As of January 31st eager players on Windows can now take part in the open beta for Barony: Cursed Edition. This version of the game includes COMPLETELY OVERHAULED ART and EXCITING NEW FEATURES such as Steam Lobby support!
To activate the beta build, follow these simple instructions:
Go to your Steam Library and locate Barony
Right-click and select Properties
Go to the BETA tab
Click the dropdown and select the Beta build
We had hoped to do the full release in January, but as is often the case with game development, things take a bit longer than expected. But more importantly, we want to make sure the new features are well tested before we subject all players to them. So if you'd like to give it a try, we would love it if you could report any problems you discover to our Steam Community Discussions board.
We have very little work left before we're ready for the full release of the updated game. In addition to fixing any surprise bugs, we're also creating a new and exciting trailer to help spread the Barony vision to potential players.
For your viewing pleasure, here are screenshots of the Cursed Edition in action that we've prepared for our Steam store page:
Thanks for your patience and attention, adventurers! Happy lich-hunting!
November Status Update
Hello everyone,
It's been a while. Perhaps too long. But we have been hard at work! So here's what's up.
Steamworks Multiplayer Integration Programming-wise, this has easily dominated our attention for the past two months. As it turned out, Steamworks is a surprisingly poorly documented API, and to make matters worse, it's written in C++, with no official bindings for C (which the entirety of Barony was written in). That means, before we could even begin using its networking features, we had to decipher and wrap every tiny function we needed (and lots, it turns out, that we didn't need) into C equivalents. We then had to integrate these wrapped functions into Barony, and smack the resulting Frankenstein of a program with a debugger until it worked. Needless to say, the process was very arduous. But, it has yielded great results.
Gone are the days that you must memorize IP addresses and port numbers to connect. Gone are the days that you must manually configure your firewall and forward your ports. Starting with the next update (which I can now say with confidence, is coming SOON) creating and joining lobbies is as quick and painless as it should've always been.
So why isn't it in your hands already?
Well, we literally just got the primary features working all nice and reliably today, so it's missing a lot of polish and expected features, like filters, private/friends-only lobbies, names, and other dull stuff. On top of that, we're still deep in the middle of a couple other important projects, like...
The Art Update Since September, the mega-art-update thingy has been pushing along steady as usual. With the texture art completed, Josiah (aka mistersneak) has gone on to redo tons of decorative models, all of the item models, all of the human models, many more creature models, and more models, models, models, and models. He's even begun to produce HD variants of all the weapon models in the game to be viewed when a player holds said weapons in first person. Snazzy.
Which brings us to our last point...
DLC? Sequels? BRAND NEW GAMES? In a previous update, we mentioned that we were planning new DLC for Barony that would add some new areas to the game, as well as various other gameplay goodies. Nonetheless, the work we've had on our plate with this next big update has kept our small team very busy for the past couple months, so we haven't been able to spend much time developing these ideas yet. However, I will say that we are not done with Barony yet: in fact, our ideas for new content have gotten only bigger since we last talked about it. To answer a few specific questions publicly:
1. Rather than DLC, we are now pursuing the idea of creating a full-blown sequel.
2. Said sequel would involve a significantly bigger, more interconnected world. A fully 3D environment would replace the flat dungeon floor plans of the past.
3. It would contain all of Barony's primary gameplay elements, such as: a proper RPG system, persistent dungeon environments, full cooperative multiplayer, and roguelike elements.
4. Rather than a singular goal with a linear path to victory, there would be several goals, sidequests, and branching paths.
That is all for now. Here in the states I wish everyone a happy thanksgiving, and to everyone else: cheers!
September Status Report!
Hello Barony fans!
I'd like to give you a taste of what's in the works.
Development Update Right now our biggest priority is the integration of Steam multiplayer features. There's a lot of fun to be had with Barony's multiplayer features as-is, but we (maybe as much as you!) would love a more streamlined multiplayer experience. Our update work should make it easier and more fun than ever to play Barony co-operatively with your friends.
Due to the challenge of integrating the Steam systems into the game, we can't say exactly when this update will be coming down the pipe. The documentation isn't the best and our homecooked engine isn't exactly standard when it comes to this kind of integration! But trust that we feel strongly about these features and are working tirelessly to upgrade the game for you.
In addition to planning and groundwork on a future content update, we are always on the lookout for occasional bugs you guys are experiencing, and bugfixes are in the works as well.
Art Update The art overhaul is making great progress. If you frequent the forums you may already know that we've posted several screenshots of several tilesets using overhauled textures here.
We've completed the first pass on all of the level art. Yay!
But before we ship this update do you, we're taking more steps to add variety to tilesets, which means we have a few more textures to add to the game, and that we need to update all the randomizable level pieces so that these textures actually show up in the game in a way that makes it all look better.
Also, thanks to developer BlackFlux, the voxel art update is well underway. A greatly streamlined voxel art pipeline has made creating new, improved voxel modes easier than ever. The side benefit of this is that modders will also have a much easier time modding Barony!
I encourage you to check out VoxelShop here.
Replacing a lot of the voxel art is the second step in the overhaul and we're already well on our way through it.
Turning Wheel Update We're currently in the middle of a locational transition (AKA moving!). The result is that a few of our team members will be working much more closely, facilitating collaboration and likely faster patch development process in the future.
Thanks for your support and dedication! Stay tuned, more is coming on the horizon.
- Josiah
1.0.6 Patch Notes
Hi everyone! Sorry it ended up taking longer to get this update out. As I said in an earlier announcement I wanted to have it out two days ago, but we ended up spending the rest of the day testing it instead, and that combined with obligations at my real life job prevented me from posting the update until today. Anyway... here is your changelog:
magicstaffs significantly more expensive, rarer, burn out easier
fixed linking libsteam_api.so in non-steam linux builds
added option for random character gen
sending/receiving chat messages now makes audible ping sound
window background art no longer fixed to 16x16
voxel models now use their own internal palettes ingame rather than the default
minor changes to map generator
fixed backspace not working correctly on macs
fixed fullscreen bug on macs
fixed headstones not appearing in singleplayer in the haunted castle
fixed performance penalty for playing with FOV other than 50
fixed inappropriate ray distribution in raycasting algorithm
FOV in character boxes is now locked to 50
Once again, this is a pretty minor update feature-wise, as 90% of our programming effort was spent fixing that cross-platform multiplayer issue at the top of the list. BUT as mentioned in our last collection of patch notes, we do still have some cool things in the works, and you should all get a good taste of that Soon.
Thanks for your patience, we look forward to seeing you all some more in the future. DRM-free players can expect to get this update just as soon as we can update the game files in your respective systems (Humble, Desura, etc.)
Until next time,
Sheridan
Fixed Cross-platform Multiplayer
Hey everyone!
After weeks of struggle, I can finally come bearing good news for those people who've experienced game breaking bugs when playing multiplayer across different platforms. Simply put, as of today, we've finally managed to find and fix the issue for good!
The source of the problem turned out to be extremely well hidden and rather technical, but for those of you who understand programming, the issue was that on different platforms, the game would compile with slightly different definitions for the common min/max C macros that are used everywhere in the code. Under almost every circumstance, the difference was completely unnoticeable, but in the map generation code this tiny inscrutable difference was enough to throw the RNG out of sync between the server and the clients at a critical point, which messed up the final part of the map gen process: placing entities like doors, monsters, items, traps, decorations, and so forth.
It took us WEEKS to figure out first that this tiny tiny detail was screwing everything over and we wasted a lot of time trying crazy things like rewriting the RNG a few times and searching for problems caused by differences in bitdepth from host to client, but right now we're just happy to have it fixed. We're sorry too that this issue was even in the release version of the game in the first place -- it seems it only manifested itself AFTER we did all of our cross-platform multiplayer tests, where an ever-so-slightly different map generator didn't exhibit this problem.
Anyway... as I mentioned, a patch including this fix is scheduled to go out later today. Thanks to all of you who've waited this long for your patience, none of it has gone unnoticed. Believe me.
Until next time!
Sheridan
Barony Historic Alpha - 7 months
Hello everyone,
Today I was digging through some old files and stumbled across an extremely early alpha of Barony dated from when the game was only 7 months into development. For historic interests I thought you'd all be interested in seeing what the game looked like at that stage of development, so here is a first ever public link to that alpha version of the game:
An original software renderer! No fancy openGL stuff involved.
We didn't have our own music yet... Chris had composed a few tracks, but none of them fit what we were going for so we just stole tracks from Ultima Underworld instead.
The game's backstory changed a few times during development... the one we ended up with in the end was ultimately the first one we came up with, however.
The only working enemy in the game is the rat.
Morrowind style combat (ie hit chance) was a big thing. I had been playing a lot of Morrowind at the time and so I had come to think it might be a fun idea to toy around with. It didn't get tossed out until about two weeks from our Steam release.
No swimming
No removing torches from walls
A lot of objects are unusable
Even at this stage, multiplayer had been working for months (though shakily and inefficiently)
Most of the level design for the mines was already done (though it would be refined in minor ways many times over the following months)
Art spreadsheet, audio spreadsheet, and two versions of the game's design document! These documents were written by me personally with minor edits from other team members. They were used to help coordinate development early in the project but for the most part they fell out of use once everyone on the team got a feel for what the project was and where it was headed.
Though you can't see it in this download, the game was cross-platform from the beginning and we were developing and building binaries for both Windows and at least two flavors of Linux.
We had a few more monsters planned for the game than what ended up in the final version. Perhaps these monsters will make a return in a future update.
Perhaps if you go digging you will find more interesting things that I have missed. It's been a long time since I've looked at any of this old stuff, so I hope you guys have fun looking at the game as it was in a rather primordial state.
