Ok, fogbugz is not trusting me anymore and starts to lower my odds on releasing on Sept, 19 as seen on the report below… 79% bah still not bad… Except if I inadvertently power the fluffotron on again…

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, ……….

Instead of working on some actual gameplay, I’ve spent a few days on the message log and a layer on top of Umbra’s widgets… Here is a small video describing its current features. With all this fluff, I think that Sept. 19′s release will be nothing more than the most expensive walking @ in roguelike history….. X/

Magnuscanis is a turn by turn roguelike at tech demo stage. It’s main distinctive features so far are directional fov, footprints (reminds me I have to do the footprint / ground trampling stuff in The Cave…) and BSP towns.  It also has some pretty nice ground shading. There’s already a playable demo.

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/

The Rogue Bard has just been upgraded with a brand new skin from UmbraProjekt. It now looks completely professional and is only waiting for new songs to be uploaded. While the 2008 RogueLike Soundtrack Contest has been a great success, the next contests, with no time limitation, are slightly less productive (0 submission in 18 months!!!). We’ll have to find other ways to motivate bards, maybe a new contest similar to 2008 RLSC…

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 )

I recently posted a screenshot of a lake in the first level of the cave. After a post about ASCII water ripples on mnemonicRL’s blog, I decided to make a video to show how water ripples look with true color, real time and subcell rez

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)