Exciting Dusk developments

I've been wanting to post about this awesome news for over a week but I've been pretty busy as of late.  Almost 2 weeks ago a Java developer 'Michael Zucchi', nickname 'NotZed', came across my Dusk blog, got the game running and played a few hours of the demo game I put together.  I've played my own demo game for an hour or 2 (but end up rebooting the game to log in as a god and script more of the game) so it was pretty neat to see that I had enough mobs in-game to provide that much play time.  There's enough to give you the feel for the game and that was enough to get him interested.

He's now actively developing Dusk and upgrading it with JavaFX.  The client has been completely re-written using JavaFX.  He's a free software developer and was concerned about Dusk's license.  The headers on the code files didn't say anything about it being GPL and there was no copy of COPYING anywhere.  I've contacted the creator 'Tom Weingarten' and got his permission to update the headers and to use GPLv2 or later.  Thanks a lot Tom!

Here's the links to NotZed's blog and his upgraded fork of the Dusk engine called 'DuskZ'.

New fork 'DuskZ' source files
NotZed's developer notes

He's made a lot of improvements in just the last 10 days.  I'm actually very impressed with what he's accomplished already.  When I look at what he's accomplished (o.O) I'm like the 'dude' in my demo game that's standing next to the resurrection tile watching people appear out of thin air acting all excited with this look on his face (o.O)  You can see this 'dude' in the last video's or you can play the demo game yourself now that another Java developer 'Andy Weaver' was kind enough to provide instructions for running Dusk on Windows 7.  He was the first to contribute to my github, thanks again Andy.

Linux users can easily play my demo game now that NotZed showed me how to run Dusk as an application.  I was running it as an applet before and that required installing Apache, placing files into Apache, and opening a web-page where the applet pops-up. 

All that is needed is Java jre, you'll need a version from www.java.com .  You can check your version of java in linux with this command "java -version"  Versions of Java like Iced Tea won't work.



Download the Duskfiles from my github -to make it simple put the files in your home folder.




Start the Dusk Server with these commands run in terminal:

Zabin@Zabin-laptop:~$ cd /home/Zabin/DuskRPG/DuskFiles/Dusk2.7.3
Zabin@Zabin-laptop:~/DuskRPG/DuskFiles/Dusk2.7.3$ java -cp . DuskServer
Loading...
Ready for connections.

Then run the client:

Zabin@Zabin-laptop:~/DuskRPG/DuskFiles/Dusk2.7.3$ cd /home/Zabin/DuskRPG/DuskFiles/Dusk2.7.3/www
Zabin@Zabin-laptop:~/DuskRPG/DuskFiles/Dusk2.7.3/www$ java -cp duskclient.jar Dusk



The GUI should come up and prompt you to click connect.  Make sure the port is "7474" and the address is 127.0.0.1

I'm on Ubuntu linux 10.04, obviously you'll have to change "Zabin" to whatever your system is called.

Have fun bashing up mobs in Dusk!

There's only 1 finished quest ATM and like a dozen half finished quests.  I plan to finish all those quests I've started over the next month.

I keep getting distracted organizing and creating new pixel art for use in Dusk.  I know how important it is to have everything properly licensed so last night I finished the LICENSES file.  I might have missed a few assets but I'll add them when I notice them.  So I've taken care of licensing the art assets and clarified the license on the code for NotZed.  That doesn't sound like much but trust me it took some time to write up that License file.  I also started a collection of art used in Dusk on OGA.

I'm including some screen-shots made by NotZed to show his improvements visually.  These screen-shots tickle me, I'm happy to see Dusk being improved upon :D

His new animated damage bubbles that drift away from the attacker and fade to blank.  Awesome!

New merchant window, This looks a lot better then the old AWT windows.

New equipment window, I like the three buttons on the bottom right.

He made Dusk's map compatible with Tiled!  This will make mapping so much easier!  Excellent!

This is my favourite screen-shot out of them all.  He got this 'tall tiles' idea and it makes it possible to get a layer effect while on 1 layer!  I was a little confused at first but it's pretty simple when you see the map open in Tiled.

Another awesome thing he fixed was the flicker in the walking animation.  He also changed the crude animation timer and now it's 2 frames alternating every direction.  Before it just looked like 1 frame because of the crude old timer.  He says it looks cheesy but it works a lot better then it did.  I'm happy with only 2 frames alternating in every direction.

Right now I'm waiting for him to release a binary version of DuskZ, at that point I'll get to play his new files and I'll make a new video showing these awesome upgrades.  Maybe I'll find the time to try and build the files but I think I'll just wait.

Here's the pixel I've organized of Hyptosis art.

Here's the re-colourations I've done on Redshrikes RPG enemies enemies.

 Here's a couple more links about Dusk from back in the day (2000-2001) for historical purposes.
Dusk player ratings from 2001

DuskQFL