Ubuntu 15.10) and I've lost my save files (I had lvl 11 Scout and lvl 5 Brute) and now I have to start campaign all over again (I wanted to pass campaign with Brute on permadeath mode - with scout it was relatively easy). So I I'll find something new or I'll have a new idea, I'll post it here :)
EDIT: I've completed campaign with brute - it was quite difficult, without Battle Cry and Axe throw it could take me much more time than 2 hours.
And I found a bug - if I stand in the correct spot, just around the corner and near the wall and some melee enemy has seen me, we stand in positions like these (picture under this post), the enemy doess't attack even once, but I can strike him (I was waiting for about 15 seconds, two times on the same level).
Zrzut ekranu z 2016-03-07 19-29-37.png 877.3 Kb [7 download(s)]
That bug should be fixed now: https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-engine/commit/37e2e92e0d548e815f...
Cool!
Thank you very much for quick fix :)
When I was editing previous post, I forgot to mention one my suggestion (I tried to add this information for about three days, but my internet suuuuucks...). When I was playing with Brute, I was using throw axe skill very often, and because I had many items, which speed up my mana regeneration (these are very common in game) and I choose a "flow" skill from mage tree, I had pretty much mana and I could almost spam axes to kill every enemy in sight.
I was wondering, if a cooldown for throwing skills could be made longer (maybe 1-1,5 seconds), to make fighting bit more difficult?
EDIT: Okay, I've downloaded newest source (11.03) - Black Oak Farm has been made more difficult thanks to much more variety in enemies and cowardly necromancers AI (now skeleton minions are some kind of threat) - it's still a shame that they don't attack even if I get them cornered, but it's definitely harder and I like it (good thing that minions are so fragile).
EDIT 24.03: After reading about a new area being added (sewers in Black Oak Farm) I've downloaded new versions of flare-game and flare-engine. Stages completed, visited treasure cache in Nazia Underground and achieved level 12 with my Brute character. During the gameplay I've found one issue, which I hadn't previously - probably just because I was lucky.
It's about Goblin shakers. Sometimes - and it's very hard to reproduce this - when I'm about to attack (I think when my character has his sword above his head - I've noticed it once, probably I should record my gameplay...) and Goblin uses quake, which stuns me - in terms of gameplay everything's fine, but the sound is a mess during this effect - I think it can be that when some sounds in the same time have to be played (sword swing, quake and hurt sound) it gets buggy and it's like one very loud tone playing during stun. I had this issue three times during my 15 minutes gameplay and I was really paying attention at it at the third time. If I'll manage to record it, I'll attach it here.
Another thing - not as problematic, but kinda unwanted. When several monsters surround me, some melee enemies, which are far away from me can wander constantly from one point or another until it gets back on track to find me - I can only assume it's because there are two enemies near me and there is much of space to get me between them, but there is a tree in line of sight of that skeleton (I've marked his path and positions, where it constantly was turning back).
The last thing will be a suggestion - I had full inventory (yeah, I did that on purpose) and couldn't pick up anything from the ground - as expected. What I wanted to do, was to have inventory screen open, throw some of my equipment on the ground and pick it from the ground, to have it automatically equiped or grabbed with a cursor. Unfortunatelly it's not possible and to reequip my boots, I had to throw some thing from my equipment on the ground, pick up my boots to appear in the empty slot and equip them again. Is it possible to:
a) give the ability to grab an item from the ground and have it attached to the curson (thus dissapearing from the ground and not being placed in the equipment, so I can place the item in the equipment or as a part of my armor
or
b) place an additional option in settings to automatically equip an item, if there is a free slot (and of course, requirements for that item are met)
I'm attaching a screenshot showing said situation with skeleton.
Another Edit: I've uploaded a video with said skeleton on dropbox - https://www.dropbox.com/s/n8aznyctc367hfh/skeleton.mp4?dl=0
And about that sound issue - I suppose it was only some kind of problem with my system. I entered the game, stood near Goblin shaker for 3 minutes attacking air and sounds were playing normally, so I suppose i called an false alarm with this one.
skeleton AI.jpg 280.8 Kb [10 download(s)]
I just pushed a set of changes to flare-engine that add an option (enabled by default) to automatically equip items. This should allow you to pick up equip-able gear even when your inventory is full.
I"m not certain about a solution for the skeleton problem you mentioned. I did, however, find a bug in the pathfinding code that could have caused enemies to give up following their path early. That bug is fixed now and may help with the skeleton case.
Thank you for your answer and fixes :) Auto-equip works flawlessly. I didn't check skeleton AI yet, but I didn't have any problems with AI lately.
After beating campaign with my brute, I've created an female adept withour permadeath. After beginning the game I've encountered one problem (and I'm not sure if it's supposed to work that way - correct me, if I'm wrong). When I'm very close to the enemy, my basic spell doesn't hit the target (tried it multiple times), but if I use some other spell (for instance, fire ball), it hits the target.
I'm sending a short video showing these situations.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0uvo905b78rw6k2/shooting%20spells.mp4?dl=0
And about translating texts in the books - these texts are placed in data.pot and I've updated my translations in data.pl.po file. Everything seems to be in Polish, except for "Book of the Dead" and "Abasi's Journal", these are still in English. Can you check out where lies the problem?
BTW: Spells look preety nice :D
EDIT: After my death, enemies were retreating (one of them was Geno in St. Maria: Mausoleum) and they were flickering, showing just one frame of their animations. I'm attaching another, very short video of that problem
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9kj48bi8pjftxgg/dead.mp4?dl=0
It happened my twice already - in both cases I dragged Geno far from his point of origin.
EDIT 2: Books can be translated now, thank you!
It looks like the engine wasn't translating text in books. It should be fixed now. Also, I've fixed the bug with incorrectly animating enemies after the player dies.
As for hitting close enemies, this is because the standard mage attack starts a bit in front of the player (we call this "melee range"). We start the spell in that position so that it looks like it's coming out of the wand/staff the player is weilding. Unfortunately, this means that the starting position is sometimes beyond nearby enemies. The fireball spell, on the other hand, starts directly from the player's position. So that spell is much more likely to not go beyond nearby enemies. I'm not sure there's an elegant solution to this problem with they current way we do player/enemy collision.
P.S. Thanks for providing video clips with your bug reports. It's very helpful.
Thank you very much for everything :)
Someday I'll download new source but for now I'll finally try to play Flare on Android (I've finally managed to compile it on my Sony smartphone) - so I'll check every feature of it and maybe create some new topic focusing on bugs/suggestions, if I'll have one, and here I'll be posting my impressions on new additions to the game itself.
For now - once again very much for your patience and sorry for so much spam.
Hello again. Today I've finally downloaded new Flare source and - of course - I've completed Fort Nasu already. It's always cool to have a new level with unique reward, but I have to say that I'm finding touching all these switches very tedious. I remember that in alpha demo there was such a level, where touching the right switch opened the door, and touching the wrong one resulted in player's immediate death - and It was cool, because there were clues to help player choose the right switch.
When I got to the last room and found out that there are 8 switches, I just wanted to leave this place.
Maybe I didn't found any clues, maybe there are some hidden in this Fort, but if that's not the case, I propose to put there some little map with puzzle, for example.
There are definitely clues in the level indicating which switches need to be hit. Unfortunately, I didn't do a good job of exposing the patterns to the player, even if they "solve" a room and open the door. I'll try to make what's actually going on in that level more clear.
@Pawonashi
I just pushed an update to flare-game. You can try the Fort Nasu quest again by doing the following:
Hopefully, the gimmick of this map will be a bit more apparent as you play through it.
@dorkster
Thank you for a quick response, I've downloaded new source and replayed the quest. First thing I noticed was that there are runes on the floor, and if in one of the room there was a glowing room after activating the switches, the same rune can be activated in the next rooms.
In the first room I've randomly picked a switch. In the next one I was watching at a wall and noticed, that two of the switches were on the same lines of tiles as curtains, so I turned them on - and it worked. Another room - I could look on the floor and picked switches, which were close to some rune. Basically - in the first three rooms just look on the floor and choose switches, which have a rune nearby.
I still couldn't find a pattern for the last room. There are 8 switches placed in pairs. I've noticed that if there was a torch right in front of the switch, then I shouldn't touch this one, but the second one - but it could be applied only for two pairs of switches - I'm not sure why should I choose other switches, which opened the door... Maybe it's just my problem and I can't see a solution and maybe I was too harsh in the previous post. Maybe if someone would explain this to me, then I'll probably smack myself in the forehead and say "Of course!". For now, I'm not complaining anymore about that :)
And thanks for that book with the drawings of the beast :) That's a small touch, but it's something I wanted to see.
Now something off-topic. I was playing for a short while close to a friend of mine. When I explained him, that it's an open source hack'n slash, which is constantly updated, he asked me why it's not on Steam, or Steam Greenlight, because it looks like it can easily surpass many paid indie games. Have you thought about it?
The last room is a bit trickier. The runes are actually located in the room opposite of the switches. If you look at the minimap, you'll notice that the rooms have a similar layout, but are mirrored. Hopefully, the rest should be easy to figure out from there.
As for Steam, I'm not opposed to the idea. There are other GPL games on there. At the moment, it does cost $100 to open a Greelight page, so I'd like to be sure that we already have a sizable community to vote for us (e.g. post Flare 1.0 release). Of course, Valve has talked about Greenlight's failures and how they want to open things up Steam store submission even more in the future. So who knows what the state of things will be when we're ready. Also, we should think of other places to show the game, such as itch.io.
Of course XD I've entered that room every time and I didn't notice those runes, and I thought that's weird that these are the only such big rooms and one of them doesn't seem to have a purpose, but that's it, I didn't investigate the room on the south further. But I think that others can be better observers than me. Thank you.
And thank you for your opinion on Steam Greenlight. I'll try to spread the word about Flare.
I've found a new bug. If I'll stand between wall and Necromancer (close to him), he won't use his shield and won't move from this spot. I've recorded it.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4ouxxveb2vdy5bm/necromancer.mp4?dl=0
Also please tell me - should I be able to hit Necromancer, if he has his shield up and I'll use War Cry, which makes me immune to knockback?
And very rarely if he has his shield up and I got to him and I'm close to a wall, knockback work on me only once and I'm able to hit him, but that's something so rare I couldn't record it.
Ah, I forgot to add the force field power as a melee-range ability for the necromancers. I'll fix that.
I think it's fine for War Cry to negate the knockback effect of the force field. The force field still does damage, and the lack of knockback actually makes it more dangerous. Getting knocked back reduces the effective rate at which you take damage by pushing you out of the hazard's range.
Okay, thanks for making it clear :)
Hi.
I finished empyrean_campaign to the Black Oak City. Looks like it is a last map for now.
But more important that I finished translation to the Russian (empyrean_campaign-data.pot). I also updated translations for default-data.pot and default-engine.pot. How can I share it?
@a-j
You can email me your translations and I'll merge them in. My email is jajdorkster@gmail.com
sent
upd: Oh! Not forget to update engine/font_settings.txt to add font with cyrillic glyphs.
I use Andantino_script.ttf.
BTW I can't translate few messages in pause screen. I mean "Paused" and "Continue".
flare_paused.png 287.9 Kb [1 download(s)]
It looks like we hadn't updated the engine.pot and data.pot files in some time. That's why Paused and Continue were missing. It should be corrected now on the git repo (https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-engine/commit/55d4b5a22be69349fa...).
Thanks for the update! *starts translating*
BTW why are developer names translatable?
The script that generates our translation files grabs all of the lines that start with "text=" in our cutscene files. The developer names are part of that, so the script grabs them. Maybe that's a good thing for languages that don't use Latin characters at all?
Fair point. I guess that's a matter of taste. I will be pretty hard for translators to transliterate non-English names though.
just leave them as is
Hey, I'm back on the forum :D I've completed the game with an adept character on level 13 with permadeath option turned on.
First of all - I really like changes made to ranged enemies' AI. They're definitely not as easy targets as before, they're greater threat and aren't so annoying.
For now, I've opened a portal to Underworld with, I've got two unique items - an Mog's Axe and some book (and statues, of course, but I'm not counting them) and three items for three different sets - I like bonuses given by all these items, which makes them useful even after finding items with higher levels.
I can see that the campaign is coming to the end, which is a shame, I presume that it can be finished with a level 20 character max. But for now my biggest complain is reusing assets - one sound for goblins' death, one sound for them getting hit, one for hero getting hit etc., it gets pretty annoying after playing whole campaign. It doesn't bother me as much in terms of graphics, just audio.
I hope that soon the game will be complete and will be getting more polish even after 1.0 release :) Thank you for your hard work.
One of the hurdles for fixing this was engine support for multiple randomized sound effects. This has been implemented. We can now experiment with alternate sounds for the player and enemies. Completely new sounds would be ideal, but maybe something like pitch tweaks to the existing sounds would be sufficient variety.
I still don't get the runes puzzle. They don't make sense in accordance to the switches. There are 6 runes that glow .
Can someone explain this to me?
First three puzzles you guess. In the lower room of the fourth puzzle there are runes, in the upper room there are switches. Each glowing rune corresponds to a turned-on switch, each non-glowing rune corresponds to a turned-off switch. Note, that runes and switches groups are reflected, like the book you've met earlier says.