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91
Development Process & non-technical / Re: Dev blog aggregator
« on: November 17, 2014, 07:06:57 PM »
I posted my link the last time you did this, but I've actually changed where I'm posting now. The dev logs for Possession 2 are at http://weirdfellows.com/
The posts tagged both "roguelike" and "dev blog" will probably be what you want.
Post the link to the tagged feed.  I took a short look and couldn't work out if you were using blogger or wordpress or whatever behind the scenes.  If you are using a custom solution that doesn't allow tagging, we can't do it.  If you are using a standard solution and there's blogs already in the list on the planet-rldev website that are using that solution, then you can adapt the url they use to filter their feed.

92
Development Process & non-technical / Dev blog aggregator
« on: November 17, 2014, 04:07:18 AM »
Do you make blog posts related to your development work on a roguelike?  If so, please let me know the RSS/ATOM feed of your blog.

I aggregate development posts on Planet RLDev, and this allows people to go to one place to discover, and keep up to date with roguelike development posts.  People claim it encourages posts by different developers chiming in on the same subjects and riffing off each other, but all I claim is that it makes roguelike development blogs easier to find.  Anyone who subscribes can automatically get the development posts from relevant blogs without going out there occasionally looking for them.

Note that the content is strictly limited to posts that contain development details.  No update posts with changelogs.  No game reviews. No general programming posts on subjects not directly related to a roguelike. People who add this to their blog reader can count on only getting what they've signed up for.  To this end, all people who want their blog included are encouraged to make a roguelike development tag or category on their blog site, and the RSS/ATOM feed should be restricted to that tag or category.  Blogs which interject off topic posts are continually removed.  For people who want more general roguelike feeds where anything off topic can be posted, there are sites which do that for you.

93
Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Incursion (open source) 0.6.9Y14
« on: November 15, 2014, 06:49:17 AM »
An updated download is available on bitbucket: 0.6.9Y14.

There are no new features being added to releases. This is the first "stable" release after a series of changes to improve the code base. It includes bug fixes to gameplay, both new ones, and others included in the unstable releases Y12/Y13.

Changes:
  • Issue 129: Journal entries are now listed in order of most recent to oldest.  Level stats are put first, instead of last.  This is to put the most relevant information in the most accessible place.  Reported by golgepapaz, with patch.
  • Issue 135: Lost symbols for wrapped messages.  This was observable through looking at monsters with lifesight cast.  Any wrapped text in the generated description would be overwritten in some cases.  Reported by Karagy.
  • Issue 150: Making a chi strike did not explicitly take mana from the victim, and likely took it from the actor.  Reported by dck k.
  • Issue 155: Gauntlets of Rust can be activated from the 'a'ctivate menu.  The description only addressed protection from rust, and not the 3x per day rusting grasp they can be used for.  The description has been amended.  Reported by dck k.
  • Issue 167: More level generation fixes related to room weights.  If comparing a signed value stored in an unsigned variable, cast it before comparison, not after.  Also, if all room types were flagged as already used, they would then all be unflagged for reuse - however it was also necessary to reset the room weights and more.
  • Issue 173: Knowledge domain does not grant scribe scroll spell as described.  Reported by Brett Olsen, with patch.
  • Issue 176: Compilation warning fixes broke alignment checks, resulting in penalties and restrictions for the wrong alignments.  Reported by John Olender, with patch.
  • Issue 177: Use menu was enacting the wrong effect, for selected innate abilities.  This was due to Y12 compiler warning fixes, where an argument to UseAbility was cast to uint8, and UseAbility had it typed as int16.  Reported by S M.

94
Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Visual studio is now free!
« on: November 14, 2014, 11:27:45 PM »
And Krice, don't you have a throwaway e-mail address for signing up for random Internet stuff? ;)

No. And I fear that the new VS is going to trash VS2010 Express I have now installed. Or that the new VS is always connected to internet. I don't know.
Google your concerns like everyone else.  You don't need to post and mention every little one.  If you don't find any matches, then they're likely imagined problems.

95
Design / Re: Adaptive Difficulty
« on: November 13, 2014, 08:08:47 AM »
I remember when Morrowind came out.  Or was it Oblivion?  In any case, whichever one it was had this adaptive difficulty where you could visit a location multiple times and depending on how far your character had progressed by that point, it would be repopulated differently.  It was a design conceit.  It was a conceit chosen as a cheap way to balance and populate the game.  But the effect was that the quality of the game experience also felt cheap and fake, as the experience created did not fit in the context.

Of course, your typical roguelike doesn't aim to create an open world experience.

96
Primarily, I am concerned with the possibility of migrating the code to another language.  I am afraid that the heavy use of Flash-specific functionality may make it a difficult prospect.  However, I would welcome a more veteran coder's opinion on the matter, should one be offered.
Why not list the features you think will be problematic, and the language you intend to go to?  Seems like you're making it harder than it needs to be.

97
Good to see work continuing! Personally, I have no objections to these unofficial updates not adding new features and instead just bugfixing etc. I suspect it'll be a long time before I get to a point in the game where I'll wish it had more content.
People will be able to add new features themselves, to an extent, once the modding release is made.  This really just involves me releasing a debug build with the script source code.  This will be done, once the game is confirmed by players to be acceptably stable.

(As a pedantic aside, the plural of status is status, not stati. :P It's a fourth declension noun, so the nominative plural is the same as the nominative singular. :P )
Well, that's what Julian called it.  Personally, I would have gone with statuses. Or statuseses.   :P

98
An updated download is available on bitbucket: 0.6.9Y13.

There are no new features being added to releases.  If a release is marked as unstable and turns out to actually be unstable, please download the preceding release and use that instead.

Changes:
  • Issue 167: Sometimes when level areas are being generated, the selection of room types failed, and a fatal error put allowed the player to win the game of failed level area generation.  This game is not about the player winning, so the relevant code has been altered to better handle problem situations.
  • Issue 168: The tabbing between links in the help system causes crashes.  Legacy bug where code was looking for information using X as Y coordinate and Y as X coordinate.  Also a Y1 bug where looking up the character at a screen coordinate was incorrectly implemented.
  • Issue 169: This fixes the dialog which appears in debug builds when leaked stati backrefs are found.  When an object is removed, it cleans up the stati which have it as a target.  To do this, it looks at the backref on itself, then to the stati on the originating object.  But certain kinds of stati when removed, are simply orphaned with the backref removed explicitly.  The only problem was that the backref removal passed in opposite values than which it needed to, failing to remove the backref.  Then the removed object would see the backref again when it moved on to it's next removal, and not be able to find the now-orphaned stati.  Cue dialog.
  • Issue 170: Little known fact that objects get more difficult to unlock the deeper into the dungeon you get.  If a locked object in your inventory is examined, this fact combined with items in your inventory not being in the dungeon, results in a crash.
  • Issue 170: A different issue relates to broken dungeon generation, which places stairs down to unsafe terrain.  Fixing that would fix the dungeon generation.  This issue and fix relates to instead adding a confirmation dialog to the taking of stairs down to unsafe terrain, under the provisio you should be able to step down carefully and choose to step back up.  There is a school of thought that these stairs to unsafe terrain are an interesting feature which should be retained, regardless of fixes to dungeon generation.

99
Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Samsung's brilliant support
« on: October 21, 2014, 11:56:15 PM »
My Dell laptop horror story was when I bought a Studio 17 a couple of years ago.  It developed a crack on the hinge which I ignored because I assumed it was purely cosmetic.  Then, one day, my whole screen dropped off.  Turns out the only thing actually connecting the screen to the body of the laptop was a thin crappy bit of plastic casing, there was no internal pin.  So, once the crack reached a certain point there was no longer enough material there to support its own weight and both hinges failed at once.
Yes, the hinges on this are deteriorating.  I periodically dose them with superglue.

You also reminded me that the LCD panel on this laptop started dying at most six months after purchasing it.  I lived in China at the time, so took it to an electronics mall and paid some dude who couldn't speak English to replace it in front of me.  The LCD has worked perfectly since.

100
Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Samsung's brilliant support
« on: October 21, 2014, 07:50:46 PM »
Choose, I've had my Dell Vostro 3450 for 2,5 years. No problems, light & small enough for me to carry around in my backpack and 2h battery life.

I've been using the charger nearly all the time to save the battery, unless I'm in classes, and never had problems with compat detection.
It might be related to the model.  Mine is an inspiron.  This is a common problem, people even open up the cables and repair it themselves.

101
Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Samsung's brilliant support
« on: October 20, 2014, 08:37:14 PM »
Don't buy a Dell.  I have almost paid as much for extra power cord/packs as I have for the laptop.  They have this special lead in it which verifies the power pack is "compatible" with the laptop.  Unfortunately, this lead appears to be really poor quality and it detaches inside the cord.  What happens then is the laptop won't charge up.  So then you need to quickly order another one if you want to keep using your computer.  Dell likely no longer sells the exact power cord/pack for your laptop, so you need to buy another at a premium from a second party seller.

Low quality shit.

102
Other Announcements / Re: Roguelike Radio podcast
« on: October 13, 2014, 09:50:59 PM »
I personally think that one of the main purposes of all media -- including both journalism and games -- is social commentary and, yes, criticism.
...
If journalists and writers want to take up the job of social criticism that these people have set aside, I say more power to them.  If the first thing they want to criticize is mainstream games and how they depict women and minorities and the way that depiction has not changed at all in the last N years,, I say that's a good start.

Hell, somebody's got to do it.
Things should not be given a pass, because some faction of the population considers an action for the cause (whatever it might be) to
validate any lack of substance.  In the end, both the cause and the media in which it features, are better served by the journalists and writers doing a worthwhile job.

Mushy doesn't think the effort had substance to warrant it (as I read his post), and neither do I.  Do you, and why?

103
The original Incursion does not uses libtcod, but the community version does. Is this right?

I could look into it. I suppose the best solution would be to edit the sources so that NotEye is used instead of libtcod, though (the NotEye-libtcod adapter does not work very well, and also it works with 1.5.1 for MinGW only, and Incursion apparently uses 1.6.0 for MSVC). Although it would have to be a copyleft-licensed derivative of Incursion, and Julian says that he does not want such things.
Yes, the community version uses libtcod.  All the related code is isolated in one file.

I do not know what copyleft is, and the meaning is non-obvious, but assuming it is some in-group way of referring to GPL..  All the changes in the community version are pretty much mine, and I am also disinterested in licensing my changes under the GPL.

That said, GPL if your goal, should be irrelevant.  You should be able to add a Wnoteye.cpp to match a Wlibtcod.cpp and license that isolated file under the GPL and have it optionally compiled in.  Licensing some of the code under the GPL does not require that all the code be licensed under the GPL, just that all the source code for a distributed end product be available for any recipient to recreate that same end product.  At least, that was my conclusion of GPLv3 last time I refreshed from it.

104
Programming / Re: Visual Basic as gui engine?
« on: September 21, 2014, 02:46:59 AM »
Yeah, this software is not a wheel thing only goes so far. If you're talking about something whose purpose is literally just fiddling with values in an array of numbers (I mean, editing icons in a damn hex editor wouldn't be a completely crazy thing to do), a task ably performed by a huge array of existing pieces of software with mature, user friendly interfaces, that seems about as much like a wheel as any piece of software could be.
You are making a strawman argument that basically agrees with me that the premise behind "reinventing the wheel" only applies in certain situations.  Then you decide that's dismissed my point.  Let me try be clearer:

My point is that when people trot out this expression, they do so as an absolute.  Like:
Quote from: Reaver
Reinventing the wheel is not cool, unless you're learning / want to learn / really enjoy the process.
And this is the problem with expressions like this.  People glom onto them and trot them out as arguments to help make their point, with the assumption that the expression stands on it's own - in lieu of making a real argument that stands on it's own.

We all agree that there are certain things that it is pointless to rewrite, like web browsers.  There's no contention there.

105
Programming / Re: Visual Basic as gui engine?
« on: September 17, 2014, 09:16:19 AM »
I've been developing it since 2004. The new version is going to be cool, unlike this current one.

Are you gonna add png support? -_-
Reinventing the wheel is not cool, unless you're learning / want to learn / really enjoy the process. If you enjoy making a subset of windows paint with Win32 API, fair enough, whatever floats your boat.
Too many people are indoctrinated with a belief that reinventing the wheel is a bad thing, and if it is suggested there are situations that it is okay, then these situations are often trivial ones that no professional would seriously choose.

The fact is that a piece of software is not a wheel.  That a given piece of software does something which resembles what the programmer wants, is a mere part of the whole.  A wheel is a wheel, you get one and it fits a hole on a stick thing.  Making a new wheel is a fixed process which is clearly pointless and of little benefit.  For software there are numerous factors which complicate the situation - how it is written, the burden for choosing to use it, the benefits of writing a better version and so on.. are all factors that need to be weighed up.

The sooner this expression dies, the fewer people who will be mislead into making poor choices because of it.

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