Announcing ADOM 3.0.1 for prerelease testers

Hi everyone!

since Thomas is on his way back to Europe, I have the honor to announce ADOM 3.0.1 for our prerelease testers. 

Please check the changelog, this version contains a lot of fixes for ADOM 3.0.0. Have fun testing!

Stay tuned!
Jochen & Team ADOM

Announcing ADOM 2.3.2 for prerelease testers

Hi everyone!

After ADOM 2.3.0 and ADOM 2.3.1 we are happy to announce ADOM 2.3.2 for our prerelease testers. Again we have lots of bug fixes but as I am a bit late in doing the official announcement (being on vacation - in theory) we sadly also already have our first bug report :-( Luckily it's not tremendously important in so far as most players never will even get close to that situation in the game - but it is very annoying as it again affects one of the cool new quests. So there probably soon will be yet another release in the very near future.

The changelog is getting shorter but still somewhat impressive. Enjoy the game for now and also give us some feedback on the revised point-based character generation, pick/drop, etc.

Stay tuned!
Thomas & Team ADOM

P.S.: Our focus (besides maybe another small bug fix release on the sideline now is a graphical release - we are getting closer).

Communication bubbles in ADOM

Hi everyone!

Today I'm particularly proud to present a masterpiece of ASCII art (*cough*, *cough* - bare with me - without Krys my artistic abilities are somewhat rudimentary ;-) ).

For a long time (and especially with the new graphical mode) people rightfully complained about dialogs with NPCs and monsters and the texts uttered by them were not very well readable.

I have taken these complaints to heart and proudly present the new ADOM speech bubble mechanism I implemented:

These bubbles adjust in size, in theory the text contained can be pageable and ADOM tries to position them smartly so that neither the involved speakers nor the nearby context gets obscured. There yet has to be a lot of testing to see if this works well in all instances (prerelease testers, you'll get work in the nearer future :-) ) but I am very happy with the current mechanism. And I find it remarkably beautiful for ASCII art :-)

Let me know what you think!
(and as usual my dear compatriots in crime [Team ADOM] are under pressure to catch up graphically with my ASCII designs ;-) )

Modern roguelikes: What gives?

We've been on a nice weekend trip and I had some to think. One question that keeps me busy is "What makes a roguelike game a 'modern roguelike game'"?

More on ASCII symbols

Yesterday I asked for suggestions for ASCII symbols for armies and boats. Today I would like to refine the request as I have made a decision for armies and JADE now already contains different craft types.

Looking for ASCII symbol suggestions (and colors?)

After yesterdays great round of suggestions today I am looking for suggestions for the look of two things that did not exist in ADOM: Armies and ships.

Wrestling with the JADE manual

Currently I feel that I hate writing the manual for JADE. Having much more fun programming JADE in one reason for that feeling. But not the only. So I have been wondering what's up and I have come to some conclusions.