Saturday, January 30, 2016

ADOM R65 (version 2.1.0) released to prerelease testers!

Hi everyone!

Today I'd like to announce a very special release only for our prerelease testers: ADOM R65 (2.1.0) is available for prerelease testing starting now!

This release is special for several reasons:
  • It is only available to our prerelease testers (and can be accessed as usual). We have been somewhat unkind to our prerelease testers (and really feel sorry for that) as the Steam release put a totally new kind of pressure on us - thus the last versions have been Steam-only. Sorry once more - it was a matter of timing and sadly doing Steam releases is so much easier and faster than doing standard releases that we just didn't manage to provide versions to all channels.
  • It is an ASCII only release. The main reason for this is that we completely rebuilt the character generation routines and our graphical version has not yet fully caught up with the new ASCII features. As we didn't want to be flooded with bug reports regarding the graphical behavior we decided to go with a pure ASCII release and collect your feedback on the new character generation sequence.
  • It is a true beta release. We fixed a major internal code section which potentially might have lots of side effects. During our internal tests we already caught a number of them but we probably missed others. The change is that I converted ADOM's internal main game loop into a much more modern architecture which will allow for an awesome slew of features.
  • We have completely revised character generation. It now has a ton of new features like point-based attribute generation, configurability for the whole sequence (via UI), re-using previous configurations (and even specific character types generated), the ability to go back from every step, a slightly more readable summary and more. I really love it and am very curious about your feedback.
  • There are lots of other new additions since the last prerelease - see our release notes for details. Biggest are the addition of the tome of donors, a new dungeon map (actually a map type, "shifting dungeons", easily possible now thanks to the new event based architecture), various difficulty tweaks plus the typical set of bug fixed.
Please let us know about the new major changes and test the game thoroughly. We tried our best but the new event driven architecture really is a beast and while it will allow for tons of great new stuff impossible to implement in earlier versions it is one of the biggest changes imaginable to ADOM and there are bound to be side effects.

And now go playing and enjoy the game!

P.S.: There is also something new for ADOM Steam players:

  • ADOM on Steam already has the new awesome achievement graphics created by Krys (one for each achievement).
  • ADOM on Steam yesterday got Steam trading cards, badges and emoticons.

5 comments:

  1. Hurray! Glad to see the new architecture coming together. And I loved the previous post discussing it, would be happy to hear more about design decisions and such things. Or maybe a postmortem book when the time comes!

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  2. I LOVE the sound of the character generation changes, very exited to see that! Really glad to hear the event driven architecture is coming along so well too, that's really going to remove a lot of restrictions from you. I also want to congratulate you on tacking such a bear of a task in established software.

    I can't wait to see the new kinds of features and foes coming out of that. The shifting dungeons sound quite exciting frex (and potentially frustrating).

    Can I ask how the PnP RPG is progressing, though?

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  3. Hi -- Will this version have a dos build? I play r60 on my android tablet via dosbox.

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  4. So when is this going live on Steam? D:

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    Replies
    1. I'm just restarting work after an extended period of disappointments. Luckily Team ADOM has been pretty busy but we now have to align all the separate work and fix some more issues with the new character generation process. A blog post will follow later today picking up where I left off.

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