Monday, June 13, 2016

Weekly ADOM update: Character generation, graphics & bug fixes

Hi everyone!

As I already managed to miss the second weekly ADOM update (because we were on a Bruce Springsteen concert in London and I travelled without my computer) here we go with the next regular update:

  • In the past two weeks Zeno, Krys and Jochen mostly have been working on getting the revised graphical character generation process working and we are very close now (although I am reminded all the time for the reasons of a pure ASCII interface - it's so much easier to do ;-D ). We'll definitely be doing another public test release before we release a new Steam version as there still is a serious number of touchy issues (with the new shifting dungeon sections, the intricacies of the character generation process, the bugs introduced by exchanging REPL with an event system, etc.).
  • Krys has started adding more detailed imagery, e.g. personalized shopkeepers:
  • Lucas keeps cranking out more music, his compositions becoming more and more complex and intricate by the week.
  • I have started going through the bug lists and fixing more bugs.
  • Tomorrow I finally intend to continue with ADOM RPG (unboxing video, the unopened box has been lying here for many weeks as shameful as it is to admit this) and then getting the address database up and running.
Regarding health issues I sadly once again caught a cold (probably during the flight to London). For some reason my body this year is very easily affected by colds and this is the third or fourth in about six to eight weeks - which makes no sense at all and keeps slowing me down more than I like. Thus it's another trip to the doctor tomorrow... I guess I'm getting old.

Next weekend my company is going to celebrate its 15th birthday and we are taking most of our colleagues to a three-day-party-trip to Ibiza, starting on Friday. Thus next weekend there again will be no update (but hopefully at the beginning of the week after Sunday).

On a more strategic level I have been pondering about ADOM and ADOM II and I'm more and more getting a feeling that I will start back-porting more features from ADOM II to ADOM when the time comes for new adventures (but first the crowdfunding tasks need to be completed). But by now I have architectural ideas for the construction system already implemented in ADOM II and for extending the wilderness maps (maybe to contain a full world at some point). The main difficulty here is that ADOM is written in C (which is not an object-oriented language thus making many implementation details a lot more complex and convoluted than I like). Jochen and I also continue discussing porting ADOM to C++ (in a very controlled way) in order get more expressive power for programming. We'll see.

10 comments:

  1. Written in C? But there are so many classes in ADOM. ;)

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  2. This is exactly the kind of stuff I was hoping to hear! Thanks for the update, the backporting of ADOM II features sounds really interesting...

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  3. Wow! Thanks for update! Looking to see more details on ADOM II feature migration to ADOM.

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  4. *wink, wink, nudge, nudge*

    https://www.lua.org/pil/24.html

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    1. I don't understand the message :-) ?

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    2. I think he is saying use LUA instead of C++.

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  6. really like the new music samples posted in another update.

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  7. Re LUA: I think that calls for a "I had a problem, then decided to use LUA to solve it. Now I have two problems..."

    Cool scripting language. Not a programming language in my experience. Now, some enormous future feature where one could customize locations in ADOM might be the right place to have LUA scripting for interactivity...

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  8. ...And good luck with the colds and the doctor! Sadly the time that sequence-of-colds happened to me it was more serious; I'm hoping for a much better outcome for you.

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