Just got over it in my previous post: There is an IRC channel for Grail on Freenode now, its called #grail (creative, eh?). Feel free to join there for any questions/suggestions regarding grail or any other stuff related to me or this site.

Hey guys. I'm glad to announce that I finished my diploma thesis a few weeks ago and am now working at the TU Braunschweig as PhD student.

As I'm not sure yet how the regulations regarding publication are, I will not publish my thesis here yet (probably its not of much interest to any usual leetless reader anyways).

There are also some changes in the VIM Section: I removed lots of the older themes in order to focus on the real good ones. Also I'm proud to present a new theme, called PhD, hopefully its useful to someone.

Another thing, which I neglected to post for months now is that the Giga Mansion 2 adventure game project is dead. They used the Indiana engine (the predecessor of Grail) which I developed in parallel to the game. At first I wanted to wait until they announce the end of the project themselves which seemingly never happened. Nevertheless it had been fun working with these guys and really pushed the adventure game engine stuff forwards a lot.

And while I'm at it: Because of the diploma thesis there was some pause, but I managed to include OpenGL into Grail, which makes it run about 10 times faster (at least on my machine). Check out the OpenGL Branch if you want to try it. If during compiling there is no OpenGL found, the engine will be compiled with plain old SDL, so this can not come to anyones disadvantage.

Currently data is being pushed to GitHub. I plan to let this run in parallel to the current self-hosted solution for a while and if it is good I'll shot down the self hosted git repository.

Reasons for github in favor of hosting the repository myself:

• Wider audience
• Integrated issue tracking system
• My git web CSS is broken and I'm too lazy to fix it ;)

Check it out at The grail github repository.

Oh by the way, you may have noticed the latest commit is already a few days ago. That's because I'm currently very busy with university stuff. But don't you be afraid, I have no intent to give up this project. If you want to contribute though, it will probably advance somewhat faster :)

Whats new:

• Parallax scrolling of background/foreground layers
• Animations don't require annoying to produce "stripe" format anymore, additionaly theres a script now that extracts layers from an xcf (Gimp format) file into a directory so its useable by grail.

Edit: I substituted the .png with a .jpg so the page load times should be lots less annoying.

Luabind is so cool. Wrapping really is the easy part now, so I finally focus on implementing stuff again. The main character already can walk around on the screen, now I'm concentrating on a user interface and then on interactions with other scene actors.

Thats sounds like the biggest part but keep in mind, theres still a lot to do:

• User interface already is a big topic (buttons, inventory display, etc...)
• Loading/Saving (will hopefully be easy due to boosts serialization lib)
• Scene/walkpath stuff (the "algorithmic" corner yay)
• Loading scenes directly from atlantis files
• Dialogs (talking)
• Sound/Music/Voice output
• From time to time try to get the stuff to compile & run under windows ;)