Elderlore

Source: Atinar - The casual RPG game

I’ve release beta 4 of Mines of Elderlore. Final version is close, here is the changelog so far:

• [Bug] It is now really possible to hit monsters with axes and warhammers while in fuzzy mode.
• [Bug] In pygame mode, you can use ‘1′ to ‘4′ keys from the keypad to change your equipped weapon.
• [Bug] No more crashing to desktop when hitting a wrong key under moe-pygame.
• [Feature] In pygame mode, a menu is displayed to play multiple games without quitting each time.
• [Feature] In pygame mode, if ‘random’ dungeon selected in ‘moe.ini’, the same random dungeon will be proposed from game to game.
• [Feature] On floor level ‘n’, monsters can only progress to level ‘n + n-1′.

You can get the windows binary at:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/elderlore/moe_windows.1.0beta4.zip

And the source release at:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/elderlore/moe_source.1.0b4.zip

After unzipping it, you can launch the game with:
- moe-pygame.exe (graphical version) or moe-curses (ascii version) under Windows
- python moe-pygame.py (graphical version) or python moe-curses.py (ascii version) under a real Operating System 

There is a readme.txt file pretty complete about the game in the folder. Have fun!

Source: Unangband: The Unnamed Angband

Have a lot of fun and save often! The files are at

http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=331

The release notes follow.

Unangband 0.6.2 Beta Release 2: "Help of the shopkeepers"

This probably the last release with so big changes before 0.6.2 gold.
Among other things, options' names are changed, so some of your
old pref files may not work as expected (old option names are ignored).
This release is somewhat tested, but it may crash on you without
any warning just as well. Please backup your savefiles before
upgrading and save often.

Thanks to all involved: testers, reporters, contributors
and to the new, volunteer shopkeepers.

Changes from 0.6.2-beta to 0.6.2-beta2:

### Game Play ###

* made nexus temporary (via temporary stat bonuses)

* fixed #12919 (Flask and wand of Nexus do not (un)scramble stats)

* removed potions of Slow Poison

* removed instrument-specialized bards' icky hands penalty. It was irregular,
no other class gets icky hands for anything else than magic books use.
Instruments are underused anyway.

* made wands of Spark less common outside Hobbiton

* made resting for the night more expensive --- vampires are not liked

* made Ranger's cache more lucrative

* moved auto-eat to before the travel; tweaked messages and allowed food

* mega patch changing the options subsystem to the V setup and tweaking
the amal gamation of V and Un options is various ways

* Savefile version bumped; options are reset when loading older savefiles

* hack: options I abandoned in the mega-patch are ignored in prf files;
warnings displayed when old savefile imported

* some slight bag tweaks

* no level feeling in town and wilderness

* removed feeling delay; changed the scale of level feeling

* remove feeling boost from items

* random hacks to make level feeling better; it will improve further
when more rooms is generated in some cramped dungeons

* changed feeling messages to negative ones from S

* bumped the level of low-level monsters, except breeders that were already
bump ed; in this way we have less monsters of the same level in monster groups
and higher level feeling with the same danger

* made good and great objects more common to compensate for no level feelings
related to objects

* a hack to move Black willow deeper (paralyze spell); it's now at DL7,
it it's not enough, make paralyzation even shorter for shallow monsters

* made ecologies start at DL3 so that both Maggot's and Isengard start with
all the fun; only Bree has first 2 levels weird

* an experiment with limiting powerleveling for low-level characters;
this count ers higher amount of OoD monsters after my previous changes;
this does not affect XP from in-depth monsters; it almost does not affect
CL30 and older characters

* reverted my year old stupid change, which made the Three Trolls worth
lots of XP

* described Black willow in more detail to help players

* added a shopkeeper, changed the races of others, made the Maias even more
secret

* made also the evil shapechanger shopkeepers hide their race. Make them
and Maiar really outgoing to their kin. Added a (hidden) ******** shopowner

* done #13304 (don't repeat shop owners, if some are still left);
no savefile format change needed

* lots more shopkeepers; the shop-owners overhaul is beta2-ready now

* slight tweak to detect magic and wizard mode display

* a slight tweak to the message after defeating the guardian

* moved some rubbish potions deeper to make stat potions and other
useful potions more common while they are really useful

* the final few shops from the polls


### User Interface ###

* corrected description of Tree of Life spell and similar

* shortened Wonder description to fit the screen

* fuelling now auto-lights

* changed some flag descriptions to be understandable by newbies

* fixed zero rechange times and mangled descriptions of activable objects
(rods and artifacs were fine)

* added description of the resting services

* tweaked line splitting and fixed some quirks

* tweaked description of mana-adding objects

* changed filename of a tip kind to be prettier to display

* store help tips (their file names) permanently in the order of their display

* help tips knowledge screen

* removed spurious messages when refueling

* fixed broken description of charm spells, etc., as reported by Anne

* wording of the birth_beginner option

* moved Un options to the end of menus so that V people feel at home

* added 'R'eset options command to '='

* fixed layout of '=' and '~' menus

* removed some obscure and half-broken commands

* corrected some command help

* various little fixes from the forum

* committed the new options help file by Mysterious Anne

- Added lib/docs folder which will contain .rtf files with various
in-game and out of game documents. (May use .htm instead at a future date).

- Move explanation of monster.txt file to lib/docs/monster.rtf.

- Decide to consolidate all lib/edit comment files into a single modding.rtf
document.

- Updates to artifact.txt, ego_item.txt, flavor.txt, object.txt, p_race.txt,
p_class.txt, spell.txt to use newly formated artifact.txt file.

* added Pete Mac description of display_knowledge

* modified display_knowledge, according to Pete Mac lore,
so that dungeon_knowledge starts at the current location (not zone, yet)

* added reminders about lighting torches to two more help notes

* yet another dungeons dump tweak

* a bit more informative messages when taking the guardian stairs

* feet -> stories for towers

* made the 'fumble' message longer, as it happens rarely

* made stat potions a little bit more common; some cleanup


### Bug fixes ###

* fixed display of temporarily drained stats on the main screen

* corrected rod of CMW

* Rod of Haste Monsters did nothing

* Potion of Boldness no longer of Holy Water

* fixed a crash at cheat_lore option

* fixed inactive Rod of Slow Monsters

* fixed uninitialized variable that mangled object details display
(e.g. Phase Door distance)

* now saving store generation level, this now really fixes #10307
(restocking of the black market, thanks to kajmace's persistence)

* a fix to message saving; if your messages get garbled upon version change,
don't be alarmed --- it's a one-time annoyance

* fixed a lots of object generation quirks; not sure what I'm doing;
no more negative pval objects in shops; but I'd prefer that there remain
a few with sane maluses

* fixed too high guesses price of unknown gauged weapons

* fixed 13138 (Can't use staff in hand)

* remove spurious flags in spells such as the one invoked by eating mushroom of
Blindness

* cleaned up dungeon knowledge function thanks to pmac

* hacked a fix to #13235 (Shield of Sustain Wisdom didn't work)

- Fix for Bug #13250: Tree trunks can be opened (and bashed with the same descr)

- Only update monster experience and rarity if we are trying to output
a new monster txt file.

- Remove various monster.txt file hacks from init1.c so that the flags
in the monster.txt file are an accurate representation of the monster.

- Update the monster.txt file to improve formatting and so that all
monsters stats are correctly represented.

- Disable ALLOW_TEMPLATES_OUTPUT so we don't write output files every
time we start.

- Fix for bug Bug #11856 Wrong greyed out classes.

* enable the slow debugging of spell.txt, but only if ALLOW_TEMPLATES_OUTPUT
defined

* fixed #13205 (infinite torches from the wall)

* a fix for a bow with EXTRA_MIGHT (-8) in a shop

* fixed #13293 (No screen update after command: wear)

* made mushrooms of Mana blue again

* a quick hack to remove broken egos from quest reward shops

* fixed #13328 (Guaranteed good and great items still get negative pvals)

* unfortunately the quadratic pval costs make cheaper flags much more common,
because more expensive stuff can't get into the 19/20 of the expected power;
reduced this to 18/20, but still... for the same reason non-pval flags
are very rare --- they can't fine tune to 18/20 by pvals or, deep down,
get high enough by pvals (in magic items, randarts cope)

* removed/redone some of my tweaks from last month, when I still didn't
understand the code

* fixed a crash in homes knowledge screen

* fixed the Wall of Fire crash reported by Big Al

* fixed bag refusing mashrooms

* disabled the "bad maze" message unless cheat_xtra

* shop_owners apparently cannot have purse bigger than 30000;
fixed a related bug

* prevented sensing pval when already identified (then items would not stack)


### Build / Platform ###

* silenced mingw warnings

- Allow OS/X to compile again due to changes in use_sound introduced
in the Angband porting work. This will undoubtedly break the OS/X menus.

- Workaround for Bug #13249 ] Crash on exit with show_itemlist on Windows.

Source: Lukos Software Development

Well, we're within a stone's throw of 0.5 and the public beta. Been trying to get back the professional polish that went down the toilet when the tiles got added, and have largely succeeded. I think I'm pretty much done adding content for 0.5, and I've gotten all the bugs I know about nailed down. The real stumbling block for releasing 0.5 is now making some updates to the Lukos Software website to make it something vaguely approaching presentable. Once that's done...we're on the road to public release!

Source: PlayDeez Games's Weblog » Roguelike

As stated previously, I am porting a version of Rogue from 1984 originally written in C for DOS into C#.

Many things wind up easy to port.  Most #defines wind up as const or readonly fields.  Everything winds up a static field or method of a single Program class.

However, the THING “class” was the strangest bit to port thus far.

THING represents either a monster or an item.

It is a union.

Each of the two substructs in the union contain pointers to other THING variables.

So, its a linked list *AND* a union.

Now, I’m attempting to do a “faithful” port, which means it is my goal to get as close to the original as possible (within reason), so I’ve got a kind of ugly re-representation of THING in my code.  It works, anyway.

When porting old code like this, I don’t typically question these things too heavily.  I have to rely on the good faith of the developer twenty four years ago.  He had a perfectly good reason for choosing a union.  I just don’t see what it was.

Source: PlayDeez Games's Weblog » Roguelike

So what if I don’t have focus?

Along side other things, I am doing a port of Rogue into C#.  In particular, I’m doing a port of the Epyx version 1.48 for DOS.

The method of porting is very similar to the method I use to port old BASIC games into C#.  First, I move all of the code into C# file with every line commented.  Then I go and slowly replace the commented lines with equivalent C# code.

Rogue, however, is rather unlike the BASIC games I have ported.  In BASIC, there was typically only a single listing/file to port.  Rogue has dozens of C files.

So I decided to abuse the “partial class” feature of C#.  Each of the C files went into a CS file with the same name.  There is a namespace around the code, and the code exists within “partial class Program”.  Yes, I have a Program class that spans nearly 40 files.

I can hear the C# people cringe.

But it just goes to show… a language like C# doesn’t force anybody into object oriented programming.

Source: Mirage Developer Diary

I decided to come up with names for all of the possible schools of magic. This is just a first draft, but I think I did pretty good. As always, thoughts welcome!

Anger + Anger = Rage
Anger + Fear = Hatred
Anger + Sadness = Devastation
Anger + Love = Jealousy
Anger + Hope = Enmity
Anger + Joy = Malice
Fear + Fear = Terror
Fear + Sadness = Shame
Fear + Love = Anxiety
Fear + Hope = Distress
Fear + Joy = Hysteria
Sadness + Sadness = Anguish
Sadness + Love = Sorrow
Sadness + Hope = Pity
Sadness + Joy = Apathy
Love + Love = Adoration
Love + Hope = Lust
Love + Joy = Ecstacy
Hope + Hope = Desire
Hope + Joy = Bliss
Joy + Joy = Rapture

Source: PlayDeez Games's Weblog » Roguelike

So, the new XNA Diamond Maze is checked into SVN, but now entering tempermanent hold status.

The word tempermanent is one of my pet words, like complexibility. In the case of tempermanent, it means “something that is meant to be ‘temporary’ but will in all likelihood become ‘permanent’”, which is kind of like income tax and the tolls on the freeway in Chicago.

But! The code is there if I should ever want to pick it back up.

Speaking of backing up, I am still missing a crucial step in my backup scheme. Yes, I have a repository on my external HD, and I keep my stuff checked in. If my computer takes a dive, and the external HD doesn’t I’m good. If the external HD takes a dive, and my computer is fine, I’ve got the local copy I can revert to, and make a new repo on a new external HD.

But! If both fail, then what?

Source: Lukos Software Development

Alas, I've been neglecting this space...been busy enough that I'm lucky to have time to develop, let alone to write about development.

Anyways. Big news in MageGuild-land. Despite my better judgement, I've implemented bitmap tiles. There are still some kinks to iron out. It required a near-rewrite of my display library, which has created some unexpected fallout, such as the message window being much slower, now. There are some pretty serious gaps in the Gervais tileset as pertains to my purposes, which I've already started addressing, but I'm not really in the mood to spend lots of time building/fixing tiles. This change has required me to remove some of MG's dynamic symbol and color changes, which I'm not really OK with; I've got some ideas on how to resolve it, but that's another kettle of fish.

I'm also having some issues determining the proper way to translate some of MG's visual quirks to tiles. For example, in non-tiles MG, it colors the lines of effect when you go to aim something in red. Which is fine. When that happens with tiles on, it becomes either eye-searing or simply confusing, depending on how bright I make the red. But, that'll get fixed.

I'm actually glad that this is taking longer than I'd planned, as I'm not ready to release 0.5 to the public yet, beyond the feature list. Right now, I just don't have time to keep my finger on the pulse of the response. Hopefully, more time will coincide with 0.5 being done technically, and we'll get a release.

Source: Mirage Developer Diary

Long time no post! I've been pretty busy lately. I'm currently taking care of a bunch of things in preparation for my upcoming vacation. Australia here I come! I'm pretty excited, but there has been a lot that I've needed to wrap up around here before I can leave with an empty head.

I've still been thinking a lot about Mirage, and I've come up with a loose model for my magic system. I wanted to have a unique magic system that would still be familiar to those used to normal magic systems. What I decided on was to model my magic system against emotions. The magic users in the game would have to embrace a type of emotion to be able to use particular spells. Embracing different emotions could also affect your character, through status effects or stat modifications. A magic user could embrace up to two types of emotions at a time. The more someone embraces a particular emotion the better they get at using it. Higher proficiencies in a particular emotion would unlock new spells and either decrease or increase the way in which it effects them. High proficiencies in multiple schools would unlock spells that could only be reached by a mixture of emotions.

I decided on six basic emotions. They are Anger, Fear, Sadness, Love, Hope, and Joy. They create a wheel of emotions, with natural opposites. The mixed emotions would also have names as well. So if you mixed Anger with Sadness you would get Betrayal. Betrayal spells would only be active once you've reached significant proficiency in both Anger and Sadness schools. You would also be required to embrace both emotions. Certainly spells in these mixed schools would be more powerful than their base emotions.

Once you've reached a particular level in a particular emotion it's name might reflect that. Anger would become Rage, Fear would become Terror, and so on. I'm not sure if this particular twist would be too complicated or not. It might end up being confusing.

I mentioned that embracing emotions would effect your character in some way. If a player chose to embrace Anger, they might gradually lose hit points. If a player chose to embrace Love they might gradually gain hit points. Embracing both emotions would counteract each others effects, but the spells coming out of the mixture between Anger and Love might not be as strong as those coming from other emotional schools.

I designed the system in mind so that there would be benefits and losses to each emotion. It was also designed for a great amount of variety in the types of spells available to the player. The player would also have to make a decision on what emotions they are going to focus on, and this decision could impact them through the entire game. I'm curious to see what other people's thoughts on this type of magic system are. As always comments, suggestions, and improvements are always welcome!