Sunday, October 20, 2013

ADOM 1.2.0 Prerelease 17 is now available!

I am very proud to announce the availability of ADOM 1.2.0 Prerelease 17. As usual I am totally convinced that this is the best version of ADOM ever - but this time even more so in so many ways I am going to explain below.

Again a lot of special things have been added, particularly awesome are the first ADOM Sage enhancements being added to the game. This ticket lists all the details and Jochen has outdone himself keeping compatibility to ADOM Sage. Also totally cool is the new feature allowing you to play the game again and again without having to restart it or the new game end menu that makes it much easier and less error-prone to see all important information.

After installing the new version please keep the following things in mind:
  • It is very important to remove the adom.kbd and adom.cfg files for some of the new features to work. If you have modified these files yourself, you should make a backup of them first.
  • You can disable the "animation mode" by changing the following settings:
    • Open the NotEye menu with "Ctrl+m"
    • Open to the animations & scrolling menu: press "m" followed by "c"
    • Change both "movement animation speed" and "auto-centering speed" to 10000
  • You can disable the mouse scrolling:
    • Open the NotEye menu with "Ctrl+m"
    • Open to the animations & scrolling menu: press "m" followed by "c"
    • Change the "manual scrolling speed" to 0
The prerelease is - as usual - only available for folks participating in the prerelease program of ADOM or those who donated to the crowd funding campaign. As usual it's available from the usual place.

Why do I think that this release truly the best and most important release of ADOM ever? For several reasons:
  1. This version of ADOM truly starts to showcase the immense quality of the graphical variant. While I at first was not a glowing supporter of a graphical mode, I'm totally awed by Krys', Zenos and Jochens immense additions to the game. We now not only have a stunning graphical mode and the most beautiful tile set to ever grace a roguelike game, but we also start to have high end features like movement animations (not per icon but for the icons moving on the map), the mini map, various features in the mini map, etc. Additionally Krys really is blowing my mind with totally awesome images for various special places in the game, some of which I would like showcase below. Being able to add such images to al important places in the game is a dream for me by now and one of several things we will be doing once we can secure more funding (Krys needs to eat, too, so I can't expect him to sacrifice major parts of his life without fair compensation, especially as he keeps outdoing himself all the time).
  2. The sound support is getting better and better. While a lot more of that will be added to p18 (as Lucas really added lots of stuff in the past couple of days we couldn't fully integrate yet). Now we are starting to add more individual sounds and we are recording voice overs for a special place in the team, where you'll be able to experience Team ADOM live in a special situation :-) Look forward to a very fun easter egg :-) Lucas' idea just rawkz!
  3. Zenos NotEye integration is getting better and better and enables more and more power features that I never would have dreamed of when we started the project.
In summary I truly believe that we now can move forward to Steam and other gaming sites in order to create a long term funding model for ADOM besides the free version of ADOM. Team ADOM is a dream come true and my most important mission - besides finishing the promises from the crowd fundign campaign - will be to find a working business model that allows me to keep these great folks on board for as long as possible, preferrably full time (yes, just to avoid misunderstandings like we had before the crowd funding campaign: it's not about money for me right now but about money for those amazingly talented people to be able to have them working on ADOM as full time as possible).

Over the next couple of days - while I keep fighting with the ADOM Lite RPG - I will post more about these ventures as we now need to move forward with renewed vigor into new worlds of adventure to make ADOM the best roguelike game ever - in any category. That's the goal and we all burn for it!

Enough rambling, here are a couple of the new images of Krys that totally blew my mind. Krys for me really is the demigod of roguelike imagery and together with Jochen, Lucas and Zeno these guys keep moving ADOM to new glorious heights.

Here we go:

The new splash when getting killed:

The new slash when winning the game:

And now imagine having such glorious art throughout the game... when finding special locations, encountering special beings and in other specia situation.

Especially the victory splash is giving me total shivers :-)

And now: Enjoy p17. More blog posts are going to come up in the evening to get the next events moving!

11 comments:

  1. Oh cool, Sage was my ticket! I *love* quality-of-life enhancements. Thanks!

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  2. Thanks, I've been playing this game for so long, and with sage. Glad I supported it. Yet I still haven't beaten it without cheating... guess I should give it another few goes.

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  3. When this hits Steam, is there any possibility of including a daily leaderboard for everyone to view online?

    The daily challenge in Spelunky has greatly enhanced the long-term appeal of that particular game, and while I know ADOM can stand on it's own merits, I just think something like this would be terrific for the community.

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    1. We already have an implementation for globally shared highscores, so a daily leaderboard should be a breeze. I'll talk to Jochen about it tomorrow ;-)

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  4. Keep up the good work. It's awesome to see how the project I cofunded develops! I have some questions though:

    Is't possible to disable graphics and fall back to the old good text mode? Don't get me wrong, I love the tiles and graphics. But sometimes I feel nostalgic for old ADOM.

    Also, is it possible to disable sound when playing ADOM+NotEye? If not, please, consider this a feature request. Sometimes I would like to listen to my music, and not to ADOM's music. It would also be nice to have a separate control over music and other sound effects.

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    1. Hi! Oneiros here. In order to modify sound and music volume (sound still not implemented), open the Noteye menu (Ctrl + m) and select option "V" to access sound options.

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    2. An ASCII display only mode is available in NotEye (in fact you can switch between ASCII and tiles with F-10). You can find even more display modes in the NotEye menu (Ctrl+m) which Oneiros already mentioned.

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  5. can't seem to download the latest version. I go to the secure site, login, and click the link to access the download page, but it never goes anywhere. anyone else having this problem? o_O?

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    Replies
    1. Does the problem still exist? Which version did you try to download?

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  6. The progress is very impressive, you guys work really hard!

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  7. "In summary I truly believe that we now can move forward to Steam and other gaming sites in order to create a long term funding model for ADOM besides the free version of ADOM.". AFAIK Desura might be better suited than Steam for funding/selling indie games like ADOM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desura

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