Elderlore

Source: Transcendence

Five years ago today I released Transcendence 0.7, the first public alpha release. Since then, we've gone through seven major releases and eighteen minor releases. No, we haven't reached 1.0 yet, and yes, we are running out of pre-1.0 version numbers, but five Terran orbits later, I am very proud of all that we in the Transcendence community have accomplished

Five years seems like a long time, but believe it or not, the development of Transcendence began much earlier. On May 1st, 1995, the following post appeared on comp.os.ms-windows.nt.misc:

In case anyone is interested, I've just uploaded a beta version of a game that I've been working on. Right now, the game only runs on Windows NT (not Windows 95) and has only been compiled for Intel platforms. Please try it out and let me know what you think (by e-mail). The file is frontier.zip and I put it up on ftp.wustl.edu under the /pub/msdos_uploads/nt directory. I imagine that eventually it will get moved to the win/nt directory.

Frontier is a game of both skill and strategy in which you explore the various star systems of the Frontier while seeking to increase your income and pay for improvements to your ship. Throughout the game you will fight increasingly more powerful enemy ships and stations, and, by looting their remains you will be able to equip your ship with better armor and weapons.

-- George Moromisato

Sound familiar? Frontier was my first attempt at creating a cross between Nethack and Star Control II and as you can see from the description, Transcendence is Frontier's direct descendant.

To celebrate the 5th anniversary of Transcendence's first public release, I've dug through my archives to find the original release that I posted in 1995: Frontier 0.5.

Transcendence has come a long way since then, and I have no doubt that the game will continue to improve and evolve in ways that we cannot yet imagine. Happy 5th anniversary!

Source: The Oblong

New bit o'fluff. I'm beginning to think that I'll need a better way of scattering general clutter - maybe something based around blue noise, there's a nice paper on using such point sets for placement of objects. A data driven way to specify new clutter objects also seems increasingly logical.

Shadows on meshes are behaving weirdly, with lots of banding and acne despite using the same algorithm as the terrain (which works fine in most cases). Oh, and I broke text rendering... whee.

Games are hard, eye candy is easy, nothing ever works as it should.

Source: Lukos Software Development

Just released 1.1.1; should correct a couple of nasty crash bugs in 1.1. Need to be more careful, need to test more. This kind of stuff is unacceptable.

Source: The Oblong

Can't say I like the turquoise colour, but it'll do for the moment. Refraction and depth blending seem to work acceptably well, and the water is not too bad looking in motion. Still pondering the best way to integrate the dynamic lights.

I reworked the way texture types are distributed over the cavern, so it biases the moss (purple!) around the water with the 'shrooms. Said shrooms are currently not placed exactly on the ground, instead they use the average height for a tile and therefore tend to float a bit, which when you have shadows and the right lighting angle becomes painfully obvious.

It can't be seen in this pic, but there's also support for emissive maps now. The mushrooms have tiny glowing spots which will be re-worked into larger glowing spots for a future screenshot. Unfortunately the addition of the emissive data to the pipeline has gobbled up most of my last free render target... all further information will have to be crammed into the three spare alpha channels. I'm guessing either a specular channel and material indices or a handful of miscellaneous BRDF parameters will eat those.

My hope is to do some content generation this weekend, but I strongly suspect it'll disappear into less fruitful activities. Still, you never know!

By the way, anyone know of a good (preferably open source) alternative to the GIMP? Its support for working with images using the alpha channel in any non-trivial way is frankly terrible.

Source: Lukos Software Development

And it is done, MG 1.1 has been turned loose. Got a flood of last minute bugs in, fixed them, and got it turned around.

Source: The Oblong

Hey, WoW hasn't consumed my soul entirely! Or maybe it's just not finished digesting it.

Or possibly a darker entity already laid claim on it, in exchange for a Mars bar and some ruled paper in an unholy pact outside a lecture theatre many, many years ago.

Anyway, li'l update. I added water tiles and subsequently a crappy water shader (it can and will be much better... no refraction, no depth-based fog, no falloff in the shallows, no influence from the deferred lights, no dynamic interactions... the list of things currently missing goes on).

I also added a rock, and changed the previous mushroom mesh to look a bit less rock-like, and spent some time tidying up a few bits of code that just couldn't be ignored any longer. Experimented a bit with different distributions for the instanced clutter - mushrooms are now more likely to occur near water, and rocks tend to be scattered around natural walls.

Source: Legend of Angband

I have had a number of characters that have died in Angband recently. It was very depressing. I tried a number of different races. None of them seemed to help. So now I have returned to my staple. I am running a human mage.

There have been two early developments that make me thing this character may be around for a while. The first was that I found the magic book "Tenser's Transformations". I hurried up to get to character level 32. Now I can cast the Elemental Brand spell.

This is a money making operation. I guy arrows from the shops. After branding them, I sell them back to the sops. With the proceeds from my elemental branding business, I have purchased all kinds of gain stats potions. My intelligence is maxed out. That comes in real handy for a mage.

The second reason I think this character might make it for a while is that I just found the boots of speed +8. That is enough said about that.

Source: Lords of DarkHall - Version Notes

v1.3.26

Note: Development is not dead. Work has simply been more pressing lately, and I have also been working on my second roguelike project, incorporating the lessons I learned on this one. I will pick up the pace a bit over the holidays when I have some uninterrupted time to code again!

Per request, I am changing the way equipping/removing gear works back to the old way. No, you are no longer kicked out of the inventory and a turn passes. Instead, you can stay in the inventory screen and change equipment as you please, and time won't pass. It's less 'realistic' (and I am using the term loosely given the subject matter), but it IS less annoying and probably more fun to do it this way. (Thanks Vanguard).

Various bug fixes (which I probably should have made note of when I fixed, 'cause I can't remember them all!)

 

Thanks!

B-

Source: Angband at oook.cz - Banding News

- 13.11.2008 09:41. New version of Z+Angband was announced here. _{-- Delivered by Feed43 service}

Source: TIGSource: Category Roguelikes

A couple of neat roguelikes went 1.0 recently. One is Legerdemain, which we covered previously on TIGSource. It’s a story-based, IF-influenced RL, and is definitely worth checking out.

The second is MageGuild, which, as you may guess, is a magic-centric dungeon crawl. My experience playing wizard classes in roguelikes is that it’s generally too complex for my tastes. Reading books, having spells fizzle, getting my ass handed to me by weak enemies – I like sorcery about as much as Conan the Barbarian, which is to say, put that staff away and give me a sword to cleave a mage in twain with!

So it was a pleasant surprise to find out that MageGuild is one of the more easy to get into RL’s that I’ve played. The interface is clean, the controls are simple, and there’s a tutorial. The game also supports mouse control and graphical tiles (I may make a tileset, actually!).

What makes the game interesting is its focus on mixing spells and potions. At the beginning of the game, you pick up to two schools of magic that will decide which spells you can learn. Then during the game you can combine potions with a variety of objects to create new ones. Want to become a werewolf? It’s as easy as mixing a Potion of Change with some Hair of Wolf.

Having only made a few runs into the dungeon, I can’t comment too extensively on this system, but my initial impression is quite favorable. It’s a pretty fast-paced roguelike that encourages experimentation without being too overwhelming to beginners. I recommend trying it. (Keep in mind that it requires the .NET framework!).

TIGdb: Entries for Legerdemain, MageGuild

(Source: Slash, via Temple of Roguelike)