ADOM 3.1.3 available as a public Steam release

Hi everyone!

We are happy to announce ADOM 3.1.3 as a public (not beta!) release on Steam. ADOM 3.1.3 contains another big package of bug fixes and minor improvements and concludes the "ADOM 3.1.x talents & traps" release (unless we somehow managed to introduce new serious bugs). The changelog as usual contains all the details. If you did not try any of the betas you should browse all the changes starting with version 3.1.0 - quite a lot has happened!

We already are working on ADOM 3.2.0 which will contain the personalized PC sprites as its major feature (e.g. correct hair and eye colors as well as much closer matching equipment). We expect a mid-April release for that.

So for now enjoy the latest version on Steam - it should update automatically (but remember to deactivate your beta mode if you participated in that).

Happy Easter and Happy Hacking!
Thomas Biskup & Team ADOM

P.S.: Work on Ultimate #ADOM also is progressing. We just spent roughly 27 hours on two workshop days with the European part of Team Ultimate ADOM to finalize our PoC phase and make many decisions (as well as raise new questions regarding optimizations to game play). I'm by now hopefully settled enough with out daughter so that I can resume regular blogging :-) Despite the social silence on this front we are progressing well with the plans for our first games under the "Ultimate ADOM" brand - more to come soon!

Here's a picture of our team meeting (although our marketing guy is missing on it):

(from left to right: The Creator, Jochen [master architect], Krys [Lead artist], Bastian [our recently added support & concept artist])

Four weeks of Ultimate ADOM development (UADOM Update #2)

Hi everyone!

Another two weeks passed at lightning speed... I barely can believe it. We have been very hard working on Ultimate ADOM (and Jochen managed to squeeze in some ADOM bug fixing but we yet need to get into shape for the next release). So what has been done over the past two weeks:

• I finally finished my prototype: The PC can move, blocking features etc. work and I can fight and kill a fully armed orc. In theory the orc also can fight back but the code for that still is a bit primitive. While this might sound trivial (and I know I can implement that with a simple setup in an afternoon) I'm still very happy with that progress because the underlying AGE (ADOM Game Engine) architecture that was built for that simple purpose can do so much more and the above scenario is the smallest proof of concept I could think about. Much of what already has been created will only show its true power later one once we work on the real game content.
• The prototype includes mechanisms for dying and resurrection, multiple damage types caused by singular attacks (e.g. a holy mace of fire & brimstone causing 2d4 crushing damage, 3d6 fire damage and +9 holy damage against undead) as well as combat mechanisms for arbitrary body shapes (e.g. detailed attacks with claws, teeth and the tail for a great winged poison drake or 2-4 melee attacks with different weapons for a four-armed ettin, etc.).
• The ASCII engine I'm using for my prototype has seem some optimization (although I still is woefully incomplete and ugly - Jochen now will start to elaborate it).
• The underlying entity component system has been greatly elaborated (there are many more very convenient JSON based means of configuration now), tested (many ugly bugs squished) and refined (it's becoming more straightforward and I'm working hard on refactoring special cases as soon as possible to make the underlying engine as stable as possible). All that right now is not very meaningful to you as a player but in the end it will allow us to produce more amazing content at much greater speed than ever before ;-)
• We have mostly concluded our 2D tests with Unity and now evaluate whether a 3D version might be the way to go. Additionally we are still very busy discussing the general feel of the art. We definitely want it to be darker and more gritty than in ADOM Classic but there are so many options we so far failed to finalize our ideas.
• We learned a lot about performance in Unity. AGE (ADOM Game Engine) is heavily optimized to be able to utilize hundreds of thousands of entities with many complex components and while we haven't stress-tested that we already learned a lot about what not to do (including such curiosities like "comparing two colors is much more costly than rendering a 30x30 pixel area" - I'm still from an age when graphics where not that fast :-D )
• Our new artist - Bastian von Gostomski - just today was onboarded to Team ADOM and for the time being he will work on concept art and help us to evolve the graphical style of Ultimate ADOM. Here are two pieces he already produced:

Image #1: Into the Eye of Darkness

A picture from the final battle between Andor Drakon and some unnamed champion. From that final battle that ushered in the Ultimate Age of ADOM:

Image #2: A Portrait of Andor Drakon, supreme Lord of Chaos

And he produced several refined versions of the Andor Drakon sketch I already posted this afternoon - let us know in the comments which one you prefer and why:

Version #1 (very dark and and kindof younger than in the later ones):

Version #2 (hair is more visible, they eyes are slightly differently filled with corruption):

Version #3 (hair still more visible than in #1, less corruption again in the eyes):

By the end of the week I'll take a brief break (and keep you updated on that - yet another surprise) to be back in full strength very soon.

Axes High!

Two weeks of Ultimate ADOM development (UADOM Update #1)

Hi everyone!

The past two weeks I have been mostly active on Twitter while actually working on our Ultimate ADOM game engine. It will be foundation for our next generation series of roguelike games (yep, plural) and thus the foundational work is extremely important (and fun - as I love building frameworks and complex architectures).

What has been achieved so far?

• I'm getting somewhat accustomed to Unity as that is the platform we will be using to deploy Ultimate ADOM games on many channels (desktop, mobile, console, etc.). So far - once you get the hang of it - it works nicely.
• I have started using JetBrains Rider which IMHO is a brilliant piece of software (as usual from JetBrains). It's a blazingly fast and pretty smart integrated development environment, works nicely in conjunction with Unity and provides excellent C# support. There are still a few rough edges (especially when used on MacOS) but general the support by JetBrains is very active and helpful and despite those rough edges Rider already now is leagues above any other IDE I tried for C#. Highly recommended!
• Ultimate ADOM is using an entity component system (ECS). My ECS is based on JSON configurations that are backed by C# classes to add complex behavior. It uses entity templates (basically classes) to describe entities (class instances, objects) and has been designed with the idea of supporting hundreds of thousands of entities at runtime because I envision a truly complex world with almost infinite means for interaction. All the infrastructure for the basic ECS architecture is in place, parsing is basically finished (I'm still optimizing my JSON-object mapper on a use case basis for special cases to make modding even more trivial).
• In order to be able to prototype features quickly I needed an ASCII based interface even in Unity. The basics for this also have been implemented and now are working.
• The ECS architecture uses an underlying event architecture to implement communication between disjointed components. This architecture also is implemented in its basics and already went through a turn of optimizations to make it scale for later more complex situations.
• The game engine is configured through the same JSON based setup used for all other content. The basic infrastructure to set up game variants also is in place (although a lot of work still needs to be done here).
• Movement for the player has been implemented as an example to prove that everything works as required.
• Jochen and Krys are familiarizing themselves with Unity, toying around with graphical concepts to elaborate our future graphical approach with Ultimate ADOM and have been testing particle systems, lighting and animation as we want to lift current ADOM graphics to a completely new level.

Next up on the roadmap are

• implementing basic combat (another interesting challenge as many already existing subsystems for containers etc. then will need to flex their muscles),
• resuming work on ADOM bug fixes (remember: we will continue to work on ADOM). Jochen and I already have discussed the next new features which probably will center on our Rogueleague portal and challenge games.

Finally we are talking to various people on order to extend Team ADOM somewhat. If all works out well, we soon will have a second graphical artist joining the team to supplement Krys' amazing skills and provide us with more concept and marketing artwork (at least initially).

Here are some more impressions from the past two weeks:

Body configurations can become complex in Ultimate ADOM (although we still have way to go before we rival Dwarven Fortress ;-) although that's not the goal):

Predefined maps are already very easy to create (great for modding, too):

The ASCII interface still is rudimentary but I'm nonetheless proud about having gotten there in the past couple of days because there are more than 10.000 lines of code of basic architecture running behind it (not for the ASCII stuff, mind you, but for the actual game content - and all that will shine later on):

This screenshot from a point in development time when I still had to add lots of architecture hints at the detail and complexity of what is going on behind the scenes:

And while this is not our 3D attempt it was fun to create it nonetheless ;-)

In summary about 15.000 lines of C# code plus another 870+ lines of JSON configuration were created in these two weeks and we are now moving forward to turning this into a game :-)

Talk to ya soon!

Thomas

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