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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Runesword2 2.6.1 RELEASED!
« on: December 24, 2009, 01:12:20 AM »
http://www.runesword.com/rs2.html
Gisty changelog summary:
"RSII 2.6.0 CODE-NAME: FRANKENSTEIN
Redesigned. Improved. Given a good de-lousing. RSII 2.6.0. New pieces have been added on, other pieces have increased functionality. Stronger, bigger, and more powerful than ever, RSII has been given new life with the release of 2.6.0!!!
CREATOR REBORN!
The Creator software has been greatly improved and stabilized again. Creator now supports Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V shortcuts. The Creature Explorer has been given an ‘Insert’ button, so you can look at a beastie and then stick it straight into an encounter in the active tome. An Item Explorer has also been added in with the same functionality. Lots of minor and major improvements to the search function, map use and tile use. Encounters are now sorted alphabetically in the treeview, making it a little easier to find things. A ‘Browse’ button has been added to certain windows, making it simpler to insert items, creatures and triggers from the library. Combat wallpapers now show their picture in the Creator, so you can see what they look like without having to leave Creator. The treeview is now updated after the "replace" function is used (and several other bugs with search have been fixed as well) and when an item is selected in the center of the screen, it is also automatically selected in the treeview. Trigger code windows are now horizontally resizable. This makes it easier to see all of the code that you are working on.
Maps and map-making have been greatly enhanced. The Move Map right-click command was fixed. It used to leave out areas that were not previously loaded. A major improvement was the move to drop down lists for the CopyTile and TargetEncounter statements. No more typing in the names of tiles or encounters and maybe getting them wrong! A new statement was added also: "TargetEncounterInArea". This is an improved "TargetEncounter", valid for the whole tome and not the current map only. You can also now place your mouse over the right or left edges of the map to move the map in that direction. New tile graphics (Right-click on the tile area of the treeview to create new tiles) are now updated when they are created, instead of waiting until the active map was opened again or another new tile was created. The Find Tile function was improved as well.
Conversations have been enhanced, allowing Creators to use CreatureTarget.Name and CreatureNow.Name to personalize dialogues between players and NPCs. A new statement: RemoveTopic, has been added to the trigger functions, making conversations much more meaningful and easier to build. So now if a player makes a merchant uunhappy, Creators can set it up so that the merchant topic is removed from him and he will no longer sell goods.
Also, the picture to display when a creature dies can now be world or even creature dependent. So, your blobs won’t show bones when they die if you take the time and specify a new graphic!
Tome Creator Several new capabilities have been added to the tome creator. Right-clicking on a map will create an entrypoint (or an encounter if Shift is pressed) if no encounter/entrypoint already exists at the clicked location. Getting easier and easier to Create! On the individual maps, creators can now select a set of wandering monsters for each map straight from the map properties. These wandering monsters only attack in encounters that are classified as "None" or "Dangerous Area" on the encounter properties. So you can have your map, dangerous as you want it to be with a selection of monsters to encounter at random, and mark safe havens in there as well. You can also tag an entire map as a Camping area, with a chance for monsters intruding as well as setting the time needed between rests. Talking about monsters, Creators now have more options when it comes to body parts for opponents. Besides the standard arm, leg and other basic body parts, there are new parts including hull, cabin, deck, mast and turret for boats and spaceships! Creators can also specify (for a world or individual creature) a different picture than the standard bones bitmap for when a creature dies.
Tome Packager The tome packager, one of the best additions to the core software, has been improved again! It now checks creatures, items, and triggers attached at the tome level and packages them correctly. It also generates an .rsp file instead of an executable, making emailing tomes a breeze!
World Creator
Creating a personalized world has never been easier. Each world can now be assigned an appropriate interface that will change the screen display to more accurately reflect your world. So when a player changes worlds, their interface will portray the new world automatically. The way Creator handles race pictures has also been improved. Creators can now select a separate set of female pictures for their races! World Creators can also change, remove or add race pictures in a kingdom by right-clicking on the picture. Brand new to Frankenstein is a World Packager! It works the same as the Tome Packager, creating a file that can be shared with others via email. Each world now has its own random tome as well! This is a big addition. Creators can put random tome(s) created specifically for their world under Library\\ and it will show up in the player for random tome creation. So no more Calm Village random tomes in Colony Prime.
PLAYER REBORN!
A lot of new things are in the Player as well, both to provide a smoother, less buggy playing experience as well as improving overall play. The most obvious change is the new interface. There are now submenus for tomes and characters. The character submenu allows you access to your characters outside of picking them for tomes. You can scan through your roster, checking to see who you have ready to play. Another one of the bigger additions is support for mouse wheels, improved drag & drop capabilities, and more double-clicking! Want to change weapons in combat? Double-click on the weapon you want to use and voila! The weapons swap places (as long as both have been previously examined). Tired of having to drag treasure over to your characters one by one when you don’t want to “Take All”? Double-click on the desired booty and it will go as quick as Uncle Darryl with diarrhea to the active character’s inventory! Want to open a container? Double-click on the chest and it will display its contents (except of course if it’s locked or unexamined). Want to go down the list of goods for sale at the merchant shop? Use your mousewheel to stroll down the list.
By the way, merchants no longer crash if you buy their last item and then try to buy more. We also fixed an error with tomes that contained journal entries, and stopped characters from being able to search in areas that they had already left (when you were transported somewhere else, you could search the previous area). The health bar has undergone a facelift. Instead of the green and red colors, yellow has been added in. Now green shows you are in the top third of your health total, yellow the middle third, and red only shows when you have dropped down to 33% or less of your hit point total. If the world uses a magic bar, then this color scheme works for that as well.
Rune names alongside of the screen have been fixed so that they can be read in all screen resolutions. Last update introduced several new features, including a Home Tome for characters. This update fixes a few of the problems found. For example, when characters visited their home tome, Player used to save the tome as many times as there were characters in the party living in it. Not any more, now it saves only once. Monsters got smarter too in Player too. They will switch weapons if needed, and they no longer check the size or level of their items. If the Creator was dumb enough to give them the wrong sized armor, then the monster will still be able to use it! But don’t worry, characters got smarter as well: now, when they search an area, they also look for traps (and when found, they try to remove them!). The RT 91 error that used to happen when closing the Player is a thing of the past as well.
TOMES
Almost every single tome available since RSI has undergone a facelift. Rewritten to take advantage of all the changes in the new version, tomes now have wandering monsters, camp areas, and increased playing areas. For example, the original Dragon Merchant tome was a quick sample tome to catch and trap a dragon. Now the tome has a redesigned town map, more encounters, and a realistic set of NPC’s instead of the generic library critters.
Combat
Several things were done to improve combat... Players now get to play with stats for their characters. On the Status page, there is a new section that lists all sorts of goodies like hit percentages, kills, tomes played, etc. There is also a new Combat log in the Log display that lists the hits and misses of melees. The infamous Combat Freeze bug is now a thing of the past. We have been hunting this bad boy for many versions now, finding causes here and there and this time we put the final nail in its coffin! Players now have access (through Shift +right-click on a monster) to view the capabilities of opponents. Not everything is in there, but you get a good idea of what you are facing. There is also a new Guard option which allows characters with some Action Points left to attack enemies that come within range. Speaking of Action Points: when the active creature has more than 20 left, the exact figure is displayed just after the AP globes. Also, at the end of combat, there used to be some confusion as to who was the active player. Well, no longer. Now whenever combat is finished, the active player’s name and the highlighted box agree on who is in the lead and doing the talking, searching, etc.... We also added in an ‘End conversation’ topic for "Can't ignore" creatures when they have no such topic, to prevent games from locking up.
Players, did you have trouble looking through a long list of skills for the one skill that you wanted? Now you can filter your skills list! See only spells, etc... And just for the ladies (and those guys who like to play female characters –you know who you are!), making a female character improved as well. Now, when you click on the female button during character creation, you switch to a screen of female graphics to choose! We updated the graphics library as well, adding in some sci-fi graphics, creature graphics, and character graphics.
Camp (Yes, CAMP!)
The biggest thing is -wait for it- the NEW CAMP BUTTON! The first topic new players ask about on the boards is HOW DO I @!#% CAMP! The "Camp" button makes its debut in this release, hopefully forever ending questions about how to camp. New statements Encounter.CanCamp and Map.CanCamp properties can be used by Creators to make it active or not. Creators can set whole maps for camping (such as an indoor residence, a small druid grove, etc...) or encounters (a safe rest area, room at the inn, etc...) as safe to camp within hostile areas. Creators can also set wandering monster encounters in supposedly safe maps by setting an encounter as ‘Danger’. "
Gisty changelog summary:
"RSII 2.6.0 CODE-NAME: FRANKENSTEIN
Redesigned. Improved. Given a good de-lousing. RSII 2.6.0. New pieces have been added on, other pieces have increased functionality. Stronger, bigger, and more powerful than ever, RSII has been given new life with the release of 2.6.0!!!
CREATOR REBORN!
The Creator software has been greatly improved and stabilized again. Creator now supports Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V shortcuts. The Creature Explorer has been given an ‘Insert’ button, so you can look at a beastie and then stick it straight into an encounter in the active tome. An Item Explorer has also been added in with the same functionality. Lots of minor and major improvements to the search function, map use and tile use. Encounters are now sorted alphabetically in the treeview, making it a little easier to find things. A ‘Browse’ button has been added to certain windows, making it simpler to insert items, creatures and triggers from the library. Combat wallpapers now show their picture in the Creator, so you can see what they look like without having to leave Creator. The treeview is now updated after the "replace" function is used (and several other bugs with search have been fixed as well) and when an item is selected in the center of the screen, it is also automatically selected in the treeview. Trigger code windows are now horizontally resizable. This makes it easier to see all of the code that you are working on.
Maps and map-making have been greatly enhanced. The Move Map right-click command was fixed. It used to leave out areas that were not previously loaded. A major improvement was the move to drop down lists for the CopyTile and TargetEncounter statements. No more typing in the names of tiles or encounters and maybe getting them wrong! A new statement was added also: "TargetEncounterInArea". This is an improved "TargetEncounter", valid for the whole tome and not the current map only. You can also now place your mouse over the right or left edges of the map to move the map in that direction. New tile graphics (Right-click on the tile area of the treeview to create new tiles) are now updated when they are created, instead of waiting until the active map was opened again or another new tile was created. The Find Tile function was improved as well.
Conversations have been enhanced, allowing Creators to use CreatureTarget.Name and CreatureNow.Name to personalize dialogues between players and NPCs. A new statement: RemoveTopic, has been added to the trigger functions, making conversations much more meaningful and easier to build. So now if a player makes a merchant uunhappy, Creators can set it up so that the merchant topic is removed from him and he will no longer sell goods.
Also, the picture to display when a creature dies can now be world or even creature dependent. So, your blobs won’t show bones when they die if you take the time and specify a new graphic!
Tome Creator Several new capabilities have been added to the tome creator. Right-clicking on a map will create an entrypoint (or an encounter if Shift is pressed) if no encounter/entrypoint already exists at the clicked location. Getting easier and easier to Create! On the individual maps, creators can now select a set of wandering monsters for each map straight from the map properties. These wandering monsters only attack in encounters that are classified as "None" or "Dangerous Area" on the encounter properties. So you can have your map, dangerous as you want it to be with a selection of monsters to encounter at random, and mark safe havens in there as well. You can also tag an entire map as a Camping area, with a chance for monsters intruding as well as setting the time needed between rests. Talking about monsters, Creators now have more options when it comes to body parts for opponents. Besides the standard arm, leg and other basic body parts, there are new parts including hull, cabin, deck, mast and turret for boats and spaceships! Creators can also specify (for a world or individual creature) a different picture than the standard bones bitmap for when a creature dies.
Tome Packager The tome packager, one of the best additions to the core software, has been improved again! It now checks creatures, items, and triggers attached at the tome level and packages them correctly. It also generates an .rsp file instead of an executable, making emailing tomes a breeze!
World Creator
Creating a personalized world has never been easier. Each world can now be assigned an appropriate interface that will change the screen display to more accurately reflect your world. So when a player changes worlds, their interface will portray the new world automatically. The way Creator handles race pictures has also been improved. Creators can now select a separate set of female pictures for their races! World Creators can also change, remove or add race pictures in a kingdom by right-clicking on the picture. Brand new to Frankenstein is a World Packager! It works the same as the Tome Packager, creating a file that can be shared with others via email. Each world now has its own random tome as well! This is a big addition. Creators can put random tome(s) created specifically for their world under Library\\ and it will show up in the player for random tome creation. So no more Calm Village random tomes in Colony Prime.
PLAYER REBORN!
A lot of new things are in the Player as well, both to provide a smoother, less buggy playing experience as well as improving overall play. The most obvious change is the new interface. There are now submenus for tomes and characters. The character submenu allows you access to your characters outside of picking them for tomes. You can scan through your roster, checking to see who you have ready to play. Another one of the bigger additions is support for mouse wheels, improved drag & drop capabilities, and more double-clicking! Want to change weapons in combat? Double-click on the weapon you want to use and voila! The weapons swap places (as long as both have been previously examined). Tired of having to drag treasure over to your characters one by one when you don’t want to “Take All”? Double-click on the desired booty and it will go as quick as Uncle Darryl with diarrhea to the active character’s inventory! Want to open a container? Double-click on the chest and it will display its contents (except of course if it’s locked or unexamined). Want to go down the list of goods for sale at the merchant shop? Use your mousewheel to stroll down the list.
By the way, merchants no longer crash if you buy their last item and then try to buy more. We also fixed an error with tomes that contained journal entries, and stopped characters from being able to search in areas that they had already left (when you were transported somewhere else, you could search the previous area). The health bar has undergone a facelift. Instead of the green and red colors, yellow has been added in. Now green shows you are in the top third of your health total, yellow the middle third, and red only shows when you have dropped down to 33% or less of your hit point total. If the world uses a magic bar, then this color scheme works for that as well.
Rune names alongside of the screen have been fixed so that they can be read in all screen resolutions. Last update introduced several new features, including a Home Tome for characters. This update fixes a few of the problems found. For example, when characters visited their home tome, Player used to save the tome as many times as there were characters in the party living in it. Not any more, now it saves only once. Monsters got smarter too in Player too. They will switch weapons if needed, and they no longer check the size or level of their items. If the Creator was dumb enough to give them the wrong sized armor, then the monster will still be able to use it! But don’t worry, characters got smarter as well: now, when they search an area, they also look for traps (and when found, they try to remove them!). The RT 91 error that used to happen when closing the Player is a thing of the past as well.
TOMES
Almost every single tome available since RSI has undergone a facelift. Rewritten to take advantage of all the changes in the new version, tomes now have wandering monsters, camp areas, and increased playing areas. For example, the original Dragon Merchant tome was a quick sample tome to catch and trap a dragon. Now the tome has a redesigned town map, more encounters, and a realistic set of NPC’s instead of the generic library critters.
Combat
Several things were done to improve combat... Players now get to play with stats for their characters. On the Status page, there is a new section that lists all sorts of goodies like hit percentages, kills, tomes played, etc. There is also a new Combat log in the Log display that lists the hits and misses of melees. The infamous Combat Freeze bug is now a thing of the past. We have been hunting this bad boy for many versions now, finding causes here and there and this time we put the final nail in its coffin! Players now have access (through Shift +right-click on a monster) to view the capabilities of opponents. Not everything is in there, but you get a good idea of what you are facing. There is also a new Guard option which allows characters with some Action Points left to attack enemies that come within range. Speaking of Action Points: when the active creature has more than 20 left, the exact figure is displayed just after the AP globes. Also, at the end of combat, there used to be some confusion as to who was the active player. Well, no longer. Now whenever combat is finished, the active player’s name and the highlighted box agree on who is in the lead and doing the talking, searching, etc.... We also added in an ‘End conversation’ topic for "Can't ignore" creatures when they have no such topic, to prevent games from locking up.
Players, did you have trouble looking through a long list of skills for the one skill that you wanted? Now you can filter your skills list! See only spells, etc... And just for the ladies (and those guys who like to play female characters –you know who you are!), making a female character improved as well. Now, when you click on the female button during character creation, you switch to a screen of female graphics to choose! We updated the graphics library as well, adding in some sci-fi graphics, creature graphics, and character graphics.
Camp (Yes, CAMP!)
The biggest thing is -wait for it- the NEW CAMP BUTTON! The first topic new players ask about on the boards is HOW DO I @!#% CAMP! The "Camp" button makes its debut in this release, hopefully forever ending questions about how to camp. New statements Encounter.CanCamp and Map.CanCamp properties can be used by Creators to make it active or not. Creators can set whole maps for camping (such as an indoor residence, a small druid grove, etc...) or encounters (a safe rest area, room at the inn, etc...) as safe to camp within hostile areas. Creators can also set wandering monster encounters in supposedly safe maps by setting an encounter as ‘Danger’. "
