Friday, February 24, 2012

ADOM II 0.2.3 progress

Hi folks... time to post yet another update. Last weekend (and the first half of the week) I have been in London (cool business trip for the start of the week, greetings to my Macedonian friends and colleagues) so that I had a little less time to work on ADOM. Nonetheless I made good progress on a couple of issues during the week. Here's what happened:

  • All wilderness encounters planned for the next release are done except for roving barbarians and chaos monks. For the former I'm right now implementing the barbarian profession (which thus will be available with 0.2.3) and for the latter I still have to do the monk profession (which thus will also be in 0.2.3).
  • Jackalweres are one of the new monsters that were added and this again got me sidetracked for about a day and a half. The reason (again) surprised me: With jackalweres JADE got the first monsters type that really is able to do other (offensive) actions than just fighting in melee... namely summoning. I pondered the implementation for a moment and decided to right away do something more flexible than in ADOM (where there are huge if...then...else... decision making structures). Beings in ADOM II now have a set of active abilities (attack in melee, summon something, pick up things, etc.). Each ability is rated with a preference and thus beings now will decide based on context and personal preferences what they are gonna do. While I'm not going to implement this to full extent for 0.2.3 (the version finally needs to get out - no more week long side treks) the basic infrastructure is finished and used whenever a being is trying to kill someone else.I'll finish it together with dozens of more options towards 0.3.0 (so probably in a couple of weeks). The nice thing is that (action wise) adding missiles, spell casting and other more refined behavior now has become a triviality and I'm locking forward to focus on that in the near future.
  • As I'm right now adding barbarians I'm actually just now sidetracked by adding tactics to ADOM II. Barbarians will receive special powers based on berserkering, more on that in a follow up blog post.
  • Wights and wraiths (as well as shadows) got added. And they now can turn beings they kill into undead. Cranked up the horror quite a bit :-)
  • 21 new monsters have been added over the past five days, two new disease types included :-)
  • Aging now is completed.
  • Inhabitants of settlements now are much more likely to support each other... there were still some kinks left in that code.
  • Swamps got some special treatments...
  • Did I mention the new wasteland terrain type? (which might get created due to special interactions with the world)
Looking through DevState I just noticed that most of these things haven't even been listed... but I consider them necessary for the King of the Orcs storyline to work much better. Oh well... progress is being made. And I really will "release early, release often" at some point ;-)

6 comments:

  1. "Wights and wraiths (as well as shadows) got added. And they now can turn beings they kill into undead. Cranked up the horror quite a bit :-)"

    PLAYABLE Undead? Like in "you get killed by a shadow - the world suddenly feels very strange..."?

    ReplyDelete
  2. @Christian: For now the life of the player ends when killed by undead. But we'll see what happens when Necromancers appear in the game... or maybe some special items ;-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Okay, here's an idea to make this "turning into undead" cool:

      Would it be possible that ADOM II could save the info of PCs that died at the hands of shadows/wights/wraiths and use that info to create recognizeable semblances of said PCs for subsequent plays?

      It would be really awesome if the game spawns a quest in which you might be tasked to rid a small farming village of a horde of undead, which, coincidentially, contains the deceased PC from the last game. If I got your entries about wilderness encounters and quests right, that shouldn't be too hard to do.

      Delete
    2. Sorry for the double post, I didn't see an "edit" button under my post.

      The idea came to me when I realized that turning into an undead would have no "tangible" meaning for the dead PC, because the game ends on his death. Technically it's no different than being killed by a ceiling stone trap, as far as the player in front of the machine is concerned.

      "The shadow touches you. You die... Your corpse rises as a shadow spawn." -> cue to highscore list.

      Delete
  3. What about draining attacks of the undead? As far as I know, attributes can't be trained in the current JADE. Therefore the draining attacks will be even nastier than in ADOM, unless the drained attributes can be restored somehow.

    ReplyDelete
  4. About picking items, monsters could only pick items, or they have ability to equip them?

    ReplyDelete