Shadowed Horizons / News: Recent posts

I'm the only active devloper currently so things have been slow to say the least. However, I'm going to resume working on sH as soon as this semester grinds to a halt, so keep an eye on the CVS and expect many new things in the future.

With spring break nearing, time to work on Shadowed Horizons is clearing up. We've got a lot of new ideas and basically an entirely new way at looking at the development process. We're not going to release publicly until we are satisfied with what we are calling the "foundation" classes of the system. Once these are done, Shadowed Horizons will be a useable library with some basic tools that you might find interesting. This release will be well documented, and have clear documentation on the vision of the project developers. There is no set timeline, but we will put it out as soon as we are ready. We're moving the active cvs module to acropolis-free within a few days, indicating our choice to remain compatible with Free Java implementations. I'll update the home page so that documentation and nightly builds of the CVS source are being generated automatically. CVS will be the preferred method to access the project until the next release. If things seem quiet, they aren't, so fear not.

We have completed our proposal for the Ruby Codefest grant, which means that we are now able to resume work on Shadowed Horizons. In the coming weeks, a number of documents will be released that outline the goals of a major overhaul of this project.

These changes include but are not limited to the removal of the JavaMBS source code, the goal to make the library JDK 1.1x compatible, and the revamp and cleanup of all existing systems. An event system will be documented and implemented in the near future as well.... read more

sH has been released for the third time this month. This time, we focused on cleaning up the code and improving the World system. There will be a short break in development for 3 weeks due to smtose.org's persuit of a CodeFest grant from RubyCentral. However, the next release of Shadowed Horizons will take place at the end of January. Hope you like it!

We've released a new version of the sH software.
This one includes a number of enhanced features such as the start of the world management system.

For the latest news on this release, head to:
http://www.smtose.org/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page

A lot has been done to make this project more accessible:

JavaDoc is now provided online and will be generated at every new CVS version.

The Documentation is located at
http://shadowed.sourceforge.net/javadoc/

CVS Snapshots are now being provided and generate 4 times a day.

http://shadowed.sourceforge.net/acropolis.tar.gz

The project now has a community wiki.
It is located at http://smtose.org/mediawiki/index.php/Shadowed_Horizons

A nightly tarball of the current CVS work will be available on the project homepage ( http://shadowed.sourceforge.net\) or directly available from
( http://shadowed.sourceforge.net/acropolis.tar.gz )

Hope this helps people stay current :)

Yay :)

Okay, it's almost 4am and my first college final exam is tomorrow, but here it is, complete with javadoc, sH.

If you want to take a look at the javadoc specification before you download, head to http://smtose.org/javadoc for the whole shebang.

I am *really* going to try and make the release schedule more regular. School is crazy. Hope you enjoy!

The first version of our Java edition of Shadowed Horizons, dubbed the acropolis version will be released on Thanksgiving day. It will most likely bear the title Horizons-Acropolis-20041125 and will include the MetaObject work, the modified Environment classes from JavaMBS, and a World class. Keep an eye on the CVS, especially on the days close to Thanksgiving to know what to expect!

The Shadowed Horizons Design Outlook, which explains where we plan to head with this project is available for download at http://smtose.org/sH.pdf or http://smtose.org/sH.sxd depending on which file type you prefer.

There will be a link to this on our project homepage soon.

We have added the acropolis module to CVS.
This will replace genesis as the active module, and will feature our new Java code.
As of now, all perl code has been deprecated, but will remain available for download as well as visible on the CVS for your convienence.
If anyone would like to take control of the work down in Shadowed Horizons Genesis, and form their own project with it, simply contact me (GBrow1@newhaven.edu) and I will be glad to hand it over.

Well, just when you thought I was dead, I have popped up with crazy news!

Shadowed Horizons is being rewritten AGAIN. However, the focus now is on a pure gaming SDK (still in the Adventure/RPG) genre.

It also is going to move to Java. Problems with finding a cross platform GUI among other issues with perl motivated the move.

We need help now more than ever. A project outlook will be released soon which will hopefully be very detailed and help define what we want to do with this project.

Sorry for the belated news, but a new release is out!
We made a graphical map viewer for the GUI, and split the panes on the GUI. We also squashed some autovivication bugs, and improved the parsing system to include shortcuts

We updated the website to be a bit cleaner and more operational.

We have re-aquired the Arachne project. We will be using it to support a game written on the Shadowed Horizons framework.

Any developers interested in creating a game that utilizes our Shadowed Horizons Library Classes or utilities, please contact greg@smtose.org

We have just released a new version of Shadowed Horizons which includes a 20 page outline of what we plan to do with the project (located at Docs/sH.pdf)
as well as some great changes, to include a World / Environment implementation.

The release scheduled for 01 AUG 04 is running a little late, but will be released within the next few days!

This release will feature the integration of the environment class into the Interface, among other things.

In light of the coding carnival, we released the latest CVS sources today.

For more info about the coding carnival event, check out
http://shadowed.sourceforge.net/carnival.html

The Coding Carnival is an idea I had to help get the game in shape for it's next release on Sunday, August 1st, 2004. The idea is we are looking for talented coders to register in one or more areas to do a substantial amount of work between now and 01 AUGUST. In return for your hard work, you will be added as a developer to shadowed horizons, and providing you intend to continue working on your area, you will be given creative control of it.... read more

Shadowed Horizons will now be releasing every other Sunday, making August 1st the first release on this new schedule! Be sure to grab the release when it comes up, and feel free to keep a watch on CVS, because we are now officially back under active development!

Horizons Genesis is the start of the rewrite, and the cornerstone for what will become Shadowed Horizons.

Finally, we have included some information on how to contribute to the project, and to help developers see what we have been doing, we have included an archive of ALL previous code in this release, to include the Arachne project work up until the Halloween release.

The new code in this release includes a simple Tk interface, which is optional.... read more

Unfortunately, The code base that was just submitted has literally NO documentation, even the code is incredibly sparse. However, for the adventurous, read through the newstuff/interface and get an idea of what the code behind the interface can do.

I also strongly recommend looking at the oldstuff, and manipulating the program through a number of commented out sections in the horizons.pl folder.

The code in oldstuff/ may or may not make it into the main release, but almost all of it will either be cleaned up or rewritten and fit into the game, especially the interactive editor for the dungeon crawler.... read more

A newer snapshot of our progress has been released. This includes the interactive dungeon crawling engine and some cleanup work on the modules.

Until we can produce a full working game (even if it's limited at first) we will periodically release a snapshot of whats going on in the project. These will be the Horizons-pre releases. You can of course check out the CVS for the most up to date code, and we hope to release the first version of this game as soon as possible.

If you have been following The Arachne Project, here on Sourceforge, you may or may not know that a number of changes were being made behind the scene. One of them was the renaming of the project! So here we are, under a new name, and with some extra help in the form of some new developers.
We hope you enjoy the game, and we will continue to strive to make this project fun for all of us.