It’s been 2 years since the release of PR v0.1 alpha.
However development didn’t stop! We are coding very hard to release PR v1.1. For this new version we achieved coding a new dat handling layer to support pop2 dat files for extraction. The DAT v2 indexing is fully supported and some images and palettes do work properly.
We’ve kept coding freeprince and it is now in an advanced stage, but not in an alpha state yet. Because this is not my only project and I didn’t have time (I have to finish the university too) for the last two month, the coding times are much slower than expected. This means there will be delays in the release.
In the last two month we only improved the portability (also worked in IRIX), fixed a few bugs and commented a bit more the code.
As the project has existed for more than a year, I can say it was very productive, the coding was good and the engine is very customizable. I like how the things are going and I want to code and finish my part. I think the balance is positive.
Both algorithms were solved in two days since the samples had been published by Diego Essaya. Congratulations!
The results will be added in PR 1.0 final, scheduled for 2005-03-23.
After that, we’ll start thinking in the GUI editor for PR. For the moment we only know it will be portable and made in wxPython.
In all the previous months FreePrince became a playable game. By the beginning of March we had released the last pre-alpha version (FP0.4). The next version is going to be the first alpha and have guards, timing and better moves coordination. Screenshots may be seen at the freeprince screen shots page. FP0.4-pre-alpha-soc (the first release of FP0.4 was compiled under GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and windows).
During the month of February our new volunteer became our new webmaster and normalized the site to be html 4.01 strict according to the W3C standards. The page is now supported by console browsers and the sites now presents a right separation between presentation (CSS styles) and data (HTML information).
Check out the Princed Programming contest awards 2005. It is about the coding of a compression algorithm used by the original game. Check out the bases.
Today we could came up with the first windows version of FreePrince. We used LCC and added a new makefile. The port can be downloaded from the CVS, by compiling the source using LCC and the makefile.lcc file you can get the exe file. The file res_conf.h requires to be generated and is a need in the compilation. This file can’t be generated in windows in an easy maner, bacause it uses awk. Any Linux version of the game can generate the file, so there is no problem at all. To compile you need to download the SDL and import the libs into LCC using the import facility at the utils menu. Don’t forget to put SDL.DLL in the game directory.
Mac Os X users can compile the game but PPC architecture isn’t fully supported, we need to upgrade the resource module code in FP from the latest PR sources. The rest of the source is ported.
There is a new FreePrince screenshots section in where you can find the latest shots of the development. Today’s addition is the windows shot.
During the Second Lugfi Conference we got the Freeprince kernel and graphics running, for the following weeks we’ve been redisigning and rewritting the FP kernel. FP is now in an advanced pre-alpha. Our kid can run, jump, couch and do all the movements depending on the pressed keys. It is read from the original dat files from disk and loaded into memory. The titles are also going fine, maps are read and loaded into memory in several object-oriented-structures and there is an interesting key binding event manager. We believe that a working version could be released before the end of the year. Interested guys may go to the FP project home page and take a look at the remaining tasks or offer any help.
I’ve been working in the debugging of PR 1.0 beta -that is very buggy- and fixed a lot of bugs. I want to thank the creators of Valgrind and Gdb for those two great tools that helped a lot finding bugs and memory leaks. The release is not delayed, when PR 1.0 beta was released I decided to keep this as the last released version for a very long time until I come out with PR 1.0 after at least 6 months of testing. The current problem is in the compression stuff, that is the most difficult code to debug and it has at least 2 known bugs (reports corruption when it’s not and reads wrong the memory). Those bugs could keep me busy for a long time -I hope not-. After fixing all bugs I’ll send people some copies so they can test it (if you are interested just mail me). For those who can’t wait, if I had to schedule or say an approximate release time I would say PR 1.0 could be finished in September. Who knows, may be it comes together with FreePrince 
