Adventurer 0.0.2.4 - Lowercase Creatures and Timing System

The bestiary file was what, 2 kb before? 82kb now. I spent a good deal of time for this update on filling out the bestiary, referencing Nethack data. I got all the lowercase creatures. If I'd done the rest, it would be well into next week before the update would be out.

I also worked on the timing system. Before, it progressed by having the player move, then all the other creatures would move, then the world would update. IT was very quirky and I ended up breaking a lot of things that way. Doing any sort of nonstandard timing was near impossible. So I just rewrote all that to be a tick/energy based system. Basically, it simulates the flow of time and only then does it start assigning who's turn it is, based on said flow of time.

This did and enables many things. First and foremost, creatures have varying speeds and it all seems to be working perfectly. If you're a jelly, you're not going to be moving very quickly. If you're a warhorse, you're going to be racing circles around opponents. Another thing this enabled is the easy resolution of the tripwire issue - yes, tripwires finally work. I also reduced the number of them on any given level. There were really just way too many, especially since there isn't variety in traps yet.

Next week, I'm working on some new features, rather than just filling out the ones that are already there. Mostly, I'm going to try to add new types, and more items of types that are already in. Items with different uses, more items to implement in crafting, more varieties of potions, scrolls for one-use effects... heck, I may even get some magic working. Creatures got their week of targeted development, now I'm going to give items theirs.

Adventurer 0.0.2.3 - Fan Fixes and More Creatures

So I promised a full library of creatures in yesterday's post. Well, that was stupid of me. Two problems kept me from keeping that promise. The first, is that there is a lot of reference material for creatures I'm using. A loooot of creatures. I only finished 'd' before I noticed the second problem. The creature select menu can't handle them all quite yet. You run out of letters.

So, I'm just going to finish that up and get a multi-page system working. I'm also going to add Effects, so that creatures can have special attacks, there can be more potions, and scrolls as well. Also, finishing up some fan suggestions I didn't quite get implemented yet.

What I did do is the aforementioned ton of fan-found bug fixes. Many, many of the bugs in the game have been fixed. Or at least I think they've been. Further research is always appreciated.I've also implemented creatures 'a' through most of 'd'. Okay, that's not that much. But it's still like triple of what was in already, and I'm going to be finishing filling it out next week.

So there's really not much to say that I didn't yesterday. Enjoy.

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.