If you have a project related to the game and want to make it public, this is the place for you. Princed is the community used by game fans to find related projects, information, downloads, etc. Hosting your project here will increase the publicity of your project directing traffic to your project site. Having a hostname in the form http://yourproject.princed.org means that you are part of the community and it is in fact a good piece of work.
Oct
06
This year -compared to others- we haven’t been very active doing releases, documentation and other stuff, but we didn’t fall asleep. We have been analyzing and designing the future PV4. We have also evaluated the possibility of migrating the website framework to another better.
To generate some activity to show we are still here, we have renamed the site URL from http://www.princed.com.ar to http://www.princed.org. We are more like an organization rather than an Argentine Commercial website. So that’s why we decided to do this change. Some traffic will be lost, but the spirit of this change is to show what we really are and it was very necessary. We should have done it before. So from now on, we’ll use www.princed.org as the main website and keep the old address as a permanent redirection to this one.
After working a lot in the POP2 Level format, we can say that we know about 90% of it. Brendon James is working in the editor Roomshaker 2 for POP2 using all the specifications discovered. The format specifications for both POP games are open and published in the technical documentation section of this web. I hope we’ll soon be playing new POP2 mods. Thanks Brendon for the good stuff!
Finally, after several delays we are setting a final release date. This version incorporates the extraction support of 256 colors images from the POP2 dat files in experimental mode. In order to do that we had to reverse the file format and rewrite two big parts of PR (the file format layer and the dat format layer). We believe that this version won’t be as stable as the other 1.x’s, this is because lots of lines of code were added without the propper testing time.
The release week It’ll be one year since PR 1.0 had been released, two years since PR 1.0 beta and about three years since the development had started.
In future releases we’ll include stability, full non-experimental extract support (PR 1.3) and importation support (PR 1.4).
After validating the page with the most strict standards in the web we decided to implement an RSS extraction system from the forum. So now the page and the forum are very close.
We also decided to drop out the nedstat visit counter because of the publicity they added. From now on, the only visit counters we’ll use are internal. When the site was first published we had decided to use nedstat because it was an external and trusted visit counting system that we won’t ever be able to modify.
The home page has reached more than 80 thousand visitors since the first time it was published.
Jan
18
We are proud to announce that we succesfully imported a POP2 dat file.
This is going to help a lot in the POP2 level reverse engineering -wich has already started and it’s going fine- because now we only have to worry about the level and not the .dat file and it’s checksums. We have reversed everything but the guard properties.
Knowing that POP2 has two types of images and that the first type is similar to POP1 we were able -during the development of PR 1.2- to extract a graphic dat file of this first type and import it back again with an image edited having successful results.
This means that we are very near to get a version capable of editing (and not only extracting) POP2 graphics of this first type.
We also reversed the new POP2 compression algorithm that is present in the second type and we believe PR 1.2 will have an experimental feature to extract all the images from POP2. If you want to know more about it please refer to the news thread I posted in the forum.
We only need testing, lots of it. The main new features are the support non-unique resource IDs that will help a lot in POP2 resource importation and the index names are now in forwards and may be bigger than 4 letters, much easier to understand.
Other less important new features are the new option –format (to generate filenames with the name specified), and the new dat input syntax allows to extract more specific resources like for example “rooftops.dat@400:shape#second,401:shape” and the unknown.xml file is now all merged in the extracted main folder.
If you want to test it, please make a post in the forum.
Jun
09
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.
May
26
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.
Mar
18
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.