Messages

1

Temple of the Roguelike / Re: The Temple is crumbling down...

« on: August 29, 2019, 12:55:17 PM »

I just logged on for the first time in years, and let me guess, this fucker is still yapping about "is it a roguelike" and what language to use and pretending his pirate game is still a thing.

You just logged on for the first time in years and all you've got to say is a bunch of random f***s thrown at one of the few who's still here? I don't think it will help to revive this forum and does not make a perfect goodbye message, either.

Speaking of never-ending development. There are people whose goal is to gain some temporary fame and maybe earn some money with their games. That's OK. There are also people who write games for pure fun. For those, I guess, it couldn't matter less whether it's 2 years or 20 years. When it's fun, it could as well last forever, why not? Why banning people for that? Tell me.

2

Programming / Re: My language

« on: July 15, 2019, 05:55:38 AM »

For example when you think about class, struct and namespace in C++ they are more or less the same thing and there should be only 'class' keyword for all purposes.

Once again, that's Java. And Java is a great example of how simplifying a language in one place leads directly to making it much harder in another. What we have now in C++ just reflects the complex nature of programming. Java tries to hide the complexity by using sophisticated abstractions, but this of course does not remove the complexity. But as long as you are not a startup owner thinking about conquering the world with 10000 high school interns, the existence of 'class' an 'struct' in C++ should not be a big obstacle for you.

3

Programming / Re: My language

« on: June 19, 2019, 06:46:19 AM »

I don't think Java is a simple language. I think it removed pointers?

It's not simple, it's simpler than C++ (in terms of syntax). They haven't removed pointers, only wrapped them in "references", which makes them harder to control. But let's look at C++. In addition to "normal" pointers it also has function pointers, class method pointers and object data member pointers (but it does not have object method pointers, which adds to the confusion). Additionally, since C++11 we have 3 new types of so called smart pointers and now-deprecated auto_ptr. That's already 8 different types of pointers. There's also something called reference, which is nothing more than a different syntax for a pointer. And, since C++, r-value references. This way we end up with 10 pointer types, more or less incompatible with each other. C++ allows to create levels of indirection with pointers (but luckily not with references!), so that we can also have pointers to pointers or even pointers to pointers to pointers to pointers to pointers. And I'm not going to talk about all possible combinations of "const", "volatile" or "const volatile", placed before or after the '*' (although this is pure fun). Did I mention iterators? Of course, iterator is yet another concept of pointers, with totally different syntax and usage... Enough?

I think Java now seems pretty straightforward and friendly, but I sometimes wonder how novices must feel when they encounter a "null pointer exception" time after time, with all those people telling them that Java has no pointers .

4

Programming / Re: My language

« on: June 18, 2019, 06:26:30 AM »

Guess what. Such a language has already been created. It's called Java. But I don't see anything interesting in it . If you like being restricted, write in Java. If language's complexity motivates you rather than intimidating you, write in C++. If you want to waste your lifetime creating yet another useless language that will save the world...

5

Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Origin of the term - 'Roguelite'

« on: July 17, 2018, 08:16:27 AM »

Maybe we do. Surely it is useful for a developer to have a handful of catchy phrases to advertise their games. Now that 'roguelike' means next to nothing, it's getting really hard to explain in one sentence what your game is all about.

In my case that would be 'adomlike'. Do you like?

6

Temple of the Roguelike / Re: Issues with forum / blog? Post here!

« on: February 22, 2018, 03:22:48 PM »

Some of older forum links seem to be misconfigured. For instance, the one in my signature. The link  (http://roguetemple.com/forums/index.php?topic=1915.0) redirects to https://blog.roguetemple.com/forums/?topic=1915.0, which gets HTTP 404.

7

Programming / Re: My language

« on: February 22, 2018, 03:16:09 PM »

What's the advantage over existing languages?

8

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Chaosforge's DRL/D**m RL goes open source

« on: December 09, 2016, 02:13:56 PM »

They say shit. Yes the code should be readable, but it's not the point. It's still more readable if you explain what the next section of code is doing. It's easier to read that one (preferably) line of comment than read through the source code. Even more than that not all people code the same way. Some programmers have let's say strange ways to do things. In that case it's even more important to write good comments.

No, if you work in a group, you should all code the same way. That's why Java is far better than Perl in big projects, by the way. Comments may help you to read the code, but will not make it much better when you need to modify it -- you'll still have to fully understand that piece of the code, right? Here's an example:

Code: [Select]

i--; // go to the next object

The original line was 'i++', a programmer has changed it to 'i--', but forgot to update the comment. This is a very simple operation, so it is unlikely that anybody gets fooled by this errorneous comment, but it's not difficult to imagine a similar situation with much more complicated code and an outdated, misleading comment. I've seen hundreds of such cases in the production code.

9

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Chaosforge's DRL/D**m RL goes open source

« on: December 09, 2016, 10:24:04 AM »

They say that even better is not to have any comments at all -- that is, the code should be self-explaining. If you don't know/remember what the code does, you need to refactor. I know it's too idealistic for the real life programming, but I often stumble upon totally unnecessary comments like this:

Code: [Select]

int counter = 0; // this counts occurrences of the value in a collection

Wouldn't it be better to just name the variable 'numberOfValueOccurrences'?

I also hate this type of comments:

Code: [Select]

a  = 1; // assign the value '1' to the 'a' variable

What is the purpose of that? Everybody can see that we are assigning to the variable. Even a non-programmer would probably understand this. For some reason, though, people seem to like this kind of commenting the code. Maybe they just misinterpret the principle of comprehensive commenting.

Sorry for this terrible offtopic .

10

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Demons of Dex (now available)

« on: September 09, 2016, 11:33:28 AM »

I would not have approved the released of the c64 version in this form (whose source code is in large parts identical to the vic20 version) if I would have had the choice.

It seems that those Hokuto Force guys have asked you directly for the permission, so unless I'm missing something you can only blame yourself for not responding to their request. Anyway, your decision to quit open source and give up exotic platforms is just what I would recommend to you if you don't accept the fact that somebody may pick up your code and use it to create their own variant.

11

Off-topic (Locked) / Re: I'm moving to linux.

« on: June 17, 2016, 12:37:29 PM »

Start button placement? A second spent to idly wonder why. Network center dialog design? A minute to familiarize with new location of IP address. Search dialog looks slightly different? Doesn't really matter, you're there for search results only.

The question is why they make all these changes if they don't matter at all. From my perspective user interface improvements are one of the major reasons to update, assuming that they make sense (hiding Start button or rearranging controls in a dialog obviously doesn't). If there are no visible improvements, any update is a waste of time and resources for both software vendor and user.

12

Off-topic (Locked) / Re: I'm moving to linux.

« on: June 17, 2016, 10:39:30 AM »

I may be rude here, but this is just stupid. No, seriously, just how much do you need to re-learn with each Windows release? A couple of buttons and dialogs, around 15 minutes in total? Every mobile app or web site shuffling its UI and workflow almost constantly and everyone adapt like nothing. You do not need to study buttons and menus, you just use it as a tool it is.

I may be rude here, but it seems that you don't get the scale of an OS. I'm sure you do, but for some reason you are pretending you don't :-)
It's developed by thousands of engineers, it has millions of source code lines. In 15 minutes you may discover all changes in Notepad, assuming that you use that program often enough. As of the OS as a whole - no chance, sorry, you won't fool me. No, it's not 15 minutes. It's more like 15 minutes every single day until next major update (every 2 years, this used to be Microsoft's normal tempo). This makes 730 * 15 minutes = 10950 minutes, which is about 182 hours. This is roughly how much time you are going to waste to learn your new OS, probably without any significant gain. I'd rather devote that time to learn things I still don't know about Linux - at least I'd learn something useful.

In Windows 10 they didn't go far. It's practically Windows 7 with new style and some new features. Maybe you should try it first before comments like that.

I'm smart enough to gather knowledge about software before I actually install it. Nevertheless, none of my posts in this topic say that Windows 10 is revolutionary in any way, I'm only ranting about its intrusive marketing and about worthless updates in general, that's it, Maybe you should read more carefully before making comments like that.

13

Off-topic (Locked) / Re: I'm moving to linux.

« on: June 16, 2016, 06:56:16 AM »

Methods aside, I think it is fairly understandable where Microsoft is coming from. People are conservative and lazy and would stay on outdated OSes for who knows how long, which would force commercial software vendors and in turn Microsoft to continue support those platforms. Which is frankly a waste of resources. Web developers had it with their IE zoo not so long ago, so no thanks =).

It turns out that Microsoft's support is not valued by "lazy people". It might be useful when something breaks, but if it's not broken, why to fix it? Yes, people are lazy and nobody is going to change that. It should be noted here that laziness is actually a form of resistance against the update terror. MS is forcing us to move ot their newest OS and we lose a lot of time just on learning where the f***g buttons and menus have gone to. All this time could be spend on some creative activity, but we spend it reinventing the wheel. A big loss for us, but MS saves some $ on support. Can't they update their business model instead? I'd pay just for not having to change OS.

IE is a different thing. Microsoft has always been setting their own rules rather than following open standards. The strategy has been paying well until the internet boom with other browsers entering the scene. People hated updates in Firefox just as much as they hate them in IE (Windows), but Firefox has been striving to follow open standards from the beginning, so that the developers at Mozilla didn't really need to force people to update, while MS finally got their asses kicked for ignoring open standards.

On desktop everything go out of date pretty quickly and sooner or later you are forced to update because new versions of some essential application is not built for your release anymore. Then you can try to continue to maintain some things by hand but this is a huge step down in user experience.

Joel Spolsky refers to this as to "fire and motion" tactics. The new software is not better than the old one and you don't need it, but you are forced to update so that you don't have time to compete with the software vendor. In the Linux world things seem to be a bit different. In that world it is perfectly normal if someone wants to use archaic software like Vim or Emacs. There are downsides, sure. I go crazy every time when such a basic thing as copying to clipboard doesn't work again, but that's still better than having to update everything just because some asshole in a suit has decided that you have to udpate.

14

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Fame 0.9.10 Released

« on: June 13, 2016, 06:08:14 AM »

This version is all about balancing. In general, balancing is crucial to every game genre, but roguelike games are particularly difficult to balance because of their complexity. That's why balancing in such a game never ends. I've done a lot of balancing stuff in the past, but apparently that was not enough and I know that this is currently one of Fame's most serious issues. For instance: attributes. Playing as a spellcasting character (of course Fame does not have character classes, mind you, but it still offers a choice of method for killing foes and earning experience points) you could notice that your Intelligence practically never raises, while Strength does. This was very unusual for this kind of a character and was making it quite difficult... well, that's not the proper word, let's say "not enjoyable", to have a spellcasting character with low Intelligence. This has been solved successfully in 0.9.10, although some similar issues remain (for instance, the Appearance attribute is still totally meaningless). There's always too little time to fix everything, but I can see that there's constant improvement in this area and that's great.

Playing as a spellcasting character used to be quite boring. The spell that is available from the start, Magic Bolt, provided that you've chosen the appropriate spellbook as a starting item and that your character is not illiterate, is good enough against most enemies. This means that you could just walk through dungeons, pressing [J] all the time and that was it. No one was able to hurt you unless you ran out of magical focus, but it regenerates very quickly, so that wasn't a big problem. This kind of gameplay wasn't even close to roguelike. It was a hack'n'slash in god mode. To overcome this issue, I've introduced a new, hidden counter for each spell. Now it is not possible anymore to just use one spell all the time. After a while the spell you overuse will become unavailable for a period of time and you will be forced to use another one, or have some sleep (not an easy thing in the dungeon), or just fall back to some melee weapon.

Trying to fight with a bow and arrows could be even more frustrating for the player, partially because there weren't enough items that support this kind of gameplay. I've added more bows and crossbows, as well as some armor designed specifically for "sharpshooters". This fills the biggest gap here, but I feel there's still more to do - I'm waiting for your suggestions!

Another big change in this release are dungeon "flavors". In previous versions you could observe that some dungeons have white walls; that's what I call "flavor". Unfortunately, this feature was hardcoded and did not offer anything beyond different tile look. Now there's more systematic approach to this feature. Every randomly generated dungeon in the game can get a custom flavor. This version comes with two flavors (white dungeon and the new one - flooded dungeon) and more are planned for future releases. Flooded dungeons will require the Swimming skill for comfortable exploration and will feature specific monster types (creatures that can swim or fly). This may (and should) enforce a completely different gameplay style!

Flooded dungeons come with two new kind of monsters that only live in the water, but there are more new species, each with some unique feature. There are monsters that explode when they come close to the player, monsters that will attack each other, monsters that will spawn other monsters when attacked and so on.

Being very close to the planned release date, during the testing phase, I became quite frustrated with the side effects of the increasing AI abilities. In the few recent game versions monsters have learned to open doors, pick up items, use items and now - to attack each other without an apparent reason. These are all cool things, but there are consequences, too. Until now you would enter a dungeon level and before you make a few steps, you would be welcomed by dozens of strange messages, saying that you have just walked into a trap and some monster has died in an explosion. Now these messages make much more sense. If a monster activates a trap and it is within your sight, an appropriate message appears just as it was before, but if you don't see the monster, you only get a message saying that something has exploded in the other part of the dungeon. The whole system is still very far from perfection (as I said, this is a last-minute change!), but the number of confusing messages has been significantly reduced.

Versions 0.8.4 to 0.9.9 used to try very hard to stay compatible with each other. I have removed much of this backward compatibility portions from the current code as it started to become more and more difficult to maintain it for a very little gain. Version 0.9.10 will still load games from 0.9.9, but not from older versions. I will strive to keep backward compatibility in future versions for as long as possible, but not forever, at least not until the game becomes stable enough for this :-).

Quick summary:

• new location
• new monsters and items
• spell system balancing
• ASCII mode improvements
• equipment sets fixes and improvements
• drew a stronger line between events that happen near the hero and events out of hero's sight

Full change log:

• new location (flooded dungeon) with a new quest
• 10 new monsters
• 8 new items
• balanced attribute gains (Intelligence vs. Strength vs. Dexterity)
• limited possibility to use the same spell every time
• added some corpse effects (mostly Dexterity or Vitality bonus)
• added brain disease
• diseases can now be cured by NPCs or by prayer or by drinking a potion of miraculous healing
• the hero can no longer read or cast spells when drunk or confused
• new encounter type - orc battle
• better names for unidentified books and plants
• added new starting item set
• Polymorph spell no longer resets monster's experience level to 1
• NPCs no longer cast "Ring of..." spells when the enemy is too far
• it is now possible to dip an item into a potion which is laying on the ground
• statistics now include all items from the inventory
• statistics now include deepest Random Dungeon level visited
• sheep, cow and family encounters will no longer happen so frequently
• experience level of monsters in random settlements now depends on region's difficulty level
• reading cursed scrolls no longer has any positive effect
• an explosion that should out of Hero's sight can no longer be seen - only the sound can be heard; the same applies to opening and closing doors, monsters picking up and using items etc.
• monsters can no longer carry items much heavier than themselves
• no treasure chests on easiest levels of the Random Dungeon
• human settlements is now inhibited by additional NPCs (female citizens, kids and beggars)
• ASCII mode: all windows look better in full screen mode
• ASCII mode: switching into Details view (Inventory) no longer requires Ctrl while displaying stuff
• ASCII mode: selection no longer change when scrolling the stuff list
• ASCII mode: items list (Inventory) no longer "collides" with keyboard shortcuts
• ASCII mode: a message appears when the player discover that an item is cursed
• ASCII mode: pressing Ctrl or Shift (in Inventory) changes keyboard tips appropriately
• ASCII mode: pressing V in the Details view (Inventory) switches to the previous view instead of always switching to the equipment view
• when the hero picks up an item that matches the current equipment set, the item is automatically equipped
• switching equipment sets no longer requires 2 extra inventory slots
• the Equipment Sets window (tiles mode) no longer displays item count
• music in the main menu is no longer looped
• editor - it is now possible to set random items
• dropped backward compatibility support for versions 0.8.4 to 0.9.8
• [bugfix] saves made under Linux no longer fail to load under Windows (does not apply to saves from 0.9.9 and older)
• [bugfix] fixed stupid error causing some random settlements to be inhabited only by sheep, cows etc.
• [bugfix] fighting with weird weapons no longer affects the 'Hand to Hand' skill
• [bugfix] incorrect location names like "plains" no longer displayed in random settlements
• [bugfix] auto-picking up ammunition no longer causes it to add itself to current equipment if the ammunition belongs to another (inactive) set; or shortly: you could pick 5 arrows and end up having 6 shields in hand
• [bugfix] switching to next/previous equipment set no longer cause items to disappear if only a part of a set is actually held in hands
• [bugfix] when switching to an equipment set, the log message informs about actual ammunition count, not about the moment when the set has been defined
• [bugfix] FOV correctly updates when a door is opened
• [bugfix] no longer possible to perform mouse actions (such as attack or move) in a question mode
• [bugfix] scroll of Repair no longer fails when the item is on a cell not occupied by the Hero
• [bugfix] no more "piece of meat [greater skeleton]"
• [bugfix] some spelling errors in Statistics

Enjoy!

15

Off-topic (Locked) / Re: I'm moving to linux.

« on: June 13, 2016, 05:57:11 AM »

After all this aggressive Windows 10 marketing I started to consider Windows as malware and yes, one day I will probably move to Linux. In the 1990s everyone wanted to have Windows, because it was the best OS available on the market. Today Microsoft needs to force us to update. That's not a good sign. I hate updates. Somehow they always mean replacing something that works with something that doesn't.