[cross posting]

I have been pretty inactive here lately, but I am still around and still working on things. One project that I have been working on the most is meiro, which is being developed my the members of mionet, I am doing the programming for it. The full development topic on it is currently open for anyone to see at mionet, but will be hidden when the game is ready for alpha testing. You can view it here if you don't mind having the game completely spoiled!

I am going to probably post YouTube videos for every test and update unless it has spoilers in it, and I will put them on this topic for you guys to see. I will also post here when the game is finished so you can all check it out :)

test 1: loading a state


test 2: changing states


test 3: music and fade effects


test 4: cutscene


07 May 2011 UPDATE: added exception handling, if files fail to load it will now leave a nice error message in the console if it was launched from command line. I will not make a video of this as it is more of a technical feature and not a content feature.

This looks great! I'm happy that we now have quite a few computer-side game programming projects going on here at Cemetech. Can you give us some more technical details, such as language and/or framework? Best of luck on this projects, I'm impressed with the screen-s-h-o-t-s- videos thus far, and I hope you'll keep us up to date on your progress.

That sure is a lot of files, what language is this and what libraries do you use for GUI?

I use C++ with SDL,and the graphics so far have all been made in GIMP (but are subject to change)

Nice, never heard of SDL, will search into it.

Excellent, I approve very much of that. I was afraid you were using GameMaker or one of those scripting packages.

Ooh, very nice I want to do some stuff with SDL sometime soon, but haven't gotten the time. Also, what desktop environment do you use? It looks really cool

thanks guys, also my desktop is xfce (with one panel on bottom only) and conky on the side.

Also, I realized there's no real summary of what the plot and genre of this game will be! Would you care to enlighten us?

its hard to say too much without going into spoiler zone, but I will give as best of summary as I can.
The genre of meiro is what I would describe as psychological adventure. It will be a top-down adventure game with 2D graphics. The gameplay will focus on the player exploring a world full of symbolism and mystery, solving puzzles along the way. the general plot will be very abstract and it will be up to each player to come up with their own interpretation of what it really means

That sounds pretty interesting and not a bit creepy to me. Well, good luck then. I hope you will indeed keep us updated on your progress as you go, although I'm not sure how you'll be able to give us progress updates while avoiding spoilers if even giving the back-of-the-box description is a spoiler of sorts.

here is a demo for windows which I compiled to test out the cross-compiler environment I set up today! the content is the same as shown in the last test video.
http://www.mionet2.com/Meiro/demo2.tar.gz
chances are to run it you will need two more dlls, which I have uploaded here:
http://www.mionet2.com/Meiro/dlls.tar.gz
about the demo:
first song is Hiding Away by InvaderKED and the second is Kevin (Don't Give Up) from George & Jonathan - The Best Music
images were all made in Gimp. the content consists of a title screen, which will play a short cutscene if you idle on it. there is also an unfinished player selection screen. If you press enter at that screen the game will close.
known bugs: pressing back (q) on the player selection screen causes the game to crash.

I'm afraid that I haven't yet gotten a chance to try this, but I look forward to doing so soon! Since it's been almost a week since you posted that last update, how is the project going? Have you made more progress?

I haven't made much progress as the school year is very close to the end and I have a lot of projects to do. The next update will probably be in a few weeks unless I get some free time before then

No problem, perfectly understandable, and good for you for having your priorities in the correct order. I'll look forward to updates when you get to them.

test 5: file loading

In this video I demonstrate meiro's ability to load save file names from a data file. Had to audioswap it, as youtube disabled the music.
test 6: highlighted selection

test 7: delete

test 8: copy

test 9: move

test 10: player creation

as of today, meiro will now be in closed alpha
as promised I have a prealpha release for both windows and linux.
this build features the following:
1. working implementation of a finite state machine
2. encrypted data and map file reading
3. multiple states, including a map state
4. a player object
5. collision detection
6. music
7. fonts (due to the nature of SDL_ttf this is a little buggy on windows)
8. builds under automake for easy install on linux
9. save selection and creation

Controls are user defined. This package includes a program called meirokeyset.
The meirokeyset program allows you to set the controls to meiro. It uses
the arrow up and arrow down keys to select a control. press enter to enter the
setting mode. When in setting mode press the key you want the control to be
equal to and it will change it and return to the normal selection mode.

note that this program shares controls with meiro. If you change the up, down,
or start controls and reload meirokeyset it will use the new definitions.
If for some reason you are not able to use the default controls you can set
them manually in the file keyset.key, all the key values are listed in
keysym.txt.

The default controls are as follows:
A = z (select an option)
B = x (go back)
Start = enter (start the game, open menu in-game)
Home = esc (closes game)
Left = left (move left)
Right = right (move right)
Up = up (move up)
Down = down (move down)
Fullscreen = F11 (note that this can not be changed with meirokeyset)

===Downloads===
Windows: http://hat.mionet2.com/Meiro/meiro-prealpha.zip
Linux: http://hat.mionet2.com/Meiro/meiro-prealpha.tar.gz

Juju's bug (crashing after player creation screen) has been confirmed and fixed, the release files will not be updated so if you have this issue your best option will be to either wait for the next release or open up src/Player_creation/Player_creation.cpp and remove the line " delete[] m_filename;" (should be line 73) and then run make and make install again.