Elderlore

Source: Rogue Survivor

SO?
Implemented. I hate coding parsers and stuff like that. But its done.
The game now reads the actor model data from a CSV file, rather than hardcoded values.
You can change most game values of the actors.

EXAMPLE: MODDING SKELETON.
The result:

Drawed the ghost and changed the stats in 30 seconds.
How?
1 change the stats in GameActors.csv.
2 change the graphic file.

The stat line went from this:

"skeleton","skeletons",100,5,99,8,2,3,0,6,0,0,10,"Quite annoying. Like a fly."

to this:

"blue ghost","blue ghosts",125,5,99,10,1,5,0,8,0,0,25,"Gobble Gobble."

The vanilla GameActors.csv file now looks like this in Open Office:

I CAN HAZ NEW ACTOR MODELS? CHANGE ABILITIES?
No sorry. Only changing basic stats. Same with items.

End of post.

Source: rec.games.roguelike.announce Google Group

* Savefile INCOMPATIBLE!
* No longer able to raise skills once you reach power 100.
* Magic oaths are harder to come by, martial oaths easier.
* Improved support for shadowstalker characters.
- Able to pick locks, use devices, and disarm in the dark with
infravision. Able to read certain scrolls in the dark.

Source: Rogue Survivor

"No Installer" package fixed
The "no installer" package was not working properly, sorry about that.
Get the new one.
Should work, right? 8-]

Next Alpha
4.2 if really annoying stuff to fix, otherwise straight to 5.0

Stats Modding
5.0 will allow stats modding.
Some of the game models data (actors and items) will be read from text files, so you guys can toy with them.
Only stats will be moddable, abilities will not (because they are tied to AI and other hard-coded stuff).
Some stuff will still be hard-coded sorry.

Stats Modding : What File Format?
Should be human readable, light-weight, easily editable with a text editor.
CSV fits the bill.
No need for XML, since there is a constant number of fields with simple integer values.
Proprietary format (some fancy .dat or whatever) is a big no-no for me.

Sample data file : Actors models in 4.11
I have written a simple CSV exporter for the game actors in 4.11, and this is how the resulting file looks like in Open Office.
Some stats like Fov and Smell were hidden till now ;)
Remember these are raw stats without the effects of skills!

*** ACTORS STATS SPOILERS **




Some stats are not used at all by the game (eg: STA for undeads) because of lacking abilities in the model definition and the values are just for show.
 
Hey! Wait! What about the poll about spoilers?
The player maintened wiki should be enough?

End of post.

Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log

The Bay 12 Report for this month has been posted. In particular, I finished the war issues I mentioned, so it should all be bugs and SDL tests and requests etc. that have been piling up from now until the release, which shouldn't be too long, though I'll be off for a day somewhere this week for an upcoming family thingy. Fixing the war issues involved moving some of the world gen events to a weekly instead of a yearly schedule, so the legends have that extra information as well, at least for war and beast attack events. I'm sure other things will be moved to respect the new scheduling over time. It's a project as usual.

We've also been working with world village pictures a bit. The highlighted '#' from the earlier pictures are obviously a little obscene, but the landscape is also changed quite a bit from the original biome, and we wanted to indicate that. Here's a medium and a large world with some human sprawl. Currently, the lines indicate crops on flat grassland and the AE and ae represent crops on hills (replacing the set intersection and the 'n', respectively). The '+' are the market sites/towns (though those remain unimplemented in adv mode). I think the only downside now is the loss of the river display on farmed rivers. I'd kind of prefer having the rivers printed instead, but it's also important to show sites when you have them, especially in cases where the farm clusters aren't anchored by a town and don't spread off of the rivers since you'd have no idea humans were present there. Perhaps it could hide river farms that are adjacent to enough other sites.

Source: Ascii Dreams

[You'll probably want to read the original article series that inspired this follow up, then start with parts one, two, three and four of this series.]

It is easy to conflate procedural content generation with sandbox play and emergence where these should be seen as three separate properties which often coincide in games which feature procedural content generation. If you consider an actual sandbox by way of analogy, a game without procedural content generation is like coming to a sandbox every day that has been raked over and smoothed out. With procedural content generation, you instead find the sand furloughed and heaped in piles in a way that may or may not be randomly distributed but is different every day. (Emergence in this example is having the castles you build fall over when they get too high).

In this procedural sandbox, you may choose to ignore what you find and start over, ascribe the distribution of sand to a preexisting external agency (the actions of the last kid to play in the box yesterday, an earthquake overnight) or invest in an imaginative world building exercise to justify what you find. The concept of repeated play is also important: the first time you come to the sandbox, it is not clear whether the sand is heaped just so because someone intended it that way, or from a process with no underlying intent.

It is the storytelling component of this example which highlights for me the importance of perspective in procedural content generation. When we tell stories, we do so most effectively when we put ourselves in the shoes of someone in that story, which is why games with a single avatar feel more procedural than games with multiple units. The concept of authorship could also explain the procedural uncanny effect I noted: we are building up the concept of a single author providing this story, and in the high fidelity example, anything that dispels your suspension of disbelief also damages your construction of the author behind the story.

The authorship conceit is not the only explanation for the uncanny valley effect: it may be low fidelity play engages us on a more childish level, but high fidelity play corresponds to our inner adult. It would be interesting to rerun this Neverwinter Nights scenario with a child playing the game rather than an adult and see if the reactions are similar.

But I don't think the attraction of procedural generation is solely about forcing us to make up stories. Stories also have a function which is to present a series of what-ifs. And you don't have to invest in an underlying narrative to react to what-ifs in game play. You have to engage your inner explorer.

Source: rec.games.roguelike.announce Google Group

Last-modified: 2010-01-02
Posted-by: postfaq 1.16 (Perl 5.10.1)
Archive-name: games/roguelike/announce
URL: [link]
Posting-frequency: monthly
rec.games.roguelike.announce is a moderated newsgroup for informational
posts and announcements about any roguelike game, including (but not

Source: If Error Throw New Brick

So it might not look like much, but that's magecrawl running in a web browser! Levels generated, items created, monsters waiting for time to start ticking. The only thing missing is drawing and control.

My good friend Ben inspired the idea and helped implement some the magic.

Roughly the magic entails removing all references to libtcod from the game engine. That way, we can load all that code inside a web browser via silverlight, (which can't load native code). I "ported" this code from libtcod:

• Shadowcasting Line of Sight
• A* Pathfinding
• Bresenham Line Generation

"Porting" could be described as the twisted application of force needed to move C code to compile and run in C#. Since none of them used pointer math too heavily, it was reasonable to attempt. The code looks ugly for C# code, but it works.

In theory, it should even save and load! I can use my same serialization code, just point it to "isolated storage" and away we go.

Obviously, a lot of work is needed to make it a real game frontend. But the fact that I could even get this far (and not have to rewrite everything in flash) is pretty awesome.

Source: News - RogueBasin

Rogue Survivor Alpha 4.11 released

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Source: Lost Labyrinth News

We received some donations lately. 4 to be exact.
Thanks to everybody that donated something!
And thanks to this support I removed the adverticements from the page.
As I don't like this form of financing an open source game.
Please, keep supporting the game. We use every dollar/euro we'll receive for the game!

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Source: Lost Labyrinth News

Lost Labyrinth 4.1.0
Features:
- Spells have special successes and botches now. With a new sound and animated graphics.
Special success means for duration based spells they last twice as long. For spells that do damage etc. they do twice the damage.
Botches do damage to the caster and of course do not work.
- spellweaving reworked. The increased cost is only applied to spells that profit from it.
The spells also show if they are weavable.
- looking around has been improved so that we see the field name "on the fly".
- Translation of FAQ to german
- Summoned creatures display the info button too. So we can see their stats.
- the summon spells display info about the creatures.
- picking up stackables even if inventory is full is working now
- scroll lore and free magic spells have own section and icon in spell selection screen

Balancing:
- free magic now only offer spells of same circle as actual, not those below
(We still considered free magic as too strong)
- luck affects chance to get special success
- mystic attack now always succeeds and does level to level*5 damage
- restricted scroll lore to allow only a finite number of spells to be learned
(Scrollore was still too powerful)

Bugfixes:
- Throwing weapons working again
- fixed haggle formula
- fixed bug in helpful wizard monster removal
- fixed bug in picking up ammunition (stacking)
- fixed bug in splitting ammunition stacks
- made oil fill up only 1 lamp (issue 194)

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