Welcome back! Scourge is still being worked on, but slowly, because the regular contributors are away ATM and I am preparing to start my own game project. However, Gabor did implement city signs that tell you the city's name and he also did a bit of performance optimization by disabling fog in the outdoors.

I'm currently coding on another project, but will continue to monitor Scourge so I can maintain this column.

That said, stay tuned and see you again soon!

Hello and welcome back! Work on the game is still progressing rather slowly, but I plan to set up my development environment again very soon and at least fix a few bugs and do some optimizations in addition to my other project related work. Gabor already started fixing some of the more specific cases of outdoor slowness.

If you run the SVN version and have a basic understanding of C++, you are welcome to share your ideas on how to improve performance or fix little glitches, as we are very short on development manpower at the moment :-/

So, see you next week for the next edition of the column!

Hello and welcome to the 32nd edition of our weekly column! There wasn't much going on this week; most notably Gabor started adding villages and towns to the outdoor world and did some save/load tweaking. I didn't have much time too but thought a bit about how to market the game so we attract more contributors - the next release will have scrolling end credits of two and a half minutes, and we have to fill that time span with enough names and acknowledgements ;-) Expect a thread showcasing the project on the Freegamedev forum as soon as development has gained more speed again.

Of course you are invited to hang out on #scourge at freenode and share your thoughts.

That said, stay tuned and until next week!

Hello again! It's time for an update to our weekly column. Gabor has started work on roads but is busy on his job now. It doesn't mean nothing is done however; I'm still working on expanding the community wiki. I have to maintain it more or less continually as much of the content will flow back into the main S.C.O.U.R.G.E. project, especially history, location and person related articles which will be the reference for fleshing out the story and missions for the next release.

Contributions to the Player's Guide are very appreciated as I don't have the time to work on all sections of the wiki.

So, stay tuned and see you next week!

Greetings and welcome to the 30th edition of our weekly column! S.C.O.U.R.G.E. related development has continued at a steady pace.

Gabor started working on roads connecting the towns and cities and cod finished a first version of the rune font. I decided to look more into marketing, as well as developing the story background on the community wiki, even if it means that new game features will come in more slowly over the next time.

As usual, contributions are welcome, just ask on our friendly IRC channel (#scourge at freenode). The community wiki needs some love too; you could for example add more content to the Player's Guide, upload a few Screenshots or add your ideas to the Wishlist.

So, happy gaming and see you next week!

Hello again! Here is a new edition of our weekly column after i was AWOL for personal reasons during the last few weeks.

There has been quite some work done in the meantime: timong uploaded the new soundtrack to SVN, including area dependent outdoor music. Monsters are also generated in the outdoors now and many bugfixes, especially related to data persistence are underway. cod continued work on runes; while it is not clear yet what they will be used for, we will surely find a use soon.

New contributors in all areas are always welcome, as this version is a large-scale rewrite and feature boost; you can also hang out on #scourge at freenode to keep in touch with the latest and greatest ideas and enhancements. That said, I'm glad I found my way here again (partly due to timong's detective skills :-) ), so you can rest assured that this column will be updated more regularly again.

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 :-)

Welcome to the 25th edition of the weekly column!

Gabor was absent but I did my best to keep things running. I extended the land generator to load multiple types of data from the world map. Charlieg gave me a tip where to obtain tree models so we can have suitable vegetation for the different climate zones. I'm currently playing with the models in Blender; tomorrow I'll start adding vegetation and climate zones to the map.

timong was as restless as me and contributed more chapter music up to chapter 9.

To give you a small first impression of the new outdoor world, I present you a composite image of the different times of day ( depicted are night, day and dawn).



We are making progress with all these new features! See you next week :-)