Ultimate ADOM: Loading & Saving (Technical Clarification)

Load & Save is coming soon. If we hadn’t stumbled upon a serious internal bug it would have been part of the EA release. We are working on it and expect to provide ASAP.

 

So what happened? Why are we going to EA without such an important feature, knowing full well people usually don't like leaving their computers running for hours?

 

It's quite simple: It's entirely our fault. The first is that we've been overly optimistic about our ability to get Saving and Loading into the game in a way that works instead of most often placing you into a mirror universe of the one you left when saving, where things roughly look the same but don't, and bugs will murder, corrupt and crash you, and not in a good way. In short: The solution we thought would work didn't quite, and we feel that the frustration of trying to load a game that would then crash around you would have been much higher than not being able to save and load at all.

 

Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos is still an Early Access game, and as such there are some core features missing. We have recently published a roadmap where we outline where the next big features such as Hunger and Corruption (in April), better combat options and AI (in June) or enemy spellcasters (in August) will make it into the game.

 

Your feedback, both positive and negative, is very valuable to us and very welcome.

 

In the next few days, we are focusing nearly exclusively to getting Saving and Loading into the game in a way that works for everyone. Thank you for your patience!

  

Here's a technical explanation for those of you in the know or with the interest about what went wrong with our initial estimate.

 

Data in Ultimate ADOM is insanely complex.

This now is going to get a bit technical but I would like to explain what happened so that everything is clear and in the open: While we have 20+ years of experience doing Java development and the many years of C programming ADOM,  the C# and Unity used in Ultimate ADOM brings its own challenges with it. Sometimes these are unexpected. The dangerous thing we noticed early on is that – while C# and Java look very similar on the surface – the actual ecosystems are vastly different, especially in the design approach to the programming languages and the open source ecosystem surrounding these two worlds.

 

My personal opinion is that both languages are fantastic to work with (and these days I even prefer C# to Java although Java has been my big love over more than 20 years [I started with Java in 1998]). But strangely both languages have areas where the design and engineering behind the languages are miles ahead of the contestant and you really wonder “how can this happen with all these brilliant people working on language design”. And Java has the far better open source ecosystem with far more advanced (and tried and tested) solutions to complex issues.

 

But back to our game:

Ultimate ADOM has a very complex data structure because we really try to simulate a highly detailed fantasy environment. Our goal is to implement a game engine that can scale up the complexity to insane levels, all in the name of fun. Our target is more the micro level of the game (e.g. the individual character, the items carried, the murals on walls, the slippery fluid on the ground, the genetic DNA of your hand) because we want to have crazy features often mentioned in the ramp-up of the game release like grafting (e.g. attaching a dragon head to your body giving you the ability to bite and breathe fire), animancy (e.g. animating your trusted sword and turning it into a companion that follows you through the dungeon… or doing the same with an altar or a dungeon wall) and complex elemental magic and related effects (weapons becoming damaged from hacking at walls, an extensive liquid system in order to have pools of healing liquid or rivers of confusion liquid). And so on and so forth. To be able to do this we built a system based on a technology called ECS (entity-component-system) and used that for everything in the game. For absolutely everything.

 

So e.g. the player character is an entity that in turn consists of a skeleton (an entity) with more than 15 individual body parts (again entities), has a race and profession (all entities) and lots of equipment (all entities, some of that attached to body parts, others in your backpack, again all entities). Items among other things are made from certain materials (defined as entities) and weapons/spells/etc. cause damage (again defined as entities). If you do a text dump (in an internal JSON-like format) of just a freshly created player character that text dump will have more than 700,000 (!) lines of text. Yes, there is a lot of redundancy in that but the nested complexity of the entities and components used to model the game world is quite astonishing (even to us). Especially as performance is pretty good with this although we yet have to do a lot of performance tuning during EA.

 

Is this complexity really necessary? I have pondered this question long and often and still will answer it with a resounding “yes” given our target of creating the most intricate and complex (in a fun way) roguelike ever.

 

So what about saving and loading?

 

Because we underestimated the complexity of saving and loading this huge set of data in the C# ecosystem. We had done very early prototypes in Java about three to four years ago when we first decided whether to embark on this journey and not. We used simple and plain Java serialization to test loading and saving data. And it performed splendidly. (To explain: serialization is a feature of many languages used to persist data to a hard disk or some other kind of storage and restore it from there – it usually saves you the pain of doing everything by hand at the cost of some performance). Due to the complexity of our data we very much planned to not handle everything on our own but to rely on trusted frameworks developed by other amazing engineers. And for the Java test everything worked well.

 

Then we checked off this issue and basically ignored it for a long while. The original plan was to have a fully implemented load & save feature by Christmas 2020 and we had set aside a week of implementing and testing it because we had managed to implement it three years earlier in half a day in Java.

 

Then we tried it in C# and had to learn it simply didn’t work. At all. Beyond any hope. The only inbuild C# framework we got to work is the BinaryFormatter. If you ignore for a moment that Microsoft  itself says “Don’t use the BinaryFormatter – it’s a security disaster waiting to happen” (and still keeps it in the framework) it was the only framework that managed to save and load our game. But I’m up to this day not 100% sure if it truly worked because even for a freshly started game it created a save file with more than 100 megabytes of size which took more than 10 minutes to save and more than 40 (!) minutes to load.

 

You can imagine our shock and disbelief after not having seen any such issues with earlier Java tests. After recovering from stun and shock we frantically went through other C# serialization frameworks (https://aloiskraus.wordpress.com/2017/04/23/the-definitive-serialization-performance-guide/ has a great list and compares them for performance). And none of them worked for us. Some showed critical bugs when encountering our huge data structures, some were not correctly able to handle all private data and would have forced us to completely wreck a well-designed architecture (which would have taken weeks – at this stage Ultimate ADOM has more than 500000 lines of code and comments in more than 3900 classes) with uncertain outcome. And each framework had different requirements on how to change the architecture. So we tested about half a dozen of frameworks that required only mild changes and each and everyone failed. Some had unexplained crashes, others were much worse at performance for our case than you would have expected, etc.

 

At that point we already had spent more than 20 days working on nothing but this issue. 20 days that now were missing from our release plan. 

 

So we made the final and hard decision: We are going to do loading and saving ourselves and code everything by hand. From ADOM I knew how staggering this task is because you then have to go into each and every bit of data you have and save and load every single byte in the correct order. And not forget to handle a single important task. So we knew this task also was mind-blowing. My colleague and friend Jochen Terstiege (who has more than 15 years of ADOM experience) took the brunt of the task and the rest of the team supported him as best as we could. And we managed to have a working version of load & save about nine days before release. At the cost of another 10-12 days of working on nothing but load & save, going through more than a thousand classes to implement our own algorithm.

 

First results were great: file size was reduced from 100 megabytes to about 5 megabytes (and there is room for optimization), saving now takes 3-5 seconds at most and loading roughly 2-3 seconds (this will increase for very late game stages because there is more data to handle) but overall the results were blazingly good.

 

So we dared to breathe a sigh of relief, full well knowing that this problem had caused us to lose a total of a month planned for finalizing and polishing features before release. 

 

And then about four days before release disaster again struck: We found a serious problem that ruins save files. And we know we now had lost. No way to share this load & save feature for EA because destroying save files is even worse than not being able to save stuff.

 

So we made the decision to not have load & save in the EA release and struggle ahead. That is where we are standing right now and why we decided to disable it just before the launch. My 20+ years of experience as a programmer and architect and all my ADOM/JADE/Java experience I felt right in assuming that load & save wouldn’t be the huge issue it has become, but sometimes it doesn't work out like that.

 

My optimistic side tells me we might have it by beginning of next week, my pessimistic side says “end of next week” but to be honest I really do not want to give a promise here because we already misjudged once. We are working on a fix and we can see it on the horizon. Now it is a matter of focus and concentration. That’s why we probably also could have communicated much better, and hope this clears up the situation!

 

In summary:

• We underestimated the complexity of saving and loading.
• We ask you to continue supporting us and a little bit more patience while we finally get this done and into your hands.
• Please test and play the game and give us all your other feedback. ADOM was built on the creativity and support of a most wonderful community and we want to continue this tried and tested approach to deliver the most complex roguelike ever (meaning fun complexity).

And please consider that we are a tiny Indie team. At best 2.5 programmers are working on this game (plus 2.2 graphical artists and one sound/music designer). And that’s it.

 

I am very sure that in a couple of weeks the then current EA version will look very different from now and be a lot more complete but we can’t change the present.

 

That being said the team already has holed up and dooes its best to fix the load & save issue (and whatever else you report). And provide new releases ASAP. We are 150% committed to Ultimate ADOM and everyone in the team gave its best to deliver a great experience. But sometimes it’s the small stones that cause you to stumble.

 

Thanks for listening. I hope to be back very soon with an announcement about a release containing load & save ;-) We will keep you updated!

 

Thomas Biskup

Ultimate ADOM vs ADOM Classic - The Overworld (and lack thereof)

One of the main points of criticism is that Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos seems to be much smaller in scope that ADOM is. After all, there's a huge surface world with multiple dungeons, quests ranging from saving puppies from deadly caves to befriending water dragons with multiple choices along the way.

Caverns of Chaos starts right at the entrance to the titular caverns, with the characters sent into the infested depths for a reason between them and their faction choices.

Few people remember ADOM actually started the same way - initially, it was all just one big dungeon with monsters becoming more and more powerful the longer you spent in a level to force you moving onwards. It featured no beings to talk with, no story lines and just an ever-growing amount of complex things you could do. Skills like Herbalism made it into the game long before any thoughts of a surface world existed!

We're not going the same way with Ultimate ADOM. There are plots, and stories, and factions to work with and appease or slaughter and loot. Quest chains will require player decisions and change the flow of the game accordingly. ADOM has a lot of different endings: Slay the evil God of ChAoS, usurp his throne or even destroy the universe. 

While we feel it's okay to spoiler a game that's been out for nearly thirty years now, we're going to keep quiet about the different endings you will be able to achieve in Ultimate ADOM - but there also will be different ones, including some which require a bit of outside-the-box thinking and experimentation. It will be possible to end the game by simply slaughtering everything if your character is sufficiently powerful and warded, though this may not be the most satisfying and valuable ending.

While Classic ADOM is a game focused deeply on exploring a large variety of dungeons and exploring, we want to put Ultimate ADOM's emphasis on cool gameplay mechanics. I wrote about the complexity already in detail last week, but there are also a lot of different environments to explore in the Caverns of Chaos! Players of our Alpha might have already discovered the Minor Chaos Temple located somewhere near the kobold caves, or the strange and deadly waters of Lake Gloom.

During Early Access, more locations will be revealed and implemented! Rumors of a strange temple populated by frog-like creatures featuring weird mind powers float around, and Rolf is sending out warriors to locate the remaining dwarfkin of Dwarftown somewhere deep below. A powerful slithering creature with snakes for hair has made her lair somewhere in the furthest depth, a mad alchemist is using the nearby source of ChAoS to empower their mad experiments and a very dangerous necromancer is using the many corpses these caves produce for his own nefarious purpose.

All of these areas - and many more - will feature questlines that are local or affect the whole dungeon and your faction's main story. So there is plenty to explore, and not everything will be available to visit every time you venture into the dungeon.

That's not to say there will never be a surface world. We roughly know where we want to go during Early Access, but the road definitely won't end there. While the area around the Drakkalor Chain has been corrupted, shattered and made thoroughly inhospitable due to the events happening in ADOM, there may still be plenty of things to do for an aspiring hero. But that's something for much later!

Ultimate ADOM vs ADOM Classic - Complexity and Details

Some of the comments we've been receiving about Ultimate ADOM is that it seems to lack complexity, and it's easy to see where that perception might come from. Unlike ADOM's multiple dungeons and expansive overworld, in UA there is a single dungeon (though with several branches both optional and mandatory), and we have gamepad support.

Being seemingly confined in a single, deadly environment and being more accessible when it comes to controls does not limit the complexity of the game however. Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos' underlying logic engine allows it to simulate things that have never been possible with ADOM.

Play with fire

Interact with anything. Extinguish torches and candles, light them (if your character has the tools, the skill or the appropriate magic) or destroy them with raw physical rage. Open fire has a variety of uses not fully implemented yet, but which will come when elemental combination effects hit our Early Access roadmap.

Bumping into burning braziers will cause the oil to spill to neighboring spaces depending on the direction of the bump, potentially setting poorly positioned enemies aflame. Please note that monsters will occasionally also stumble into these things, making fighting near braziers a dangerous but potentially rewarding tactical choice - unlike in ADOM Classic, monsters now have access to exactly the same skills and actions as the player character.

Potions

Like in ADOM, potions can still be used in a variety of creative ways apart from drinking them. For example, you can pour orange juice into a river or coat an iron maiden with poison if that is what you wish to do, because Ultimate ADOM is not going to stop you from doing that. You will even be able to coat your weapon with a healing potion, in case an enemy disarms you, picks up your blade and decides to pummel you with it. It's all about being prepared, and while these are all instances which had to be hard-coded in ADOM, UA's logic engine will just allow you to do all of this because it's possible to simply interact with all the objects in the game.

There's one major change though - we will not have any "unidentified" potions or scrolls anymore. While some players enjoyed the challenge of finding out over and over again if a certain potion is poison or healing this session, most did not enjoy experimenting over and over again and we decided that in the Caverns of Chaos, potions are clearly labelled this time.

Grafting, Limbs and meaningful critical hits

Here's something that also hasn't been possible in ADOM, and best of all: It's already in game when we hit Early Access on February the 11th. While every character (at least, for now) starts out with two arms, two legs, a torso and a head, they do not need to remain so for long. Powerful enemies skilled in wielding bladed weapons (especially axes) may score a lucky hit, sending limbs flying.

Additionally, some characters specializing in this may graft monster bodyparts to themselves, because what's better than wielding two axes? Wielding four axes, one for each arm you could eventually run around with. Found a really cool helmet but it's too small for your regular head? Kill a kobold, butcher its corpse and graft its head onto your shoulders. You now have a slot for wearing a smaller helmet.

Animate everything

Playing a White Necromancer in ADOM was quite difficult, because clay was hard to come by. The Animancy school of magic in Ultimate ADOM will allow your character to animate anything she desires. Spare weapons, coffins, corpses or even the walls of the dungeon itself - as long as you have enough power points spare, a wizard specializing in Animancy will never truly have to be alone.

You might even cut off a minotaur's arm in combat, animate it and then leave it to fight its original owner if you are feeling particularly cruel.

So while the dungeon's scope itself is a bit smaller than all the different locations of ADOM Classic (for now, at least, because developing roguelikes is something one does not simply stop just because it's feature complete), we feel we have added all the fun, complex bits we couldn't add to ADOM due to the code simply not allowing for it. And there's a lot more to come!

Ultimate ADOM vs ADOM Classic - The new skill system explained

As we're nearing Early Access for Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos, we want to shine a light on the different approaches to game design for old ADOM players. What can you expect to see in the sequel? What are the changes to the game concept you all love and play?

In this mini-series, we want to highlight the differences between the original ADOM and its sequel, and what the thought processes was behind the decisions.

If you want to see a specific question addressed, drop a note! Yes, diagonal movement is going to be answered.

Why are there only five classes? Considering that ADOM has 22 classes, that's a net loss of 17 classes. Quite significant, if taken at face value.

First of all, we're heading to Early Access for Ultimate ADOM for a very simple reason: It's not done yet. There'll be more classes incoming, though the final number is still up for debate.

Second, and more importantly, classes in Ultimate ADOM are not like classes in ADOM. Let's have a look at Alynna the elven archer up there. They can Sneak, Butcher things and Cast spells among other standard actions from the very beginning - because they decided to spend their skill points in these trees:

Grafting

As an Elf, Alynna receives additional skill points in arcane skills. The elf decided to put their arcane talent into Grafting, to make the best use of the many, many corpses they will leave behind. A different elf archer might have invested into Hydromancy to improve their defense or hurl icy bolts at their enemies. An investment into Animancy might have been worthwhile too - turning the very dungeon around you into allies, allowing your archer to keep their distance as they rain down missile attacks at the monsters.

There will be new arcane categories in the coming weeks, so it's not just a choice between these four schools, but many more.

Archery

The Archer class will receive extra skill points to be distributed to missile weapons. Right now we have a selection of Bows (Alynna's choice), Crossbows and Slings in the game, but there are plans for including throwing weapons, too. There are advantages of specializing in a single category of missile weapons, as this makes unlocking powerful skills and boosts more easy. A different archer might decide to spread evenly between crossbows and slings, though, remaining versatile and ready to deal with monsters that are more resistant to being peppered with pointy sticks.


Stealth

Alynna has also opted to invest a point into the Stealth skill. They could have become stronger and faster, improve their chances for loot from monsters and chests or invest points into literacy to cast spells from scrolls, but a sneaking archer knowing where the nearby traps are and dealing extra damage while being hidden is a very powerful combination.

And that's just the archer class. Let's look at Fira, a female human wizard. She specialized in Animancy (turning objects into companions) and Hydromancy for attack and protection. As a Human, she occasionally gets extra skill points to distribute wherever she wants, and she decided to put some into Literacy and Crossbows - remaining dangerous at range even when out of power points.

Instead of having Necromancer, Elementalist and Wizard classes, there's only Wizards now - but they offer so much more customization than ever before.
 

So, yes. Right now, there's only five classes - but no Wizard, no Fighter, no Adventurer, no Priest and no Archer needs ever be the same.

We can't wait to read about your favorite combinations and the adventures they will encounter!

Life keeps changing... significantly

Dear ADOM community,

while I never have been known for regular updates and timelines keep changing I today would like to talk about a major change in my professional life that also will have profoud effects on my ADOM activities.

As some of you know I am one of three CEOs of a German IT company called QuinScape. QuinScape specializes in enterprise software development in the areas of data & analytics and business applications for large companies. I have been joyfully working in this position for the past 18 years and just recently we decided to make the next big move forward by onboarding a growth investor into the company (link to German page, only, sorry - but Google Translate should be helpful). This investor will allow us to grow the company to the next level and ensure that we can sustain our unique culture, deeply humane view on people and energetic approach to innovation and progress for a long time onwards.

Despite IT markets being pure gold right now, competition for small- and medium-sized companies becomes harder and harder and there is a big trend towards concentration and consolidation rocking the markets.

Often this means being devoured by much larger companies who wreck your own unique culture, just look at numeric ressources and cost synergies. This can ruin a life of work spent on building a unique company culture in a matter of months. We decided that QuinScape is not going to be a company someone else will devour. Instead we want to build a truly unique company group of similar minded organizations that also subscribe to our core company values of openness, competence, fun and loyalty.

With out new partner Auctus we have found a growth investor who takes the same view on how to develop healthy and growing companies while deeply understanding the benefits of a strong employee-oriented culture and holding to values we believe in.

So QuinScape now is facing a very unique opportunity to grow from a single location in Dortmund, Germany, to many locations spread over Germany and the nearby foreign countries... and maybe much further in the more distant future.

I am very happy for myself, the company and our employees that we have been granted such a unique opportunity and want to take it with all my energy.

Both me and my two founding colleagues now are very much focussed on continuing to grow the company to new dimensions - together with our new partner.

But this has a downside: I will have to focus my energy and resources even more and will have to get rid of distractions faster. Also I do not want to sacrifice my family - both my beloved wife and our daughter Hannah, almost 18 months old by now, deserve all the time and love I can give. So focus really has become even more important in my life.

Is ADOM a distraction? Not by any means - it is one of my three big loves (family, company, ADOM) and thus ADOM will not be sacrificed to this new development. But I will have to focus my activities to get by doing a satisfying amount of work despite more limited time resources available to me - which in turn will affect ADOM, ADOM RPG and Ultimate ADOM.

As this is the ADOM blog I will lay out the consequences for ADOM Classic immediately:

• Updates (which have been scarce in fecent months) will remain scarce. But they will continue as the investment into QuinScape also means that I have more personal funds at my disposal that I can invest privately into Team ADOM. Still pace will remain somewhat slow.
• Communication will also remain on a somewhat barren level until we have big things to announce.
• Our prime focus will be the development of Ultimate ADOM (which has made huge progress internally - we just need to be able to finally start showing things).

Feel free to ask questions. I'm deeply committed to the ADOM community and will try my best to keep the flame burning. As this whole situation is new to me, too, I will use the next three months to sort out matters and see where we can take this with my new life arrangements.

Both the ADOM RPG Kickstarter and the Ultimate ADOM blog will receive separate updates.

Thanks for listening & Axes High!
Thomas Biskup
ADOM & Ultimate ADOM Maintainer

The ADOM RPG Kickstarter ends in less than 48 hours!

It's less than 48 hours to jump onto the ADOM RPG Kickstarter bandwagon. Having been funded on day 1 we also managed to unlock lots of new graphics for both rulebooks, 16 additional pages of Ancardian randomness to unleash upon the players and a Game Master screen (and we are close to unlocking the very first adventure). Additionally we managed to get famous RPG legends like Ed Greenwood (the inventor of the Forgotten Realms) and James M. Ward (the mastermind behind Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma world) to write short stories about Ancardia, the home of ADOM!

Now or never is the time to support us in order to unlock more stretch goals!

Big Release Day: ADOM 3.3.3 has been released everywhere!

Hi everyone!

While we are happily running our ADOM RPG Kickstarter we as proudly would like to announce the general availability of ADOM 3.3.3 everywhere:

• It's on Steam.
• It's on GOG.
• It's on IndieDB as a public release (but with less features - see the comparison chart). 

For all fans of the public version: There were many changes and tweaks in the past year. If you want to catch up check out all the changes listed in our change log since version 3.0.6. For everyone else: ADOM 3.3.3 just fixes two bugs found in ADOM 3.3.2 and adds a temporary reminder for our ADOM Kickstarter campaign (sorry for the extra click - but small indie publishers need all the attention they can get and we truly value your love and support).

As for the Kickstarter:

• We have been funded on day 1.
• We have unlocked stretch goals 1 (10 more pieces of art for the Player's Handbook), stretch goal 2 (10 more pieces of art for the Game Master's Guide) and stretch goal 3 (16 more pages of random Ancardian goodness for the Gamemaster's Guide). And now we are close to unlocking stretch goal 4 (the GM screen). Next after that are adventures and tons of background stuff about Ancardia.
• We are working on some good news related to print-at-cost. Stay tuned - hopefully we will have great news within two to three days.
• Help us to make ADOM RPG the best OSR RPG ever created!

And now: Happy hacking!

Thomas Biskup & Team ADOM

ADOM RPG has been funded in less than 24 hours!

We are funded. In less than 24 hours. Now we can unlock all the amazing stretch goals!

Dear ADOM fans: I have often said, but I'll repeat it - you are the greatest guys and girls on Earth!

Thanks so much for your trust - this game will rock!

ADOM RPG Kickstarter now live!

Hi everyone!

As planned our ADOM: The Roleplaying Game Kickstarter campaign went live minutes ago!

Please support us, help reach the funding goal and spread the news - it's so hard to reach people and your help is highly appreciated! Why is this exciting news for ADOM?

For three major reasons:

1. First of all it hopefully will help broadening the audience for ADOM in general. A wider audience always is good because it helps keep us going.
2. Some of the design points from ADOM RPG will find their way into ADOM (not all of them, mind you, and more of them will make their way into Ultimate ADOM because for that we are completely re-examining all aspects of the current system). But there are interesting new parts like racial abilities that scale with increasing experience level (similar to class powers) or new ideas for class powers (so a pending revision of the existing class power system), many new corruption ideas and similar things that are very interesting for ADOM and thus eventually will find their way into ADOM.
3. You finally can play ADOM face to face with other roleplayers. 

Additionally you in theory can affect the development of ADOM, Ultimate ADOM and the RPG in case you'd like to donate on one of the ultra-high levels - these will yield new factions and artifacts we design together with you. These factions and artifacts will make a direct appearance in Ultimate ADOM, in the ADOM RPG and (for the artifacts) also in ADOM.

You can find samples for the ADOM RPG here.

Level advancement and racial abilities in the upcoming ADOM RPG

Here's a link to an interesting blog post about how we try to make level advancement and racial choices extremely meaningful in the ADOM RPG.

Merry Christmas!

Hi everyone!

Team ADOM sends our kindest Christmas greetings to everyone out there (wether you are celebrating Christmas, something else or nothing at all): Enjoy love, peace and happiness and play your part in bringing more of these qualities into the world! Have a great time with your beloved ones, remember those that can't be with us anymore and live your life to the fullest!

Updated: Because I was in typical Christmas hurry I totally forgot to link the awesome Christmas Jam audio soundtrack Lucas composed specifically for Christmas 2018! Enjoy! (and bonus points if you recognize the theme ;-) )

Will the ADOM RPG just be yet another D&D clone?

Read the answers to this import question here.

Announcing the full-featured ADOM RPG

It's shortly before Christmas and sometimes wishes are fulfilled earlier than expected: We are going to release the ADOM Roleplaying Game starting next year.

To my own surprise the most requested "ADOM feature" in a long while has been access to the ADOM (Lite) RPG. The ADOM Lite RPG is a pen & paper version allowing you to relive the adventures of ADOM in a classical pen & paper experience. It was initially created during the "Resurrect ADOM" crowdfunding campaign as a highly limited edition never to be reprinted after the campaign. A promise we kept. Which caused a lot of grief to many people who missed the campaign and would love to play the pen & paper game.

We are keeping the original promise - but now are going to release a new pen & paper roleplaying game based on the Open Game License (OGL). Rewritten and redesigned from scratch,  the OGL ensures ADOM RPG's compatibility with a plethora of old school renaissance (OSR) games out there. At the same time we improve upon the standards of most OSR games by wrapping the rules in a beautifully laid out set of two rulebooks with immensely readable typography and tons of amazing artwork.

The ADOM RPG will be kickstarted in January 2019 (yes, we are going to do two Kickstarters, the first one for the pen & paper ADOM RPG, the second one a little later for Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos).

Starting today the initial version of the ADOM RPG website is up now at https://www.adom-rpg.com - a lot more content will be added over the coming weeks (and we will improve on the website

layout). The roleplaying game will be published as two manuals - the Player's Handbook (PHB) and the Gamemaster's Guide (GMG). Both will be available in full color printings and bound in hardcover. We probably also will make available budget B/W softcover versions. The Kickstarter (which will start in January 2019) will offer the cheapest access possible to both manuals (print at cost basically). Stretch goals hopefully will add a lot more content (and might yield adventure modules and more).

See the samples section of our new website (and the single image below) for impressions on how the ADOM RPG is going to look like.

Thanks for listening - we are looking forward to your feedback!

Celebrating the 100th ADOM release ever!

Hi everyone!

We are proud to announce the release of ADOM 3.3.2 as a general release on Steam and GOG (currently we have a 10% sale on GOG)! This release marks a numerical milestone - it is the 100th release of ADOM since its inception.

ADOM 3.3.2 is a bugfix release increasing stability and providing a number of bug fixes to annoying bugs.  You can find the changelog in the usual location.

We soon hope to release ADOM 3.3.2 as a general public release on IndieDB, too.

In the meantime you can vote for ADOM on IndieDB - ADOM has entered the top 100 of the games at IndieDB and we'd love to win in the roguelike category - so please vote for us!

It's voting time (IndieDB)

Hi everyone!

It's this special time of the year... were you can vote for your favorite game on IndieDB!

We'd love you to vote for ADOM in order to help it endure and thrive. So if you enjoy ADOM and want to see more of it, it would be great if you could cast your ballot in our favor!

Click here and cast your vote!

Thanks!
Thomas & Team ADOM

Modding

There have been a number of moddability requests for ADOM over the years. For Ultimate ADOM we have specific plans. Learn about the modding side of Ultimate ADOM in this post.

Moving forward: ADOM @ GOG & New UA website & Roguelike Celebration 2018

Hi everyone!

As we are getting very close to Roguelike Celebration 2018 things are moving forward. Today I'm very proud to announce two things (and mention a third):

ADOM Deluxe finally arrives on GOG

Announcing ADOM 3.3.1 as a Steam beta

Hi everyone!

Today we are proud to announce ADOM 3.3.1 as a Steam beta release. As usual you can find the instructions for activating the beta version here.

ADOM 3.3.1 is a bugfix release for our 3.3.0 release. It fixes some annoying crash bugs as well as resurrection powers that failed to work with multi-turn actions. You can find the changelog here.

Additionally a word of warning for MacOS Mojave users: On some configurations ADOM seems to start with a black window frame - moving the window once seems to fix this in all cases. We suspect a bug in the underlying SDL library we use. From what we can see there is a bugfix for that in the SDL repository but no official SDL release yet. We apologize and will try to provide a new release as soon as possible.

And now happy hacking!

Thomas & Team ADOM

Announcing ADOM 3.3.0 as a Steam Beta

Hi everyone!

After a long pause we are proud to announce ADOM 3.3.0 as a Steam Beta version (initially). To activate the beta (and switch back later to the stable branch read these instructions).

The biggest change in ADOM 3.3.0 is a major addition to the play comfort:

The graphical version now sports floating texts that indicating important events in the game. There's a multitude of things getting reported:

• damage suffered
• hitpoints recovered
• critical hits
• state changes (e.g. becoming poisoned, stunned, hungry, confused, Strength of Atlas waning and so on)
• indicators for items on the ground
• and more.

IMHO this is a huge UI improvement because in the graphical version the texts in the message buffer become less and less important and you can focus on the PC and the immediate environment. To me this single change completely alters the way I interact with ADOM in the graphical mode and I fell in love with it from the very first moment. In retrospective I feel sorry for not having added this much sooner.

Another (far minor) change is another round of buffing the boss monsters. We still are trying to find the right middle ground for them. Let us know what you think about the latest change.

Additionally ADOM 3.3.0 features dozens of bug fixes and minor improvements and enhancements. You can find the full changelog here. There are some important bugfixes related to multi-turn actions and finally the Volcano quest / interaction with Rolf always should work as intended (sadly that bug corrupted older save files and you only will be able to fully enjoy the quest with new games).

Please try out the Steam beta and test it intensely as we'd love to do a full Steam release very soon as well as a general public release. And then there is something called GOG that is looming on the horizont ;-)

Axes high!
Thomas & Team ADOM

Ultimate ADOM Update

Hi everyone!

I'm somewhat late with my planned Ultimate ADOM update... here we go with bits and pieces.

But first the reason for being late:

Actually we are getting prepared for Roguelike Celebration 2018 in San Francisco. There we will show a first live demo of Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos, our upcoming attempt at building the ultimate roguelike dungeon crawler in a world with details never seen before. (well, maybe in Dwarven Fortress... in some respects... but we are working on building an easily accessible game with tons of depth and surprises ;-) ).
While preparations are underway we decided that we will start seriously speaking about Ultimate ADOM beginning with the presentations at Roguelike Celebration 2018. One part of this is that we currently are preparing a separate new website for Ultimate ADOM that also will contain a blog so that we have a focussed communcation channel for all news regarding Ultimate ADOM.

We have spent the past 8+ months building the underlying game engine for Ultimate ADOM (called AGE for ADOM Game Engine) which in turn is using Unity as a technical platform so that we can more easily ship Ultimate ADOM on many platforms.

AGE is a platform agnostic game engine controlling the game flow and everything that exists in the worlds of Ultimate ADOM. It's Unity-inpendent (although we have no plans to use something other than Unity) and uses an Entity Component System architecture for modeling everything - with refinements to the basic architectural approach to allow us to be even more flexible and build worlds of incredible depth.

The past months have been spent on building many of the basic features needed for a deep game (and there are still quite a few months ahead of us for building more of that).

While I now could start talking about our detailed skeleton infrastructure modeling the shape of bodies (and allowing for amuptations and grafting), our breath-taking new magic system (in which I just added spells for animating inanimate objects), our system for possessing/controlling arbitrary monsters, our growing in-game physics simulation allowing more and more complex interactions with the environment (from freezing water over boiling it to steam clouds, push mechanics and more) I'll defer doing so until we start presenting stuff at the beginning of October.

Additionally we are heavily working on our graphics and sounds for the game as well as lots of concept art (some of which I already posted).

Please follow my Twitter account where I occasionally tease things if you feel you need infos now... everything else will have to wait a little more. Next week we will be finalizing our communcation plans for the weeks and months to come and then we'll see!

Kind regards
Thomas Biskup

P.S.: Here's a brief summary of things I posted on Twitter that you might have missed:

A short video demo of bits and pieces of the new ASCII animation system:

Just finished the basic #ASCII #animation #framework for Ultimate #ADOM. The video is not perfect but should give a basic idea of what it can do. Will next be used when targetting spells (and more stuff in the future). #indiedev #roguelike #gamedev pic.twitter.com/vMZC7FsTsK

— Thomas Biskup (@adom_dev) 8. August 2018

Genders, genders, genders:

Modeling bodyparts:

Our beautiful ASCII tooltips: