Sunday, November 11, 2012

ADOM: The Resurrection update - The state of things

Yet another update from all the stuff going on behind the scenes of ADOM: The Resurrection...

  • Jochen and Zeno are hard at work on the NotEye integration. Things look good and we now also have an alpha prototype for NotEye on OS X. Screenshots will follow as soon as Jochen and Zeno manage to get some color kinks worked out ;-)
  • Krys is working on the tiles. Many detail issues... greetings from me to all the people who before and during the crowdfunding campaign stated "Hey, it's trivial to do some tiles". You obviously have no clue. And although I tried to estimate the effort required in a pessimistic way I'm continuously surprised about the detail problems we run into. But Krys, Zeno and Jochen make a perfect graphical team - I'm sure that the final results will be mind-boggling :-)
  • Lucas is getting up to speed after we had quite a lot of organizational challenges (I'd never had expected the difficulties to get money to South America without incurring horrendous costs... but we are improving ;-) ). Here you can find Lucas' latest work.
  • I sadly did not make any progress during the last week except for fiddling with the concepts for the new boss monsters (the programming architecture now is in place), testing various of the suggested form mailers (because I ran into problems with Google Forms - sadly I'm back to Google forms as none of them really solved my problems) and writing a couple of pages for the ADOM Lite RPG (less progress than I hoped for). Preparing my sabbatical sadly takes a lot more work effort than I hoped for so spare time right now is premium. But I can't wait for December and non-stop ADOM work :-)
And here is a small teaser for the current state of the tile set - rougher tiles, some PC samples, some items:



And here we got some samples of test screenshots... note that they really are tests and already now fail to mirror reality... things are constantly changing right now but I couldn't resist to post some older screenshots:




Cheers
Thomas

P.S.: Yes, you still will be able to play in ASCII mode. Right now Jochen and I plan to have two distinct ADOM versions in the future, one including ASCII, image graphics and sounds and another offering just ASCII (and no sound). You decide which version you download. This seems to be the most reasonable compromise as otherwise the build system would have to take into account too many game variants and testing all of them before deploying them would become absolutely impossible.


13 comments:

  1. Looks great! I presume also that we'd be able to replace the tile directory with fan-generated content? Cause stuff like this would be cool to patch in:

    http://roguelikepixels.blogspot.co.uk/

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    1. Yes, that definitely will be possible. Also for soundtracks and sound effects.

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    2. Choose our own soundtracks too? Wow, that'll be really great! We often talk in the community of music that would suit certain areas well, but getting to integrate that and share playlist set-ups with other players will be truly cool.

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  2. YES, HOLY CRAP YES!!!! I'm playing ADOM right now and just got to the Dwarven Village for the first time. I used to play back in the day but all my char's had short life spans. Just now picking the game back up as an adult and WOW this game is deep. I am so high off nostalgia right now!

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  3. Those tiles look quite a bit more detailed than I had imagined. I was thinking pixel art in the same vein as Crawl.

    Reality > Expectations.

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  4. Awesome update, thanks!

    About the costs: I'd definitely love seeing Adom getting a stable revenue stream in the future to make sure all you get the chance to polish things even further. With tiles, I'm pretty sure you'd get that from the planned Steam integration.

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  5. Great to hear about an update. Sad to hear that progress is going slowly but at the same time, really glad we have ADOM progress :)

    I hope that the ASCII mode of which you speak will be in NotEye, providing a bit of a polish over the old DOS-style ASCII ADOM we have had. Truth be told, it won't change how much I play but a fancied up ASCII design would be a dream come true.

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    1. Actually having a pure ASCII mode (not just drawing images that look like ASCII characters) has some important advantages. One of them is being able to play on the server via SSH. So I hope a pure ASCII mode is kept.

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    2. Not sure if they can develop the idea of DCSS webtiles and integrate it with steam. I used to play online just to compare my achievements with others. Personally i will be fully satisfied with only global-high score system from STRETCH GOAL #5: ACHIEVEMENTS. New adom will be so much extended that will make spectating other games obselete(at least IMO). Exploring those further regions of game by yourself is so much exciting.

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  6. Thomas I've been wondering, if we've donated $40 in indiegogo fundraiser, do we not get access to the ADOM pre-releases (4 and onwards?)

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    1. 40 $ in any fashion gets you a free ADOM Deluxe license. Nightly builds are available at the 25 $ pledge level. However, money you pledged for the Seeker level - the one that gets you the printed RPG - does not counts to regular pledge levels, even though it DOES count towards the ADOM Deluxe license. So if you donated 40 $ for the rulebook, but no additional 25 $ for the Wanderer level (for example, 40 $ for the RPG and 10 $ for the Special Thanks), you don't get access to the nightly builds, but you do get an ADOM Deluxe license.

      I have high hopes that there'll be dedicated prerelease versions available to the general public some months down the road even for those who missed their chance to get nightly build access, but for now, if you're not among them (you should have got an email to that effect if you are), it stops at prerelease 3.

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  7. I think the current characters have too large heads. Makes it look a bit funny.

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