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

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).

ADOM R70 released as a Steam beta!

Hi everyone!

Due to my presence at the Roguelike Celebration in San Francisco (and a nasty sunburn right now) I'm a bit late in announcing this: We already yesterday released ADOM R70 as a Steam beta. Update 9/20/2016: Due to positive feedback reports R70 now is the public version for Steam. The biggest change is the introduction of new internal graphics cache mechanisms that greatly should speed up performance. We are quite happy with the results so far and now eagerly wait for responses from the community.

You can the (short) changelog as usual here.

To test ADOM R70 do the following:

• 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.

And now try it out!