Free/Libre Action Roleplaying Engine
We have relocated the engine and game Git repositories to a separate Github organization. They can be found at:
To those of you who regularly pull from these repositories, be sure to update you remotes:
### These assume that "origin" is pointing to the "clintbellanger" repos # flare-engine git remote set-url origin https://github.com/flareteam/flare-engine.git # flare-game git remote set-url origin https://github.com/flareteam/flare-game.git
Flare 1.08 is now available for download. This is a small release to patch up a few bugs in 1.07.
The most critical bug from 1.07 was one that caused players to lose unlocked passive powers upon death. In rare cases, this may have resulted in permanently losing power skill points. If you have experienced this, and 1.08 does not fix it, you can try to fix it with the developer console. In the console, enter exec respec=powers to reset your power skill point allocation.
Windows
LinuxEngine fixes:
Translation updates:
Flare 1.07 is now available for download. This release contains several bug fixes, some quality-of-life improvements, new translations, and a few new features.
New to 1.07 is the addition of items that can grant bonuses to the player’s unlocked powers. In the above screen shot, you can see that Ardwen’s Gloves raise the level of the passive Stone Wall ability. The stat and level requirements for the upgraded power is waived. In other words, a level 2 player with Stone Wall 1 will be able to use Stone Wall 2 despite the latter requiring a player level of 3. A handful of the unique items in the Empyrean Campaign have been updated to make use of these new bonuses, so be sure to keep an eye out for them.
We’ve improved the appearance of item icons. The engine now supports image overlays based on item quality. This makes it much easier for players to find the good loot in their inventory at a glance. The quantity text on item icons has also been improved to be easier to read.
Players can now move backwards and forwards through cutscenes with either the buttons at the top of the screen or the left/right arrow keys. In addition, the movie-style scrolling cutscenes and now be scrolled up and down with the respective arrow keys. The Hyperspace map in the Empyrean Campaign has also been updated with a book stand that provides access to unlocked cutscenes for re-watching.
Players no longer need to keep track of which quests they’ve already done. Completed quests are now listed in the Quest Log underneath the list of active quests.
The previously silent Cursed Graves have been given some new sound effects. Also, a new sound effect will now play when the player tries to use a power, but lacks the required MP.
Bulgarian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Vietnamese have been added as new language options. Several other languages have received updates as well (see the full changelog below). There are unfortunately still some languages which are severely lacking in translation completeness. Those wishing to help can check out the engine and game on Transifex.
Windows LinuxFlare 1.06 is now available for download. This update contains some fixes for the Torture Chambers and brings a few improvements to the Android port.
There were two issues that had been reported with this map. The first being that it was possible to attack the imprisoned enemies without consequence while the barriers were still active. I wanted to fix this without changing the existing hero attacks, so I ended up adding the ability to make groups of enemies invincible based on campaign status. Modders that are interested in this new feature should refer to enemygroup.invincible_requires_status and enemygroup.invincible_requires_not_status in the Attribute Reference.
The second issue was a bug with the “Warden’s Notes” quest in this map. The end of the quest contains a switch to unlock the chambers and a teleporter to return to the main area. Previously, it was possible for players to skip the switch and teleport back to the main area. This left players with no way to unlock the barriers. This has been fixed by requiring the player to use the switch before the teleporter becomes active. For players that had already encountered the bug, the quest should reset the next time you visit the Torture Chambers.
The existing controls for the Android port had behaved like a desktop user with “Move hero using mouse” enabled. When using such a control scheme, the mouse cursor is generally near the hero in the center of the screen. This is acceptable for desktop users because the cursor is just a small arrow. On mobile, however, this cursor is replaced by the player’s finger. This results in the action being completely blocked, and thus a poor play experience. To remedy this, I’ve added a virtual joypad to the Android port. On the left is a virtual d-pad for movement. On the right are two buttons which correspond to the two primary attacks.
Another “flaw” on mobile is vastly higher DPI screens than most desktop systems. For reference, my desktop is around 92 DPI, whereas my phone is 300 DPI! So running Flare on my phone’s 1280×720 display resulted in the game running at the higher virtual resolution of 600p. This led to me adding a virtual_dpi setting, which lets modders define a target DPI for their game. I’ve set the fantasycore mod’s target DPI to my desktop’s setting, so the game will now use the lower 480p resolution on mobile. This results in everything being bigger and much easier to interact with. While disabled on desktop by default, I’ve also made it possible to enable DPI scaling in the Video options.
Windows LinuxFlare 1.05 is now available for download. It includes many new features, a few of which I will now highlight:
The developer console has been made more compact and the old developer HUD has been removed. The new HUD displays the radius of hazards as well as the origin points of entities. The text output of position information is gone, as it would often be covered by the developer console. Replacing it is a tile cursor. Right clicking on a tile will display information about the mouse cursor position, the tile itself, and any entities that inhabit the tile. Holding right click will also calculate the distance from the player’s position.
We’ve had a long standing issue with the way some tiles were being drawn in relation to other objects on the map. Tiles that are part of larger objects are split in a way that would make them improperly overlap entities. This has been fixed for the majority of cases, but at the expense of some less optimized rendering code. So if you experience performance issues after updating to 1.05, please report them.
Previously, Flare tileset definitions could only contain a single image file. This made it difficult for modders to expand on existing tilesets. It also made it impossible for old graphics cards to use the hardware renderer in combination with very large tilesets. Now, modders can freely add new images to tileset definitions, eliminating those two issues.
Windows LinuxFlare 1.04 is now available for download. It contains a few bug fixes that were overlooked in 1.03.
Windows LinuxFlare 1.03 is now available for download. Newly implemented is the ability to trigger events from books (demo below). Flare 1.03 also includes a handful of bug fixes, as well as several translation updates. Many of the translation updates are from new volunteers that joined the Transifex team.
Windows LinuxIf you’ve been following closely, you saw that I closed the Flare projects on Transifex yesterday. I cited Transifex as being unsuitable for our workflow. I’ve since been convinced to re-open the project pages and decided shift our workflow slightly to better adhere to the Transifex way of doing things.
For those completely unaware of our presence on Transifex to begin with, you can find both the engine and game projects on there. Translators interested in helping make Flare better in your language can join the flare-engine team. 14 of our 20 translated languages are without an assigned translator, so there are many places you can help.
And we will still be supporting our existing methods of submitting translations. So if you would rather submit your work as a Github pull request or send it via e-mail, feel free to do so.
Flare 1.02 is now available for download and fixes a few crashes along with some language updates.
Windows LinuxFlare 1.01 is now available for download! It includes many bug & crash fixes, as well as a few game play changes based on player feedback.
Windows Linux
Mac OS