• portrait customization

There are 5 templates (male kid, female kid, adult male, adult female, elder male). Each template contains various layers (face, eyes, nose, mouth, …). Each layer can contain versions (to have different haircuts or eye types for a template). There are jewels layers (necklaces, bangles, earrings, …), marks (scars, beauty spots,…).

You can also customize the eyes, nose and mouth position, the complexion and the hair color (everything only works in monochrome though).

• emotion

Once you defined the portrait (how the character looks like…), you can alter the emotion. Eyes, eyebrows and mouth have several versions. You can change the eyebrows, eyes and pupils position or add tears and “shame blushing”.

Note that not all templates support every feature though. Only the kids have emotion support. The adult female has the most clothes and ornaments layers but no emotion support. The adult male is even simpler and generally looks like a dumb folk singer in pyjama… The elder male has the fewer layers… and no clothes…

The original code uses dynamic font updates to render the portraits but it’s quite buggy. I replaced it with the SDL callback.

For this one, I had to use Linux to squash a nasty memory corruption bug, so the zip contains both windows/mingw and linux binaries and makefiles.
Features :
- day/night cycle
- weather system with
- varying cloud thickness
- varying wind speed and direction
- rain
- lightning

Get it here.

The result is on the demo page. It’s far from being a full featured tile engine and the right way to do it is probably to use both libtcod and an existing SDL based tile engine. Anyway it’s a working proof of concept and it’s always good to know that you can go beyond the ascii limitations with the SDL callback.

I was also interested in making this demo because I’ve always wanted to use this breathtaking free tileset.

I’ve grown tired of showing off stuff and never being able to release anything so I decided to extract the niftiest pieces of code and make small tech demos with them. This way, they’re no more bloggish vapor and the source code is easier to understand and reuse once extracted from the main project.

There are 3 of them right now, I’ll dig in the archives to see if there are other interesting bits I could process. Get them on the new Demos page.

A big thank to anyone involved in this release, especially :
- Donblas for his work on cmake, swig, C# and OSX versions
- Mingos for various bugfixes, work on gaussian distribution and colors and an upcoming butt-peeling MRPAS2 fov algorithm.
- Dividee for python polishing and various bugfixes
- Jotaf as always, for his unshakable support and suggestions
I’m probably forgetting people, so have a look at the credits file

Also a big thank to all the developers who put their trust in libtcod for their game. Have a look at the projects page to check the latest promising games.

At least I finally have a crudely working looting system. There is still a lot to polish (for example a “Take all” button wouldn’t hurt…) but you can do the basics : exchange items between your inventory and a static container like a chest.

Since the chest dialog and the inventory are implemented by the same class, this was more tricky than expected. For example, the default action (left click) in the chest is to move the item to the player’s inventory. When the chest is open, the default action in the inventory is to move the item to the chest instead of using it. And the right button context menu also depends on the type of inventory. There are some actions that make no sense in the chest. I don’t even mention drag and drop actions that do not work at all with the looting screen now, but in the end, you should be able to throw an item from the chest without having to put it in your backpack first, or combine one of your backpack item with one in the chest and so on… This probably leaves some sporadic work and bugs for the next few months.

So now that I have a chest I can put a blade inside, the idea being that the player can disassemble his starting knife and replace the poor blade by a better one. And that’s where I stumble on another pitfall… The naive idea was to have a list of recipes that define the item operations :
blade + handle = knife
Thus you can easily disassemble a knife into a blade and a handle. But what blade quality ? Does the handle have a leather sleeve ? The recipe does not tell. When you create the item, its properties depends on the quality of the components you use, but the resulting item properties are not sufficient to tell you what exact components were used, so you have to store all the components in order to be able to retrieve the right ones when you disassemble the item… Of course, this is only required for items that were crafted by the player. For a knife found in a chest, you can defer the generation of the components to the moment of the disassembly, saving memory during the life of the item…

The 30 minutes in fogbugz that I had estimated for the disassembly action have turned into 4 hours and I’m not even sure they’ll be enough.

Once I have my hunting knife, I’ll be able to start coding the game (herds, stags), then fighting, then meat and leather, then spark spell, then campfire, then cooking, then hunger, ……….

Check the updates there :

http://magnuscanis.com/

Goblin camp is a pretty ambitious roguelike. Indeed, it’s aiming at no less than Dwarf Fortress, but with a higher management level. The project is pretty young, but already quite advanced. I personally regret that Ilkka, the developer, is not using background colors, but I guess he’d rather follow Dwarf Fortress’ path instead of going where there is no path and leaving a trail . We’ll see if he can find as much mojo as Tarn to keep going with his project. As Platon said (or was it Christiano Ronaldo ? whoever), “Talent is nothing, knowledge is nothing, dedication is everything”. No releases yet but you can find updates here :

http://www.goblincamp.com/

Oh wait, I think I just see a new song over there… This was intended to be some theme for the cave, but I don’t think I’ll use it after all.

By the way, check the skin evolution since the site started 18 months ago (and have a good laugh at the first one )

On the video, you can see the player swim, throw stones in water, scare fishes and finally catch a living fish with his bare hands !

The fish shoal AI is adapted from this :

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/deta…
The water ripples are done with an old school effect like this :
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/arti…

A few remarks :

• the zoom and big yellow arrows are done with the video recording software, not the game!
• you can throw an item by dragging it out of the inventory window
• there’s a bug when there are too many fishes in the shoal, it starts to display some circular patterns (you can see it a bit when the fishes are fleeing in the south-east shallow waters)