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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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).

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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.

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