Friday, August 10, 2012

Some clarifications about tiles in ADOM

My recent post on tiles raised a couple of important questions as I probably was too vague in it. I'd like to quickly answer them:

  1. Tiles would be an extra. You always will be able to play ADOM as ASCII-only and thus it would continue to run on older systems. We haven't yet decided on whether it would be one binary with options for both or two distinct binaries but currently we lean towards the latter as that would allow a much smaller download for the ASCII version.
  2. Tile development would happen in parallel to the other planned features. Thus there would be continuous updates for all donors. Depending on the parallel development speeds and challenges we can't foresee today we even might consider releasing ADOM 1.2.x and ADOM 1.3.x in order to get all things done. This is yet another detail we so far haven't discussed.
  3. Tiles will be 64x64 to ensure a decent quality for the custom built set. It is possible to support other resolutions (like 32x32)rather easily because NotEye is very flexible in this regard. We are going for 64x64 as Krys is actually drawing the tiles at much higher resolution and downscaling them and I learned that downscaling works almost perfectly until you reach that 64x64 limit. 32x32 requires a lot of manual repairs and as computer resolutions seem to be increasing all the time (and things like Retina and its successors are going to be standards soon) we'd love to have a beautiful tile set for the custom variant. But as several resolutions could be supported bot community built sets and my preferred set by Krys are an option.
  4. Regarding Steam and others. Yes, it might be an option to position ADOM (Deluxe) on Steam in order to finance both the continuous future development of the free and the paid version - but this requires the game to be beautiful.
  5. There won't be any facings. The whole ADOM engine doesn't have any notion of facings and thus there is no need for that.
  6. Right now we are not planning to do images for the individualized parts of a characters equipment. IMHO this is so much work that we'd probably need another $10.000-$20.000 for just that feature. Which is too much as far as I am concerned.
I hope this summarizes all raised questions for now! If you want tiles, start donating - you get free artifacts and items with the deal!

6 comments:

  1. Sounds like a good deal!

    Also, it seems like you made two thirds just in time. Yay for ADOM! :P

    ReplyDelete
  2. As for the binaries, why not do what Angband did (at least until recently when tiles were included in the download) and have just one binary which can work with or without tiles, and have the tiles as an optional download which can be enabled in-game if the file is present?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm glad to hear it. I have a sinking feeling about the graphics and would hate to try them out knowing it's the only (updated) way to play from now on. :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Wow those graphics are amazing! If everything goes through and those do end up being an official tileset for ADOM II it seems like that would open a lot of doors for the game. Especially for attracting new players to the game!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Some ideas:
    A blue/green/red outline added to a tile for items whose B/U/C status is known.
    Small icons (8x8) that would overlay monsters to show the status effects like bleeding.
    And of course, a "more" icon to show that there is more than one thing on the tile.

    Also, how many tiles would there be for gold? A detailed image of a coin for one gold, a stack of coins for small amount and a pile for large amount? :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thinking about coins a bit more, it would be fun to have a "Flip a coin" command that randomly generates "Heads" or "Tails" -- but only if you have at least 1 gold :)
    Or, for a high-level lightning expert, a railgun attack using coins :) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=279ILZThVRA&)

    ReplyDelete