Hello and welcome to the 28th edition of our quasi-weekly column! There are many news.

Timong finished the chapter, intro/outro and battle music. He also composed a new Scourge main theme. He is now working on generic dungeon and outdoors music. Gabor continued work on the outdoor world, re-added NPCs and the underground part of the headquarters and fixed loads of bugs. I didn't code much but I'm planning on spicing up the minimap quite a bit. Depending on situation, it will show the immediate surroundings, the part of the world where you currently are, or both. In order to prepare this feature, I created an artistic travel map using nothing but Gimp.

Depicted here is the first ingame appearance of the new map (creating a new outdoor region in the map editor):



I also created a more varied set of outdoor ground textures so the landscape doesn't look too boring. Two examples:

Plains of Garmoskod (subtropical)



Geinaror Ridge (alpine)



Today is my 31st birthday, and a present I would really like would be more contributors. No really, we urgently need more contributors. By implementing a massive outdoor world, we have created room for more storytelling, lots of scripted side missions, great eye candy features we would like to try, sharply increased bug and bloat potential and so on. We virtually need more personnel in all areas: Coding, bugfixing, artwork (including handpainted backgrounds and portraits), scripting (Squirrel, C++-like), gameflow, dialogue writing, cutscene direction, playtesting etc.

If you are interested in contributing on an as-time-allows basis or just want to get in touch with the team, you are invited to hang out on our friendly IRC channel (#scourge on freenode).

So, see you on IRC or otherwise, until next week! :-)

Welcome to the 27th edition of the weekly column!

This week saw the implementation of two important milestone features: tree generation and multiple ground textures for the outdoor world. The land generator creates appropriate vegetation now according to the climate and vegetation world data. Work on climate specific ground textures is near-complete. If you are running SVN, take note that region transitions are currently sort of broken and may trigger asserts we tactically placed in the code for debugging purposes.

Timong composed an awesome, outstandingly epic music track for use in the final battle. I'm really impressed by his work, and the rest of the Scourge theme surely too, and I'm glad we have him here helping out with the game.

Besides of all that, most of us hung out on the IRC channel, discussing the impact of elven dairy products on tactical warfare and other similarly interesting stuff. We also have an annoying chatter-/dicebot there for added role playing geekness.

That said, stay tuned and until next week!

Welcome to the 26th edition of the weekly column! This was a very busy week with lots of people helping out.

Firstly, we are proud to welcome AL13N to the S.C.O.U.R.G.E. team. He wants to help out with coding on an as-time-allows basis and already fixed a few bugs nobody else had noticed or had the time to look into. Timong finished the chapter music tracks and made a new Scourge theme, as well as music for the planned end credits. Gabor and me worked on the new outdoors together. He did most of the refactoring and scripting, among others adding support for different vegetation types, while I contributed tree models for various climates and checked in a first version of a travel map to be displayed in the game.

Scourgeweb had been down for a few days, but we managed to coordinate all the work via IRC (#scourge on Freenode). Thanks go to eihrul, former lead developer of sauerbraten, who was also present on the channel and gave me valuable tips on how to improve and speed up the rendering. As we already break enough stuff, most engine improvements will not be implemented for the next release but I will try hard to squeeze a few frames out of the existing code.

So, as usual, stay tuned and until next week :-)