Elderlore

Source: Ancient Domains Of Mystery (ADOM)

Lately I have been once more involved in classic pen & paper roleplaying, especially design-wise. (more…)

Source: Angband at oook.cz - Banding News

- 23.4.2009 09:34. Optimality has released Craftband, a variant where the player has the ability to craft items from raw materials. Visit the homepage or see the announcement thread. _{-- Delivered by Feed43 service}

Source: Angband at oook.cz - Banding News

- 23.4.2009 09:34. R. Dan Henry has released version 2.3.1 of the Moorcockian variant Gumband, a minor update and bugfix to 2.3.0. It is available from the Gumband download page; see this thread for the announcement. _{-- Delivered by Feed43 service}

Source: GameSetWatch Column @Play

['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.] Pixel Journeys is taking a break this month while I continue my reviews of all 25 of this year's in-challenge 7DRL winners - here's the first part. I should mention, before we resume, that I was preceded in this by the guys at Cymon's Games. If I had known that they had done this when I started I probably wouldn't have bothered, heh. I agree with most of what they say, and where our opinions differ I at least can see why they differ. Each of my own 7DRL reviews contains a link to the page on their site so you can quickly see their take on the game. And to the folks at Cymon's Games, please allow me just to quickly say: good work. This column's a week late, so let me waste no further time in getting to the games. This time, we look at Cypress Tree Manor, Domination, Backwards Gravity, The Favored, Persist, TetRLs, Expedition, and SpiritsRL.

Continue reading "Column: @Play: 2009 7DRL Winners, Part Two" »

_{-- Delivered by Feed43 service}

Source: TameTick.com

Seems like I've made some silly mistakes in my first Java2D application.

Source: Unangband: The Unnamed Angband

This is a pre-release of 0.6.3. It should be stable, and just requires extensive playing to sanity check all the changes and find weird edge cases. Unfortunately, I had to cut trap regions before release, as this would otherwise extend an already late release unnecessarily.

You can download the source code from http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangband/unangband-063-pre1-src.zip. You can download a precompiled Windows build from http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangband/unangband-063-pre1-win.zip and a precompiled OSX build from http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangband/Unangband-063-pre1-osx.dmg

Unangband 0.6.3 "Death to the Case Statement" aka "The Projected Release"

### Game Play ###
- Compress dungeon levels from 0 - 100 to 0 - 60 to speed up the end game.
- Allow player to assemble friendly monsters and carry eggs to hatch friendly monsters.
- Prohibit certain races from acquiring particular equipment flags. - Penalize shape shifter mana. - Add ability to tattoo and woad yourself.
- Change earthquakes and destruction to use projection code.
- Add wilderness paths (from FAAngband).
- Try harder to prevent escape from Moria.
- Add firearms.
- Updated druidic spells to use new region code.
- Add in new sorceror spells that allow them to create traps from objects and other spells.
- Make body armours appear earlier in the dungeon. This is to try to make them a more viable option...
- Tweak weapon values as per blog. Note there are some additional tweaks here not mentioned in the blog entry.
- Add additional trap types.
- Add poisonous levels.
- Change how traps themes work.
- Sneaky monsters can now disarm traps.
- Implement sticks to snakes and familiars. Somewhat hackish.
- Tweak spell lists for mages based on 'Designing a Magic System - Part 14'
- Add some useful low level rings so that first rings !cursed. Now the first cursed rings occur at level 15, and are actually mixed cursed and beneficial.
- Altered amulets so there is no duplication in ring and amulet abilities. Amulets now occur deeper and are almost always useful.
- Make freeze have an ice effect.
- Increase power of torch and chill spells.
- Added slow poison potions and spells back. Slow poison now delays the onset of poison effect.
- Added slow digestion temporary effect.
- Added spells and mushrooms of slow metabolism.
- Improve Sauron end game. Morgoth end game still to be done.
### User Interface ###
- Reenable tunnelling using the alter key.
- Added Dubtrain Angband Sound Pack v3.1.0
- Remove original Angband sounds.
- Added cheat_wall option to pseudo-colour walls for debuggingpurposes.
- Make permanent rock distinguishable from normal rock.
- If an item/spell is known, display the area of effect when targetting to better allow the player to use the ability.
- Change druid starting light spell.
- Windy rooms and items give the player good defense against archery.
- Tweak names of throwing items.
### Bug fixes ###
- Many, many bugfixes, particularly due to code rewrites in a number of areas.
I would like to thank the numerous Unangband contributors, especially darke, for the work put in here.
Undoubtedly, I've introduced plenty of new bugs.
### Build / Platform ###
- Rowan Beentje (Lebannen): Significant updates to the Mac OS/X platform as well as some general platform updates.
- Significant rewrites of the projection and blows code.
- Remove another set of case statements: this time for describing item effects.
- A number of improvements to dungeon generation to allow map designers to improve specific dungeon designs. You can now create 'special' levels of various types, and use level and special room flags as a part of the dungeon zone set up. This allows a lot more granular control of dungeon architecture and special scenarios.
- In addition, added ability to have Mario style hidden access to dungeons. Note Gandalf taking one such route in his fight with the Balrog.
- Update class and race code to use new skills array.
- Make mushrooms tval 79. This simplifies code all over the place.
- Implement ability to regenerate the last dungeon level as per Bug #15115. Because this uses the simple random number generator, you have to switch this capability on explicitly.
Wizard command S specifies a dungeon seed. If dungeon seed is not zero, we generate levels using the simple random number generator and store the last seed used.
Wizard command L will then regenerate the last level using the last level dungeon seed.
Let me know if you need the ability to see what the seed and last seed currently are, or modify the last seed in any way.
- Switch over to using 'modern' Angband timed effects on the character.
- Player spell and ranged attacks now use the new do_cmd_item interface.
- Darke: Dumps out html files of various lib/edit/ text files; needs to be run from the 'root' unangband directory

Source: Rogue Hut

It's too slow to program Teemu @ work so I'm taking it back to home. Besides DevC++ is worse than VC and when the project is getting bigger it's clumsy to browse it with DevC++. Plus you don't always have time to program at work, because some people keep telling you should do some things, you know, work stuff. That's breaking my concentration always when that happens.

I could probably concentrate on Teemu anyway, hack the 1.1 ready, release the source code and let other people take care of possible new versions.

Source: The Reptoran Saga

I've compiled a detailed planned feature list, based on a similar one found on the Dwarf Fortress development page. You can see it here:
http://reptoran.rogueforge.net/detailed_plan.html

I'll add a link on the home page eventually.

Source: The Reptoran Saga

I've been working on the quest model recently, and it's coming along very nicely. By the next release, quests can consist of the following:

Killing x monsters
Bringing x items to an NPC
Talking to an NPC

These are all goals for quest nodes, and a quest can consist of several nodes. In other words, a full quest can require you to kill 4 snakes and 3 goblins, or talk to a gnome and give a dwarf a pickaxe, or any other combination of the three basic tasks. Also, a quest node may have the completion of another node as a requirement, so you can have quests where you need to do one thing, then another, then another (rather than being given several objectives that can be completed in any order).

Conversation has been expanded a bit as well. Responses can be based on items that the player has, quests that have been completed (or not yet started, or even in progress), attributes or skills that the player has, or the type of monster that is being spoken to.

Quests and conversations are very tightly linked. The conversation sets up all the requirements for the quest (you might have to have something achieved before the response that launches a quest shows up), and quests in turn can determine what choices you have when talking with people.

Two things need to be accomplished before (what I hope is) the final release for this subversion, v0.3. The first is proper saving of quests, especially partially completed quests. The second task is to populate the dungeon with a wide variety of monsters and items. Right now there's a decent monster density up to about level 12 or so, which then tapers off until level 22 and beyond where there are no monsters at all. Obviously, this needs to change.

The next subversion, v0.4, will be a lot of interface and engine adjustments to convert Labyrinth of Reptoran from a tech demo to a playable game. The following additions are planned:

overhauled speed system
converting LOS from raycasting to shadowcasting
lots of combat tweaks and improvements, like natural armor, critical hits, blood, two-handed weapons, and more
enhanced skill system, with provisions for partial tasks (interruptions) and weapon type redefinitions
interfaces improvements like filtering out extraneous messages
improved AI
compressed save files

I'm going to be posting a planned features list on the main site soon, and hopefully I'll have a new release by the end of the month.

Source: Ancient Domains Of Mystery (ADOM)

Just as a side note… in order to bring my personal home page slowly back to life I just (re)started my personal blog at http://www.biskup.net/blog. It only will cover my other hobbies besides ADOM and JADE but it probably will be updated more frequently with ramblings about my non-roguelike life.

Concerning ADOM & JADE… I’m still working on my Ph.D. - on Friday there is (yet another) presentation of my results and everything moves towards the finishing line. I still expect to start real work on JADE in autumn.