Survivors of Ragnarök - Alpha Cubed news

It's about that time again. That time every other week when Garrett and myself are up until the late hours doing last minute fixes, polishing everything up, and getting things together that need to be done. Oh yes its time for our bi-weekly updates, and all the frills and fluff that you've come to expect from a French Rice Games news post.

Alpha 3 was a substantial update from Alpha 2. While our dwarf scouts could not get all 9,001 chickens back for Alpha 3 they did however managed to snag 7 for this release. In fact it would probably be easier for you to chick out the code monkey's log on this one. (Okay we are done with the bad chicken puns)

Code Monkey Log

• Chickens!
• Zombies?
• Menu added
• Loading screen added
• Survival mode
• Ancient randomly generated terrain code active (should be fun updating this bit of code as development progresses)
• Increased size of create mode

Garrett himself wanted to address a few things directly to the community as well.

I've been getting questions here and there from a lot of people wanting to know what I use to develop SoR and I'll have you know it's no big secret. So to address peoples questions and also to feel more involved with our news posts, I thought I would share some knowledge and provide a little insight to the fabulous world of a programmer. After all, I'm making this game for the fans, and sharing things like this is what makes development so much fun. Open development is my philosophy and I hope I can make these small articles a common thing in the future.

I use the latest version of Netbeans(it auto-updates for her pleasure) as my IDE. I did path-finding using my own varient on A* search, a varient on Dijkstra's algorithm. I use dreamweaver for the websites(even though I write them by hand, it's basically an expensive syntax-highlighter).

Genel and I both use Photoshop for 2d(I mainly use it when he forgot to resize something).

Other then that I'm really coding everything with the default Java libraries(Swing/SWT for graphics). It has been pretty difficult getting everything set up at first, but now we have a really steady work-flow for animations, effects, etc.
To go into more detail about path-finding, my method was sort of a strange variant of A* search, which is a varient of Dijkstra's algorithm. I think (and keep in mind I only have 'played' dwarf fortress) Toady (I think that's the guy who codes DF) uses the Greedy Best-First-Search, another variant on Dijkstra's algorithm that is faster, but doesn't give you the shortest path. (you ever notice you're dwarfs walking along walls?) I think that was very necessary for his game seeing as it was path-finding in three dimensions.

I hope you all enjoy the update!

-Garrett Colas

With that being said I assume you guys wanted the download link a while back in this news post...

SURVIVORS OF RAGNARÖK - ALPHA 3

As always we have a new episode of Pixel Pushers that comes along with our bi-weekly updates. We discuss the alpha 3 and a little indie game called Sarah's Run. Be sure to check it out.

Now if only iTunes would update their database....

That's all the news and updates we can squeeze out for you this week. If you haven't already don't forget to sign up on our forums and participate in daily discussion with us. We love hearing your feedback and want to continue to support you guys as much as you are supporting us. Remember you can get early access to the alpha builds just by signing up.

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