Elderlore

Here are some news about my last developments.

Things are not progressing very fast, I would like to release version 1.0 of Mines of Elderlore before going on with Lands of Elderlore, and real life didn’t left me a lot of spare time and energy.

Anyway I’ve found a nasty bug that was roaming around from the beginning in MoE, and now keymovies are efficient at last. What are keymovies? Only records of previous play in the form of keypressed and random seeds that can be played back.

I’ve also coded some PHP and now high scores can be pushed to some website. This feature will be in the 1.0 release; I hope I’ll publish it soon! I think I should try to release soon and often, but that’s easier to say than to do.

Concerning this website, I’ve uploaded some screenshots in several image galeries; I’m still having a hard time mastering Drupal, but I progress slowly in my knowledge of this CMS.

Finally, I’ve migrated my laptop to Hardy Heron, the last Ubuntu release that was published some days ago. Most of the migration process consisted in backing up my data; once this backup done, it only took about an hour to install the new system, install the useful packages (Eclipse, pydev, pygame, numeric-ext, ocempgui, psyco), and find my usual development environment. This heron is very hardy indeed!

Source: Lukos Software Development

I've released a v0.6.1, a quick patch for the nasty little crash bugs that snuck into v0.6. Made the save/load code a bit more stable in general, and fixed the weird little bug that I introduced into the AI code when I optimized it. (A weird little bug that, as far as I can tell, is responsible for the nearly-random crashes that have been reported.)

A fair bit of the new content stuff for 0.7 was already in place; some of it I left, some of it I hid or removed (due to incompleteness, not due to sheer bloody-mindedness, I assure you. :) ). There's a special kind of irony to having to remove content in order to release. If I had a proper SCM system in place, I could have simply fixed the bugs in the v0.6 branch, released a v0.6.1 off of that, and then integrated the bug fixes back into the development trunk. It's what I would have done at work, in fact. Getting an SCM set up for my personal projects is certainly something to think about, I'm just unsure if the (hopefully rare) occasions where it would be handy are worth the hassle the rest of the time.

Source: Unangband: The Unnamed Angband

This release is a development check point which allows you to play a "relatively" bug free version of Unangband, while we significantly hack on the source to add extra features that may potentially destabilize further releases.

Please save often.

This release would not be possible without my collaborator Mikolaj and contributions from Big Al, Anne and the other members of the angband.oook.cz forums.

You can download the source from http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangband/unangband-062-gold-src.zip

You can download a precompiled Windows executable from http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangband/unangband-062-gold-win.zip

Macintosh and Linux compiled versions to follow shortly.


Unangband 0.6.2 Gold "As Is" aka "The Unwarranted Release"

### Game Play ###

- Show basic resists as numbers (similar to pvals) to indicate
that basic resists are cumulative.

- Add Invisibility spell and potion of Invisibility.

- Make restoring a stat cure temporary stat loss.

* made !oBloating worth some gp so that shops stock it

* filled up runes for some egos

* toned down some artifact stat boosts to make it harder for thorgot next time :)

* added nutritious potions to 2 shops

- Rework low-level bard spellbooks to include another book
(Sympathies) which fits between Chords and Harmonies, as well as
remove archery related spells and movve throwing/melee related
spells so that they are available earlier. (Suggested by Arralen).

* added lights to the Elrond's house

- Further monster tidy ups including moving Tangleweed and golems
deeper.

- Try to make golems more interesting.

- Give some monsters hit to dispel attacks.

- Uncontrolled objects are now mastered over time, as opposed to
being uncursed. This should make them more interesting, as well as
rings of teleportion etc. less boring.

- Allow ego items to have activations. This means Seven League boots
should correctly randomly teleport again.

- Added boots of dancing.

- Try to make mouse shape a little more useful, cheetah shape a
little less like boots of speed. Shapes are still a bit hackish in
general.

- Player construction of pit traps now requires a digger and spikes,
making them not exploitable.

* make debug-mode cure-all get rid of diseases, petrification, etc.

- You can't over-exert yourself if you cast a spell that costs no
mana (eg. concentration).

* less XP for Beorn

### User Interface ###

- Allow browsing of shrines, magic circles.

- Add a warning when you can't go back to where you came from.

- The big monster color commit. Monsters should now have a unique
colour / letter combination unless it is for a good reason.

* YAT to char dump (flags move foremost, as in V)

* YAT to dungeon dump

* YAT (yet another tweak) to visited dungeons list

- First pass at 256 color implementation.

- The cause of death is now noted in the character dump.


### Bug fixes ###

- Remove pvals from wands that accidentally had them.

- Fix mislearning about HURT_LITE when actually BRAND_LITE.

- Fix for bug Bug #13254 No death from bad mushrooms even if
identified.

- Fix for Bug #13443 No pval displayed in object name for REGEN_MANA,
etc.

- Improve correctness of price guessing algorithm, to try to rectify
various bugs with pricing.

- Fix for Bug #13588 Casting Mana Pool in deep water yields Potion of
Poison.

- Fix for Bug #13589 One charge missing from selling wands message.

- Fix for Bug #13594 Bridge of stone on lava, spells no longer
pass over.

- Fix for bug Bug #13599 Globe of Invulnerability is broken.

* probably fixed #13624 (Home Knowledge screen ('~6') crashes game)

- Remove center block of Minas Morgul, Tirith and Dol Guldur so that
you don't get stuck in stone when you come out the bottom.

- Partially fix #013424 (remember locations of the windows at game startup on OS X)

* got rid of "Lev 0" in ~7

* fixed broken color_table in main-x11.c

* fixed crash when getting gold stolen

- Add back in entry format hints to the lib/edit files where they
were removed. This makes it easier to quickly refer to, or at least
guess, the entry meanings.

- Fix for Bug #13582 "A (offscreen) fails to teleport you away."

- Slight tweak to source_birth death message.

- Improve death messages and move generation of death messages to
point where player is actually killed.

- Fix cause of death issues with activating ego items.

- Fix for Bug #12899 disarming player traps should not give XP.

- Fix bad logic that caused wands and staves to be fully IDed when
discovering its flavour for the first time. Closes #13456.

- Fix several problems that meant resting until dusk/dawn didn't
work or wasn't charged for in stores.

- Monsters that left a body which was hidden in terrain did not
redraw the 'visible monsters' term window.

- Make mushrooms of poison actually poison you, and fix up a couple
of (currently unused) note formats.

* fixed services in Heavy Armoury

* fixed a pink mushroom

* fixed store services broken by the blows

- Fix bug that might have caused .raw file initialisation problems.

* a couple of text fixes from the forum

* REGEN_MANA from objects now affects SP not HP

* REGEN_MANA, etc. are displayed with 'I' also for objects that
don't modify stats

* fixed the inability to fill things from fountains

* temporary Big Al fix to #13409 (Disturb detect problems)

* tweaked the shopkeepers

- Start work on modding.rtf documentation.

* added WOR to temples, slight price tweaks

- Fix for Bug #13256: Throw or fire in place of service "Recharge
Item II"

- Part of ongoing fixes for Bug #12885: Feature request: let
Lanterns, etc. set fire

- Fix for Bug #13347 Allow access to documentation at level up
screen

- Fix for Bug #13255: "Dise" does not disappear

- Fix for Bug #12710: Cumulative Disease broken

* fixed Mighty Blow at empty spave weirdness

### Build / Platform ###

- Add modding.rtf and .txt which provide information about modding
Unangband and the various lib/edit files.

- Player spell damage scaling now controlled from within spell.txt.

- Move damage specification and number of spell blows from blows.txt into spell.txt.

- Initial blows.txt parsing code and data structures.

* Makefile.std from V; move config.example to config to get nice
compilation caching and debug binary

* added docs/ to build_win.sh

Source: Lempface

Really not happy at all with this section. It works, and as far as I can tell it works well but I know its just crowded and ugly. Any suggestions would be welcomed!

Source: Lempface

Alright so our little '@' moves around the screen now and he doesn't run through walls or off the map now. I think this still needs some work though, I'm not 100% satisfied with the flow of the code. Post any comments please :)

Source: Lempface

So I'm starting slowly getting some basics out of the way. Adding one thing at a time and approaching things in a finish this part in one sitting type way. I got two of those done today! Next projects are, loading a map from a file, collision detections and a more polished input method/game loop. Rather than have the player.move() function control the loop I'm going to make an input function and have it pass the keypress to the move function. That way I don't need to pass the window to the move function as all it needs to act on is the coordinates of the player. Not much going on this weekend so hopefully we'll have a bunch of progress.

Source: Lukos Software Development

So, I think I've decided what the plan is, for the rest of MG releases through v1.0. v0.7 is going to consist of a few fixes and modifications, and a number of New Things. In fact, anything that I want to go into v1.0 is going into v0.7. There will be no new content after v0.7; only bug-fixes, UI changes, balance tweaks, etc. Depending on how badly v0.7 is bugged/unbalanced, there will either be a v0.8 or we'll go straight to v1.0.

The issue now becomes, what new features are going into v0.7, and what's going to wait until v1.X?

I'm currently struggling with MageGuild's identity a little bit. I was shooting for somewhere between "coffee-break" roguelike (i.e. DoomRL) and "epic" roguelike (i.e. Angband), in terms of game-length, complexity, etc. I thought I'd hit that mark pretty well, so far. However, a lot of the feedback I've gotten has been suggesting pushing things more toward the epic end of the spectrum. And there are a lot of very cool ideas in there, many of which I'd like to use, in some manner or another. Problem is, I'm not sure if I'm currently sitting too close to coffee-break, or if I'm already in about the right area, and could easily topple over into epic territory.

The current plan is to start adding things, lowest-impact first, and kinda feel my way along. Hopefully, I'll end up in the right spot.

Source: Lukos Software Development

v0.6 just rolled out the door. I ended up cramming a few more New Things into v0.6, because I'm addicted to coding content. Mob descriptions and amulets, primarily, were the two big things that went in that I didn't expect to. Some other smaller things. And the cycle begins anew...time to plan for v0.7, and to start figuring out where the v1.0 line-in-the-sand is.

Source: Atinar - The casual RPG game

In order to keep my word of showing some weekly progress, I'm compelled to post this first public release, even as it is still in something near to an "alpha" state... although the game is already fully playable. This one (alpha 080409) still shows many glitches regarding the incomplete graphical tileset and text positioning on screen, which has been resized to 240x256, in order to be executable on Windows Mobile devices.

The game so far has been ported to both Windows and Windows Mobile, a Linux version is currently under development and might see the light next week.

Also for anyone who cannot wait for the fully fledged Linux version, Atinar seems to run fine using Wine.

Don't forget to check its Manual.txt.

Please send any comment, suggestion or help offerting (we are looking for people willing to create further game content, as well as some new graphical tiles), to hsanmartin@kaze-net.com

(Windows binary alpha available here)

Source: Lukos Software Development

Well, the response for MageGuild v0.5 has been extremely positive. I'd like to thank everyone for trying out my pet project. :) There have been a lot of bugs found, and a lot of good suggestions for things to add.

I've got a rough plan for v0.6 outlined:
- Assorted small bugs
- Clarify a couple of points in the help file
- Couple of small UI tweaks
- Add spell descriptions
- Improve pathfinding efficiency
- Overhaul for Mono/non-Windows compatibility
- Clean up and add more invertible mobs

There are a number of other items lurking on the "some later release" list, as well as the "might do at some point" list, but these strike me as the top priorities, so they're going to get banged out first. As always, when v0.6 hits, check the changelist file for all the details.