Hey folks, how's it going? I recently released a toolset that should give people an alternative to using maped3 for editing maps, by allowing people to open their maps under tiled, a cross-platform and open-source editor. The tool collection for allowing just that is called v3tiled, and you can read more about it here.

This release serves multiple purposes. First, by making these tools, it is now possible to convert a .map and .vsp file into a map format that can be opened with tiled. And as a result, we have a cross-platform editor that doesn't require .NET and potentially works on many different Windows-based machines available! You convert to tiled formats with my tools, do the editing in tiled, save, and convert back with my tools when you're ready to have a go in Verge.

Secondly, is being able to convert maps into a format that can be read a lot more easily. Tiled uses an XML format, so plenty of tools can use that for maps and so on. So if you were wanting to use your old Verge maps in projects on another engine or development platform with XML capabilities, that is now possible too.

However, there are currently a few downsides to the tools as they stand currently. The disadvantage of these tools as they are, is that they require Python 2.6 with PIL installed for it, and need to be run from a command line (with Python setup in the PATH or else you need to run out from the Python installation's folder). Not entirely friendly right now, if someone makes a GUI for it, that might be cool.

You can check out the source on github (see the Download Source button to get a zipped archive of all the files you need), or consult the reams of documentation on the tools here. I've even documented the file specification of various Verge formats on there too! If you are interested in volunteering to making tools more public-friendly, that'd be helpful. I don't really have the time for that lately, but I thought I'd do part of the favor, and at least make tools for this sort of thing exist!

So there you are. Hopefully someone finds this useful!

The first-year students of Creajeux, a French school that specializes in game design, have released another game, with Gurvy (a Verger who made Menolly and LIFE) as one of the teachers. I have to apologize, because this announcement comes a couple weeks later than intended. I think that Creajeux has been extremely patient with us, considering the delay.

But without further ado, I'd like to present Creajeux's latest release, Pistil Panik!

The story of game revolves around a Pistil, who is on a mission to save the world. To do that, the Pistil must travel across dangerous territories, and it makes friends with a variety of different insects who help it towards the goal of the fertile soil. This game mixes different genres of gameplay (plus bonus games), and features colorful backdrops, environmental effects and cutscenes.

...Yes, that's right. Cutscenes. Their game uses a customized version of Verge (based on the May 2010 release). Their full modifications include stable AVI movie playback (used for the game's intro and ending FMVs), a new collision system with spline paths for NPC movement, and maps larger than 2048*2048 tiles through use of a custom map editor tool.

The game is by default in French, but no fear, there are bilingual settings. The English translation is not the greatest, but it is forgivable given the native language of the people making the game. Aside from the grammatical errors of the translation, I think that the story was still communicated okay.

Each of the different insects that helps you along the way has their own unique controls and gameplay style. Each character has their own distinct abilities, such as pushing objects, jumping, flying, or emitting their own light source. Solve puzzles, help NPCs on quests, and explore different maps. Traps and enemies cause instant defeat, so you need to move with caution to avoid a Game Over, especially since checkpoints are sometimes sparsely placed. This can be frustrating at times, so be patient.

Each character has their own chapter, and upon completion, the Pistil is passed along to the next character. Once a chapter has been reached, it can be loaded instantly from the game's title screen, keeping progress and allowing you to return to the game later. There are 4 chapters in total.

Oh, and keep your eyes open, there is a minigame hidden in each chapter of the game! (4 minigames total) One of the games is capable of saving high scores on a remote server.

Download Pistil Panik from Creajeux (375 MB)

Walkthrough (English/French) (21 MB)

(You will need WinRAR or similar to extract RAR files, and the DivX codec for the game's cutscenes.)

When you read the credits, you'll see that there were lots of people behind this project. And to be honest, it shows.

They even have some development photos for the game's production, which they've shared. You can see the students working on various parts of the game, as well as a couple shots of their playtesting. Neat!

Gurvy has said that he hopes to write a 'making of', which will describe what went into the overall design for the graphics, and how they integrated with and modified Verge to suit their needs. He also told me that we can expect to hear about the next Creajeux project, which will be sort of like Ecco the Dolphin (Genesis, Game Gear, etc) and EVO (SNES). Sounds cool.

As a lot of work went into all this, the Creajeux students and teachers would greatly appreciate any comments you have on the game. So if you have any comments or reviews for them, please feel free to leave them here.

This is probably more important to people who want to work on Verge itself, but it was a recent decision to move Verge's source code out of SVN and into a Git repository for better version control. Github was just the right place.

Git allows each and every person to have their own individual fork, if they so choose. No more centralized repository, instead each person who wants to work has their own individual copy of the code in a separate clone. Anyone can be a developer, no need to ask for permission to start working on the engine, you can commit to your own fork as much as you want, or pull changes from other people. My branch is http://github.com/Bananattack/verge3/

Good (tested, working, useful) changes and fixed can get pulled into one of the core Verge maintainers' branches, and when everything works and seems "release-worthy", can be packaged together into a new official Verge release by the main devs here.

Along with this, the source is a lot easier to view from the web, as github has its own friendly file browser and colorful syntax highlighting on files.

You will need a Git client to get things going. On Windows, I recommend using msysgit. And, it's still pretty convenient to slip people zip or tar.gz of source now if you don't want to use git, by simply using github's download options available.

So let's make the move happen! My branch is here!

UPDATE: Account logins work once again.

Hey guys! Overkill here. I just wanted you to know that Verge, while being quiet for a while, still has life. Below is a summary of things, which I earlier described on my blog.

A major uphaul was made to Verge through a replacement of DirectDraw with GDI in terms of rendering. DirectDraw was old, deprecated, and broke Aero on newer machines. GDI, on the other hand, is still supported and doesn't need to lock the screen surface.

Along with the move to GDI, hardware fullscreen was removed. This at first sounds like a major loss, but this is for the best, I think. After all, Verge games are entirely software-drawn anyways, and many video cards do not support the lower resolutions that most Verge games are made in. Verge now instead uses a fake fullscreen mode, which means that non-native resolutions can be used without problems. As a result, that window switching is also much faster if you're doing multiple things, and switching back and forth between fullscreen mode and windowed mode with ALT+ENTER is almost instant.

This however, wasn't the only thing that got changed. There were a couple bugs and undesirable behaviours that somehow crept their way into the engine. Until I fixed them, that is.

When I added type-aliases to VC a bit of a while back, I somehow wrecked arrays in structures, but that is now fixed. FileEOF now works properly again (was broken in SVN for a while). I also fixed a bug with ColorFilter, where translucency settings were not being obeyed.

Kildorf added escape characters to string literals. But most VC games were written without this, and expected a to put a single raw backslash. So I added an "oldstring" configuration setting. When oldstring is found on a line in the verge.cfg, it will go back to the old way of handling string literals. Sadly, there's no way to mix files which use backslashes raw in string, and files that use escape characters in string without adjusting one or the other, but I think this is acceptable, since it's a pretty trivial thing to do. I just added in the backwards compatibility so that old projects ran with a newer Verge would still work without digging through and fixing every string in the code.



Oh, and along with the GDI renderer, I also added a few new window scaling settings. There are a couple modes to how the Verge screen can be scaled/fit into its window and fullscreen view. This called for new configuration settings. For windowed mode, there is "scalewin". For fullscreen, there is "scalefull". Both of these have a few settings that can be taken on:

• scalewin 0 / scalefull 0 - Letter-box. The old Verge method of scaling the screen, which often resulted in distorted pixels. If the window was not perfect aspect, it would scale according to ratio (but the ratio could be non-integer, resulting in the chunky distortion), and it would fill in with letterboxes along the shorter axis. No longer the default, or only way of scaling. But left in, in case anybody prefers this.


• scalewin 1 / scalefull 1 - Aspect-aware mode. Get the largest integer factor of screen size that fits in the render area. Makes sure that no distortion of the screen occurs, only uniform integer scaling. (Default windowed mode setting).
  
• scalewin 2 / scalefull 2 - Scale to size of render area. (Default fullscreen mode setting).<br/><br/>In most cases, a little bit of stretching can be acceptable. For instance, my monitor is 1440x900 (16:10), and game resolution is (4:3), but since the game is low-resolution pixel graphics, the bit of non-uniformity doesn't stand out too badly (I think).
  

You can peruse the SVN (anonymous/anonymous), or to be a little more friendly, you can download the exe here. If there aren't any major bugs, maybe in a couple weeks we can have a full release.

Get it here!

...In other news, we hope to fix the logins here soon, which are partially responsible for how quiet things are now (since nobody can post!) FIXED. And maybe a few other excitements. Stay tuned!

So, myself (vocals) and one ancient verger (w1cca, on drums) performed live for Child's Play last night at Umloud.



Donate to Child's Play to prove to the world that gamers are wonderful people who care about other people! Namely sick children!

More verge-centric news to come soon. Honest.

The machine that verge-rpg.com is hosted on has had some rough days recently. Many thanks to zeromus for his multiple 3-hour trips to Houston to get things worked out in the short term, and his continued efforts to find a long-term solution!