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Messages - espectra

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Less exalting is the fact that Voyage crashes on my Eee PC netbook (running Debian "wheezy"). With Sun's java (version 6), I get no display at all. With openjdk (version 7u25-2.3.10-1~deb7u1), I get a small window that plays some music and displays a few logos, before cutting to a forest scene, that I only get a glimpse of before the application crashes. I'll paste the error message below, in its entirety.

I've got an old Mac sitting at home with Debian on it as well, so I'll see if I won't get the opportunity to try it on that machine during the weekend or something.

As always,
Minotauros


Hi Minotauros,

I PMed you, but apparently the temple forum ate it!?

Anyway, I got another similar crash report and did some digging. Apparently, some older graphics chipsets have a stricter texture size limit.

I made a test build that falls back to lower resolution sprites when the spritesheet blows the chipset limit. The game was failing on a friend's HP ze4900 notebook with 82852/82855 GM/GME graphics chipset, but the test build now works with a couple of caveats:

- the game's pretty slow until you turn the map off (M key)
- the lower resolution sprites it substitutes (there are only a few) look pretty crappy (Toy Robot, Evilbot, etc.)

If you'd like to give it a spin, PM me and I'll give you the link!


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Hey, just a tiny update: I get the same problem on my intel-based Mac Mini (running the same OS), so it seems this might be a software problem, as you say. I'll see if I get more success with the *.so-thingy from Sourceforge and/or booting Ubuntu (been thinking about putting Ubuntu on the old Mac, anyway) – and will come back with good news soon, I hope :)

As always,
Minotauros

I hope you can get it working with your Mac Mini and Ubuntu! If not, it may mean I need to work more on the game code to have it run on a broader range of PCs and chipsets/gfx cards!

Keeping my fingers crossed.  :)

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Other Announcements / Re: GoG Indie initiative
« on: September 06, 2013, 10:33:07 PM »
Oh well, Desura is pretty cool -- I just wish more gamers would get on board. With their DRM-free stance and availability of "standalone" downloads (that don't require using the Desura client) it should be popular, I'd think.
Even the client is pretty good. I find it much less intrusive and less of a resource hog than Steam. Given the chance, I favour Desura first (as a consumer, not a developer. I don't even know what programming is).

Desura is pretty solid. The standalone installer/archive requirement is an interesting "disruption" in the market, but the documentation is still catching up -- I'd seen a blog post about the requirement, but didn't know for sure I'd need to submit a standalone version of my game until I sent them an email asking about the approval delay. Perhaps with the recent Linden Lab purchase they'll be able to continue the innovation.

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Other Announcements / Re: GoG Indie initiative
« on: September 06, 2013, 10:23:44 PM »
You may be right about GoG. They're either busy or they know that a Mystery Dungeon-ish roguelike won't sell enough to be worth the trouble.

About GG, it was Alex that contacted me, but the Skype session had me asking a couple of basic questions with no responses in 20/30 minutes. I was puzzled about the whole Skype idea anyway -- email is better for this sort of thing. Just bugs me that they were the ones who reached out to me first, not the other way around.

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Other Announcements / Re: GoG Indie initiative
« on: September 06, 2013, 06:26:37 PM »
I filled out the GoG-Indie online form for Voyage to Farland, but haven't heard back from them so I guess they aren't interested.  :(

A rep from GamersGate also contacted me soon after the game got on Desura. When I finally got a self-installer package built I mailed them but haven't gotten a response (other than a failed Skype-tag session).

Oh well, Desura is pretty cool -- I just wish more gamers would get on board. With their DRM-free stance and availability of "standalone" downloads (that don't require using the Desura client) it should be popular, I'd think.

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Hey, I just read your article on Gamasutra. Inspiring stuff – I agree that Shiren is The Good Stuff, and I had to laugh at the concept of Obatarian (is the O- in this case an honorary prefix? that would make it even more hilarious).


I got so freaked out that the game crashed on your machine, I forgot to answer your question about the Obatarian!

My Japanese isn't perfect, but my understanding was that Oba is used for a woman older than the speaker, but not necessarily elderly. So teenage kids would call a woman in her 30s Oba-san, or "aunt" -- not to be confused with Obaa-san (longer "ah" sound) or "grandmother". I think the "O" is an honorific, like Ocha for tea, Okane for money.

Anyway, they combine Oba with ba-ta-ri-an (battalion) into Obatarian.

There are lots of other funny combinations -- let's see if I can remember more:
kimo-kawa = kimoi + kawaii, roughly creepy but cute
puri-kura = purinto + kurabu (print + club from English, those little photobooth stickers
mukku = magajin + bukku (magazine + book)





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Hey, I just read your article on Gamasutra. Inspiring stuff – I agree that Shiren is The Good Stuff, and I had to laugh at the concept of Obatarian (is the O- in this case an honorary prefix? that would make it even more hilarious).

Less exalting is the fact that Voyage crashes on my Eee PC netbook (running Debian "wheezy"). With Sun's java (version 6), I get no display at all. With openjdk (version 7u25-2.3.10-1~deb7u1), I get a small window that plays some music and displays a few logos, before cutting to a forest scene, that I only get a glimpse of before the application crashes. I'll paste the error message below, in its entirety.

I've got an old Mac sitting at home with Debian on it as well, so I'll see if I won't get the opportunity to try it on that machine during the weekend or something.

As always,
Minotauros


Hey Minotauros,

Sorry about all this! I've never seen this sort of thing on the machines I regularly test on.

Looks like SUN's Java may not be playing nice with the lwjgl library. I've only tested with openjdk -- I think the openjdk-6-jdk package in the Ubuntu software center to build, and openjdk-6-jre & openjdk-7-jre to run, although -jdk also has the runtime stuff, so either one should work I think. I've tested Linux mostly on my own notebook (HP dv4) from pendrive Linux Ubuntu 12.04 (I think), so after booting it seems to take a while for the Ubuntu software center to pick up the very latest openjdk packages from the "Universe" repository.

Anyway, that's just background info. The main problem in your error output seems to be the "Texture too big..." line. I guess either the graphics card (or chipset since it's a notebook) can't handle the owl sprite texture -- which isn't big at all.

I did a bit of googling and saw people saying to update lwjgl.so (Java OpenGL library), but the one I've included seems to be fairly recent (2.8.4). OK, just checked and there IS a newer version available from Sourceforge here. You could try dropping the linux lwjgl.so and lwjgl64.so into the lib directories for the Voyage installation, but it's a long shot whether that would fix the problem.

Also, fiddling with the graphics chipset settings may or may not help.

If your Mac with Debian has an Intel based CPU, you could try the game on that. Unfortunately, the whole Voyage for Linux build assumes Intel/x86 based CPUs for now.

I'll also google some more and see if I can find other ideas or fixes. Feel free to email me at the address on the download page (just below the Sellbox button) in the meantime.

Again, sorry about the problem! And stay tuned.

EDIT:

- if you try that latest lwjgl from Sourceforge, you should probably also copy lwjgl.jar (from jar/) into the Voyage jars directory (in addition to the native/linux/lwjgl.so & native/linux/lwjgl64.so into the Voyage lib directory)

- if you don't mind more experimentation, you could make a pendrive Ubuntu USB stick (4GB should be sufficient) with either YUMI or unetbootin to see if Ubuntu can run Voyage on your hardware. I've had success with Ubuntu 12.04_Live, but as I wrote above, you'll have to wait and otherwise convince the Software Center application to look for openjdk on the Universe repository - sometimes it won't find openjdk-7-jre initially, then does after a minute or two, then finds a newer version of it after another minute!?

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Cool. I've been curious about this game for some years. Now that there's a Linux demo, I'll check it out one of these days.

As always,
Minotauros

Yes, please give it a try. I made the Linux builds from a pendrive Ubuntu install, which is kind of wacky but cool.

I think I've noted on the download page that the game requires Java, so you'll need one of the openjdk jre or jdk (6 or 7) packages installed.

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Thanks! I'll keep at it -- this game keeps pulling me back to work on it every time I try to escape.

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Hey everybody, Voyage to Farland is my labor of love project to introduce the Japanese console roguelike sub-genre to a wider audience. Well, sure - everybody knows the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games, but not so many have played the harder Shiren the Wanderer games.

Voyage is now on Desura for $2.99. It's also available on the Peculiar Games website for a bit less than that ($2.50), selling "direct" via Sellbox. And there are free demos for Windows and Linux on the website, too. You can try out pretty much everything in the game, including rescues, but there IS a levelup cap of 5.

Voyage is also part of the Rugged Rogues bundle along with ToME and Man in a Maze. And there's a Bundle+ option which adds in Obludia and Dungeon Prospector.


New stuff in version 2.2.5 of Voyage:
  • rescue codes (get a friend to rescue you or be a good samaritan and rescue a wanderer in need - yes, I stole this idea from Shiren DS)
  • fullscreen support, including a wider cell display area compared to the mobile Android version
  • a new bonus dungeon and NPC with a pretty interesting persistent levelup mechanic that is sort of questy, collectible, achievement-ish (well I like it anyway)



Finally, here's a youtube playlist with Let's Plays I and BrianDaGod made.

Happy wandering :)

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The PC and Linux versions are now synced up with the latest changes from the Android version.

I'm trying out Sellbox for this latest 2.0 release, although the previous version (1.0.5) is still free and fully playable.

PC version:
https://sites.google.com/a/peculiar-games.com/voyagetofarlandpc/

x86 Linux version:
https://sites.google.com/a/peculiar-games.com/voyagetofarlandpc/voyage-to-farland-beta-for-x86-linux

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Just a quick update that I released a version of the game for the Chrome Web Store using the Native Client SDK. Get it here:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/voyage-to-farland/hbiboffmikccokhcedbglilkgccacjcj

In theory, Native Client apps run on any x86 machine, so this would be the first time Voyage is available for Macs. I'd be interested in hearing from any Mac users if it actually works or not. Then again, I'm not sure how many Mac users run the Chrome browser.

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Released an update to the Android version of Voyage last week that makes better use of the screen real estate on the Nexus 7 (currently the most popular device for the game according to the Android Dev Console).



I've also been testing it with a bluetooth keyboard and it works pretty nicely! Will likely get a BT or USB game controller set up soon as well.

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Thanks for posting this getter77!

Here's a video I put together today of the PC version:
http://youtu.be/wDbIIVL95P0

Indeed, feedback is welcome. Here’s my current list of things that need fixing:
- game controller support
- mouse support
- HD graphics (ShroomArts is helping on this front). Actually the game in its current version on the website is moddable -> make a folder on the same level as lib and files called “pack1”, inside that make a folder called “data” and drop in sprite sheets -- currently only sprites can be modded, but tiled backgrounds and tracker music files will come soon. There’s a sampling on the website of a few new sprites by ShroomArts.
- a few bugs here and there (maybe more) that I’m tracking down
- smoother animation: need to do some profiling on the current version and tweak a few things

This PC version actually has a bit more content than the Android version on the market in that there’s a preview of a new dungeon called “The Bot Sub-plot” with the Toyrobot NPC. It’s only a filler dungeon currently, with a couple of new tiled backgrounds and a new family of monsters, the “Evilbots” with a “magnetic draw” attack. Hoping to turn this into a Shiren-esque Borg Mamel style quest.

I decided -- for the time being at least -- to put the Windows version out there in its current form rather than take a stab at a Kickstarter project just yet. I’ll try to keep updating regularly, but life intervenes occasionally.

All that being said, you can play the game through all the dungeons, the graphics and UI need work, but the gameplay is pretty solid since it’s the same engine that’s been tested for 2 years on Android.

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