Adventurer 0.0.2.2 - Unified Tileset and De-dragoned Rats

So I've got this uploaded to Google Code. I pretty much just took a fan suggestion and went with it. Basically, someone needs to be able to edit a tileset. I'm a horrible sprite artist myself. Not that I didn't try: I had to draw 253 ASCII tiles, which took up a good chunk of my time. Then there was actually getting SDL to properly load and display from this file, which took some time. But that all works, and should be easy to edit for anyone that would like something to look different. I'll improve it even more later on so that colors are properly preserved with the internal recoloring that happens right now to ASCII tiles.

Anyway, the edit also saw me having to work on rewriting the way grids of tiles are handled. I had to make a constant, which I really should have done to begin with, and then fix all the damage that caused everywhere. Eventually, I got it working fine. You should see some aesthetic differences, as in the picture above. Another slowdown is family holiday festivities including seeing a synchronized music/light show, and my monitor going down. The replacement also didn't seem to want to work on my computer. Third time was the charm though, borrowed my console monitor that was rigged up as a TV.

I also corrected some other bugs, most importantly the bug in the way DNotation was stored, causing rats to end up with dragon claws. Also, attempting to load a bad save file shouldn't crash the game now. Amongst other little things I worked on.

Next week I'm going to again try to work on adding a lot of creatures to flesh out the bestiary, if I don't get sidetracked by something else that needs to be done. And remember to check out the new forum, we need more members there.

Merry Christmas if you celebrate it, everyone.

Adventurer Forum

I am again suprised to find that adventurer.freeforums.org is not taken. WELL IT IS NOW MINE! But seriously, it's a good way to get discussion going amongst users, as opposed to what we have here which is targeted primarily towards myself. I have never been an admin or mod or even a very participating user before, but I've been a lurker on various forums for a long time. I promise to be a very lenient admin. I really only have one rule: Don't disrupt usage of the site. It's a broad rule and the host probably has rules that you also need to adhere to like not posting gore images everywhere. Which also would happen to follow under my rule because angering the host would pretty directly to disruption of the use of the site.

I've seen too many sites get trigger-happy admins and mods, that ignore the rules on people they like and take action on people not breaking any. Myself, I'm all for freedom of expression. Go ahead and flame war as long as you don't break the primary rule. As long as it doesn't result in pages of spam obstructing view of the good stuff, have at it. I do reserve the right to take this back since, you know, I'm the admin. But I want to watch how things go like this.

So have fun.

Adventurer 0.0.2.1 - Classic Update

Well my usual time of update has come and gone without an update, but I have good reason. I could complain about college eating up a lot of my time and then suddenly quit on the project altogether. But nah, I'm not like that. Seriously though, last week was the next-to-final week and had some of the hardest, most time consuming stuff. Never, ever try to do a "combo matrix" by hand. And then there was a lot of studying for both final exams, which I took today.

But that was only half of what is taking up my time. The other half is Adventurer. I'm working hard on 0.0.2.1, but it's not quite ready yet. ...actually, you know what? I just think I fixed it enough to give it to you all. I started to write this blog post before I finished it, but yeah. Here you go.

The major change here is one that may not be perfectly agreed upon. I switched to a more classic roguelike style health and damage system. There are a few reasons why I did this. The first is that it was hard to tell how close you were to death before. The second is that it was extremely unbalanced. The third is that I have much more source material to borrow data off of in this format. Hopefully, the increase in fun will outdo the temporary loss of an uncommon combat system. I do intend to either switch back to a realistic style or to continue using the current system, but with a lot of improvements that will go hand in hand with it while increasing the detail level of combat.

The other major change, the one that suddenly increases this game's longevity by a lot, is an experience system. Yes, you can finally gain levels and grow stronger. I even rigged up save files with it and improved those. You can save and pick up exactly where you left off, current hit points and all.

A more personal change is that I totally redid how the game internally handles input from the player. I shifted everything over to use the WaitForKey method instead of weaving my logic in with my SDL. I started on this because rats spontaneously decided they could save their moves up, then use them in one burst. Dealing with it in the SDL mire was a no go. So now it is MUCH more simple on my end. It's just what ate up most of my time this week.

And finally, I fixed a bug where kicking down a door would leave a permanent shadow spot where it was. I'd forgotten to set the tile back to transparent when a door is kicked down. The other bug that was pointed out was the duplicate body parts. I have no idea what's causing that yet. It shouldn't affect much, I'll see if I can spot what's causing it next week.

So next week. The bestiary is looking pretty thin. Now that I've got this classic-style update done, it will be easy to add in a ton of creatures and some more items. So I'm going to do that.

0.0.2.0 Graveyard Files

I'm almost back on track with this update. I'm a day late, so sue me. Actually, don't sue me, I haven't even made five dollars yet. This was never meant to be a major update, so don't expect a ton of new features.

What I did do, first off, is fixed some of the bugs from the last update. Yeah, that was a major update. You had items multiplying on reload, and sometimes when a level would try to save, it would hit a null item, give up, and cry. No more, I fixed that. As far as what I added instead of just fixed, two things. The first is graveyard files. Whenever you die, a file is buried in the graveyard preserving some stats on your run. Also I fixed potions to where shattering against a foe causes their effect. This opens up the options for things like poison and acid later.

I also sped up pathfinding considerably by having it return a path in a stack of moves, instead of a single move that has to be calculated each time. What this means is that the processing can be used elsewhere. Specifically, what I'm going to work on next week, temperature and its effects.

Yes, next week will have temperature and ways to affect it, as well as things it affects. Set things on fire, freeze water, etcetera.

End of Month 5 - November; Full Persistence and Save Files

I'm not dead. I'd just locked myself away in a white room, with only a television, a bed, and a computer to fulfill my needs. And guess what? I only watch TV out of utter boredom or to get a laugh out of the ads. As in, laugh at some of the cheap marketing techniques that no one should really fall for, but do. But mostly, I spent my time working on this update.

I cannot begin to describe the complexity of what went on here. Wait, I think I can: I can perfectly (presumably, there may be bugs) recreate a session's universe based on what I've saved in text files. They are relatively small. A universe in which I dived down fifty levels was less than 300 kb saved. Basically, I crammed a universe into 2 million on/off switches, and can recreate it all from those files. It wasn't easy, either; there is no command to write what's in memory to the hard drive that I know of. I had to write it all in legible text based on what is in memory, and save it to a plain text file. What all this means for you? Truly persistent levels and save files. When you drop an item and come back, it will still be there.

I had some hilarious bugs while I was working on this, too. At one point, I was randomly switching bodies with random wildlife. Dragon on a rampage through the forest, while I was suddenly a wolf. We had whole inventories shuffling from one creature to another. I was suddenly a quest giver. And I can't even near promise all the bugs are out. But it seemed to work well enough after a fair amount of play testing.

As for the statistics so far. 1308 downloads grand total. 549 blog views this month, up 27.38%. 636 code page views, up 36.77%. $4.63 in ads grand total, $0.66 this month. No donations. So it seems that views are definitely on the rise, and downloads are either maintaining or growing in their rate. While the money is lackluster, I don't mind. I've learned a lot on the way and maybe I've given a few people a few minutes of fun. And I will continue to work diligently.

Next week... wow. Let's see if I can't get something simple done to get back on track, and submit Monday. Perhaps the things I've been saying the past three weeks. Maybe graveyard entries. That would be partially on the road to bones files.