Monday, October 24, 2016

Crowdfunding address verification activated (ADOM Lite RPG & stuff)

*** IMPORTANT UPDATE *** 
24th of October, 10pm German time: I somehow managed to break the character encoding when saving address data. The problem is pretty weird as my code basically stopped working overnight: When I debugged my code I still had working data from yesterdays tests in the database - but I was unable to correctly store the data today. Even though I hadn't changed anything about the code. It seems that ChAoS somehow is involved o_O 

As a consequence I sadly have to ask everyone to login once more, check their old inputs (or enter their data for the first time) and confirm the address data once again (I reset the confirmation flag to force you to check once more what you entered and prevent any new problems). I'm very sorry for the inconvenience and hopefully I didn't break anything else (this time I even tested with Mandarine and other exotic encodings... everything now seems to work). So please check your address data!

Sorry once more - I am deeply ashamed!

Hi everyone!

Finally the address survey is online for ADOM Lite RPG (and the other physical rewards like the postcards, code certificates and RPG boxes from our crowdfunding campaign).

Please go to the ADOM: The Resurrection fulfillment portal, login or (or request your password data if you never before logged in or forgot your password) and then fill out the address form. Save the data and check the address confirmation box once you are sure that your full address is correct. Please note that I only will send out physical rewards to confirmed addresses!

Currently I plan a first shipment of stuff roughly for the 15th of November (so that everyone has a chance to get goodies before Christmas).

If there are any problems, you can't login, the number of RPG copies shown is incorrect, etc. please drop me an email at creator(at)ancientdomainsofmystery.com and I will try to work out any kinks during the next weeks.

Thanks for your patience and now let's get your addresses confirmed.

Sunday, October 16, 2016

ADOM R72 (version 2.2.6) released as a Steam beta!

Hi everyone!

We are proud to announce the release of ADOM R72 as a Steam beta. This release should be another very big step forward in our quest improving the ADOM/NotEye performance, the biggest change being the introduction of a JIT (just in time) compiler for the LUA scripting language which is used by major parts of the NotEye engine (which in turn drives all our output stuff for both ASCII and tiled modes on Steam). LUA is a scripting language that normally is interpreted at runtime (and thus slower than compiled languages). With the integration of LuaJIT we now combine the advantages of a scripting language with the performance of compiled languages - on some older test systems of ours we have seen a performance increase of up to 1500% (!) (but don't expect that as a general case... it's more of a special case for older systems... although many cases should see at least a doubling). Additionally the UI output now seems to behave less erratic and provides more constant frame rates.

Since this is our first experience with LuaJIT we again decided to go for a Steam beta release. To use it follow these instructions:
  • Go to your Steam games library.
  • Right-click on the ADOM entry.
  • Click on "Properties".
  • Select the "Betas" tab.
  • Select "Beta - public beta test" in the dropdown box.
  • Close the dialog.
  • Play.
As usual you can find the changelog here (there are some more internal performance improvements and minor bugfixes).

And now enjoy playing!
Thomas & Team ADOM

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

ADOM R71 (version 2.2.5) released as a Steam beta!

Hi everyone!

And here we go again with the next minor ADOM release (while I keep working on the next truly major ADOM release and Jochen is reworking our build infrastructure): ADOM R71 (version 2.2.5) now is available as a Steam beta. Follow the instructions provided for previous beta releases to install ADOM R71. The changeling is available in the usual place.

Again we have a slew of minor improvements, the most importantly probably being the ability to configure the classic interface via a configuration option. Additionally we have fixed another batch of minor bugs.

Enjoy!

P.S.: I still have to do my write-up of the roguelike celebration but I spent the past couple of days writing an entity-component-system in order to test out its general viability for ADOM (I got inspired by Cogmind and Caves of Qud during Roguelike Celebration ;-) ). I wrote my prototype in Java, discovered a number of issues (performance specifically) but now have a firm enough grasp on the topic to try mapping the approach to an ADOM quest/story engine I'm right now planning (although this is something that's going to happen after we are done with the crowdfunding stuff... or at least 99% of it).