Saturday, August 4, 2012

ADOM 1.2.0 Prerelease 1 now available!!!

After almost ten years the unbelievable is happening: A new release of ADOM (Classic) is out.

ADOM 1.2.0 Prerelease 1 is the first of hopefully a long line of releases to bring ADOM up to date, fix all known bugs and polish the game up. This will require the success of the "Resurrect ADOM" crowd funding campaign at Indiegogo, but the current new momentum gives me a good feel about that and we hope that the prerelease will get back a lot of old time fans into the fold.

I would like to take a moment and thank Jochen Terstiege for his incredible drive and the huge amount of work he already put into resurrecting ADOM and I would like all the people out there who already have put and still are putting their energy, love and support to back the crowd funding campaign - you all are there greatest ever and without you ADOM never would have become what it is! Thank you all so much!

Now for ADOM 1.2.0 prerelease 1: There are a number of awesome things to mention about it:
  • We have an incredible lineup of platforms for the start and Jochen really is trying hard to add more to them: Windows (XP, Vista, 7, 8), Mac OS X (>= 10.4), Linux (Ubuntu 32 bit and 64 bit, Debian 32 bit and 64 bit, Raspberry Pi, NetBSD 32 bit and 64 bit, FreeBSD 32 bit and 64 bit and finally Amiga 68000, 68020 and 68040!). Jochen did an incredible job in creating an automated build system for all that and we are curious to see if we missed many hidden bugs.
  • Quite a number of bugs already are fixed in the release but a couple of hundred still are to be done, so there's a huge amount of work ahead of us (first we fixed the easy ones, now the harder ones are waiting).
  • The release really is a prerelease... while we fiddled with a lot of stuff we had little time for testing and hopefully didn't introduce too many awful new problems while fixing old ones. So far we didn't touch the manual or FAQ extensively and neither the start screen nor other parts have been adjusted greatly. EDIT: Jochen has added a change log showing the major changes.
  • A little bit of fine tuning also went into the game... patching new loop holes, etc.
  • We managed to find a surprised number of very serious code bugs that simply went undiscovered by the compilers I was using during the last period of active development... and even today each new compiler detects now serious problems. Quite surprising...
What does the future hold? This is going to be determined by the success or failure of the ADOM Crowd Funding campaign. We are moving towards $29.000 of $48.000 while I type this and I think that we can make it - even if it might become a close call. If the campaign is a success ADOM will see a flurry of development activity and releases (but note that all further prereleases currently only are planned for donors of the $25 pledge level and above - all the rest only will get to see the final version... probably something like 4-7 months after the end of the campaign from what we can see today).

If the campaign succeeds early enough (which makes it important to pledge now and not to wait till near the end) we are going to talk about the first two stretch goals of the campaign:

  1. We are considering to add tile support to ADOM by integrating NotEye.
  2. We would like to add more quests to the game.
To make this happen we need to be successful and we need to pass the initial goal a bit... so let's see what is happening.

Ok, enough marketing talk about all this ;-) Now go download ADOM 1.2.0 Prerelease 1 and let's hear your feedback!

25 comments:

  1. Version: Version 1.2.0 (Linux ELF)
    Error: Could not read in the last game counter.

    I suppose that's because I am trying the 64-bit version and I had adom.cnt from the 32-bit version. At least deleting this file seemed to be enough.

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    1. Thanks for the information, I've added this to the FAQ.

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  2. Congrats on the release of this pre-release---a feat that should indeed resonate with many people.

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  3. The readme1st.txt file has end-of-lines in the UNIX format (only LF) even in the Windows version, while Notepad assumes the Windows representation (CR and LF), not registering a newline with just LF. This renders the file nearly unreadable without better text editors.

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    1. Thanks, I will update the Windows version with a correctly formatted file.

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    2. The Windows ZIP now contains correctly formatted versions of manual.doc and readme1st.txt.

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  4. I've fixed the download links for the NetBSD and FreeBSD versions.

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  5. I wish that we could get morgue files on the mac...

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    1. On the Mac the .flg files are located in the hidden .adom.data directory within your home directory. You probably have to use the "Goto Folder" function of the Finder to get there.

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  6. A changelog is now available: http://www.ancardia.com/changelog.html

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  7. Replies
    1. It's a prerelease. Music will only be included if the crowd funding campaign succeeds.

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  8. A pity that the uberjackal/uberspider problem has not been fixed yet... We experienced players are able to cope with this, but newbies won't know why these jackals and spiders gain power so fast.

    Anyway, congratulations for this!

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    1. It's a prerelease. Lots of stuff left to be done.

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  9. I love the new Ancardia site - very modern and stylish. And woo, new release! Before Jochen got so heavily on board I didn't think this would ever happen. Congrats Thomas, and I hope this helps bring the necessary boost to the crowd-funding campaign :-)

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  10. This moves me a little closer to getting the credit card out and donating since it shows you're serious. I'd like to see a better commitment to supporting tiles. 'We'll maybe talk about it if the goal is met soon enough' isn't very encouraging.

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    1. Hi!

      I fully understand this and we are really working hard behind the scenes to come up with a reliable statement. The technical challenges aren't trivial though. We have a closed forum right now to discuss the feasibility and the challenges and I hope to come up with some announcement during the coming week: http://www.adom.de/forums/forumdisplay.php/15-Tiled-ADOM-Requirements-Engineering

      Regards
      Thomas

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  11. Although I don't take tiles as an important one myself, I agree with HeavensBlade23, that your statement on tile support is not sufficiently clear. You should really investigate it and make a clear decision on the topic.

    Also, there are 4 weeks left that require some nice pledge drives. I believe (intuitively) that it is better not to make breaks between them too big, and to plan ahead now.

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  12. I think it's a good point about the stretch goals. Now is the time to formalise them and ride the publicity from the new release. A lot of people want tiles so it's important to show you're serious about including tile support.

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    1. Yeah, we are working hard on this.I hope I have something to announce soon.

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    2. Which BTW creates an interesting psychological problem: More people seem to yearn for new quests, so that might be the community compatible first stretch goal but more new people probably would be enticed by tile support (judging from the votes to the right), so the "marketing decision" so to speak probably should be "tile support".

      Currently I also lean towards the latter as it would be the "better new feature" so to speak. We'll see...

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    3. I think you should be reaching for the people that have yet to contribute. Graphics support will be a big puller I think.

      Another ADOM II release will also help draw in support. We're rather overdue that, aren't we...? ;)

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  13. Prerelease 2 is available now for 64 bit systems which fixes a critical bug related to using the "ws" and "w5" commands. Please upgrade!

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  14. crushes on startup in MacOS 10.7, (Bus error: 10 in Terminal)

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    1. Are you using a PPC based Mac? If that is the case, you need to wait for the PPC release of ADOM 1.2.0 Pre1. Otherwise you might want to try renaming/moving the ".adom.data" directory within your home directory, so that ADOM can recreate this directory on startup. If that does not work, please submit a bug report in the issue tracker. Thanks!

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