Hero of Allacrost Forums

Once again we are calling on you all to be our ad hoc quality assurance team and help us test out our next release before we make it public. Please do not share these download links with anyone. As usual, download it, try it out, and let us know of any bugs or issues you encounter by posting in this thread and this thread alone.

Download Links (about 45MB)

Linux/source: (link removed)
Windows: (link removed)
OS X: (link removed)

Here's a list of features we added to this demo:
- Advanced dialogue (ability to selection response options)
- Laila is now able to join the party and fight with you
- Treasures are available on maps
- Entering maps now display introductory location text and graphics
- Ability to run on maps (hold down the cancel button, 'd' is the default key for cancel) and a stamina bar that depletes on maps with enemies
- Battle menu interface has been adjusted
- Ability to save and load your game as well as your personal settings (volume level, resolution, key mappings, etc)
- Small number of improvements to party menu
- A new "shopping cart" system added to the shopping menu


Here are the known bugs in this release that we are still working on fixing (so dont bother reporting them to us):
- Credits text doesnt display in the boot menu
- Map NPCs often collide with or block one another
- Battle retry feature upon losing a battle is not available
- The game is not balanced at all. You'll probably find it very easy
- The attack point indicator graphic in battle mode doesn't show up
- We need to add equipment for Laila instead of having her share the same armor as Claudius
- The game "freezes" when reconfiguring key mappings while it waits for the user to input a command

Here are things to watch out for while testing
- Make sure the music plays back nicely (this demo uses a brand new audio engine). On one machine (an Ubuntu laptop) playback was been very harsh and choppy and we haven't figured out why
- Report any unexpected behavior and try your best to find "corner cases" that you think might screw up or crash the game
- Keep an eye out for visual glitches with images or text. A very large portion of our video engine was re-written for this release



Our plan is to spend the next week receiving feedback from you all and fixing up the last few bugs/issues we know about, and if all goes well we will likely be making this release public next weekend. Thanks for your patience and support, and happy bug hunting!

OS X release has now been added.


Also if you are using Ubuntu and experience choppy audio playback, try doing the following:

1) Create a file in your home directory called ".openalrc"
2) Enter the text "(define devices '(alsa sdl native))" in the file and save it

(If this solution doesn't work for you, please post here and let us know).

Roots wrote:- Ability to save and load your game as well as your personal settings (volume level, resolution, key mappings, etc)

Since when? That doesn't work for me when I run straight out of svn.

Saving the game works for sure. I wrote that feature 3 months ago and have been using it since. I was told the configuration file works by someone, but never tested that myself.

Yeah. Saving the game works for me too. I meant that it doesn't save configuration options.

Roots wrote:I was told the configuration file works by someone, but never tested that myself.

Nope, it ain't there. Certainly not in MenuMode. I can look into implementing it but I'll be very busy for the next two days...

Its supposed to be in boot mode, not menu mode. And I think steu was the one who said he implemented it and tested it and everything worked.....

It was working at one point in time, but it appears it is broken now, also it saves it in dat/config folder which needs to be changed i'll fix these this week. Also in my most recent commit, BootMode should no longer freeze when waiting for key presses.

EDIT: it does work for me, if you quit using QuitMode (instead of the menu) then the settings won't be saved, i'm fixing this in my next commit.

Yo... Running on MacBook in OS X.4.11...

I hate to say it, but I can't get the thing to play at all. It starts up fine, but when I try to select any of the commands, it doesn't respond. Arrow keys work to flip between the different options, but no mouse feedback. Pressing return to select anything doesn't work. When I try to click on the menu, the game freezes. Somehow, I started a game by pressing command-F, though I really don't know why that would do anything... but I couldn't do much in-game either, because only the arrow keys seemed to work...

[EDIT]

Ah, so I figured out that the F key was supposed to be the confirm key... and somehow I looked into the options screen, so I found out what all the keys were supposed to be. I also looked at the video options, and it seems it also crashes when trying to switch to full-screen mode. It does fine switching resolutions, though.

Also, talking to the villagers and buying stuff was easy, but it promptly crashed when trying to go out of town...

[EDIT2]

Okay, I tried again and took Laila with me this time, so I got out of town, but it promptly crashed again when I tried to fight something.

Shenlon wrote:Yo... Running on MacBook in OS X.4.11...

I hate to say it, but I can't get the thing to play at all. It starts up fine, but when I try to select any of the commands, it doesn't respond. Arrow keys work to flip between the different options, but no mouse feedback. Pressing return to select anything doesn't work. When I try to click on the menu, the game freezes. Somehow, I started a game by pressing command-F, though I really don't know why that would do anything... but I couldn't do much in-game either, because only the arrow keys seemed to work...

What gives?? I realize it's a beta, but I thought it was farther along than this!

Roots has this crazy idea that "ASDF" are somehow intuitive as input keys, instead of conforming to the "enter/esc" paradigm that the rest of the damn planet uses.

Anyways, like an SNES game, allacrost has no mouse input; you use those four keys, and the arrow keys, for basically everything. We may add mouse input down the road for menus and such, but right now it's a low, low priority. The manual file details what those keys do, IIRC.

On a positive note, as per the "What to look for" parts, the music and sound plays back just fine and dandy.

And there's supposed to be a welcome screen that pops up the first time you run the game that tells you what the default controls are, and if you don't like them you can re-map them yourself. But the welcome screen is currently broken, so that's on our "to fix" list for the release. Thanks for reporting those other crashes though; it seems that our OS X developers have some work to do, because those problems are simply non-existent in Windows and Linux.


And FWIW, in the future we'll probably provide the user an option to select between two configurations: the current ASDF one, and Jetryl's "intuitive" commands that I argue aren't intuitive at all, except for maybe enter for confirm and space for cancel or pause. The reason why ASDF is used is because we actually have 6 keys (not including pause) used for commands. The idea is that the right hand handles direction with the arrow keys and the left hand can stay on the home row with all the commands available.


I never said that ASDF was intuitive. Don't put words in my mouth please. I said that they were more practical than that "all-over-the-keyboard" enter + esc + tab + ctrl + whatever combo where you have to constantly move your eyes away from the screen and to the keyboard to move your hand and find the correct "intuitive" key to press.

Shenlon wrote:On a positive note, as per the "What to look for" parts, the music and sound plays back just fine and dandy.

Whoa, Shenlon? There's a name I wasn't expecting.

Windows release lacks OpenAL32.dll. I tried to find it on my own, but first three hits on google didn't work. This one is OK:
http://www.dlldll.com/getdll/4385.html

VS wrote:Windows release lacks OpenAL32.dll. I tried to find it on my own, but first three hits on google didn't work. This one is OK:
http://www.dlldll.com/getdll/4385.html

I noticed this too. ChopperDave needs to somehow include this with his release. I don't know if he can simply have the dll just sitting there in the root folder, or if he needs to include an installer for it.

However, he can find both of these on the ftp in /libs/win/

Yeah I can include it. I'll add it in when I get home tonight. I thought it was kinda strange it wasn't listed as a DLL on the wiki, but the game ran fine without it, so I assumed it wasn't needed (sound fx were coming through just fine).

Maybe you had it installed in a system location?

The wiki needs to be updated. Last I looked it had SDL_mixer.dll listed, which should no longer be needed since we don't use SDL_mixer anymore.


To that effect, it would be really really really nice if a Windows person (and OS X person if its relevant) could upload all the DLL/library files needed for -both- run-time and compilation. I think good locations would be:

- Windows runtime: http://www.allacrost.org/staff/libs/win/
- Windows development: http://www.allacrost.org/staff/libs/win/dev/
- OS X runtime: http://www.allacrost.org/staff/libs/oxs/
- OS X development: http://www.allacrost.org/staff/libs/osx/dev

Maybe you had it installed in a system location?

Not that I know of. Whatever. I'll upload it.

To that effect, it would be really really really nice if a Windows person (and OS X person if its relevant) could upload all the DLL/library files needed for -both- run-time and compilation. I think good locations would be:

I can upload Windows stuff.

Roots wrote:The wiki needs to be updated. Last I looked it had SDL_mixer.dll listed, which should no longer be needed since we don't use SDL_mixer anymore.


To that effect, it would be really really really nice if a Windows person (and OS X person if its relevant) could upload all the DLL/library files needed for -both- run-time and compilation. I think good locations would be:

- Windows runtime: http://www.allacrost.org/staff/libs/win/
- Windows development: http://www.allacrost.org/staff/libs/win/dev/
- OS X runtime: http://www.allacrost.org/staff/libs/oxs/
- OS X development: http://www.allacrost.org/staff/libs/osx/dev

You already made another thread somewhere about this and I've already done it...