Messages

76

Player's Plaza / Re: Roguelike with persistent (or seed generated) world?

« on: July 20, 2017, 02:04:01 PM »

Yeah, I guess that's the big advantage of skimping on spiral galaxy generation, as I did – it only takes about a dozen years to get an actual roguelike.

As always,
Minotauros

PS. In a futile attempt not to kill/hijack the thread, OP may also be interested in the oldie but goodie Legerdemain, which takes a lot of RL tropes, but has a persistent world with save points dispersed here and there.

77

Player's Plaza / Re: Roguelike with persistent (or seed generated) world?

« on: July 19, 2017, 10:03:03 AM »

You can specify the seed in Brogue and (the paid version of) Caves of Qud. My own game LoSt features this, too, but is not very playable at this point (check back in 5-10 years )

As always,
Minotauros

78

Early Dev / Re: Ultima Ratio Regum (v 0.7 released, 18th April!)

« on: July 12, 2017, 07:17:58 PM »

For me, it's much harder to find specific stuff withing ~1200 files (every class had own file)

Perhaps there is a golden middle. In LoSt, I have 20-odd script files (ai, name generation, event handling, graphics, etc.) For me, at least, that makes things more orderly.

As always,
Minotauros

79

Other Announcements / Re: Roguelike Radio podcast

« on: June 20, 2017, 04:51:52 PM »

Ops, I really botched that one.  If anyone's looking, I'll be in my room reading that verse from Hávamál.

As always,
Minotauros

80

Other Announcements / Re: Roguelike Radio podcast

« on: June 19, 2017, 09:56:09 PM »

It's just his voice, man. Go read Hávamál verse 27 or something.

As always,
Minotauros

81

Programming / Re: BearLibTerminal: a pseudo-terminal window library for roguelike

« on: June 18, 2017, 08:17:40 PM »

(I'm redoing Veins in Python as an exercise and Pygame performance sucks when partially transparent pictures are involved, such as isometric tiles).

You're not forgetting to run Surface.convert_alpha() after loading the tiles, are you? (Probably not, but I'll mention it just in case.) In my experience, python+pygame can get a bit slow, but I never had any trouble related to just loading and blitting sprites.

As always,
Minotauros

82

Early Dev / Re: Golden Krone Hotel

« on: June 02, 2017, 12:12:42 PM »

Starting a series on roguelike design:

Things I Hate About Roguelikes – Part 1: Burden of Knowledge[/url

Loved it Left you a steaming pile of reply on reddit.

As always,
Minotauros

83

Design / Re: Skill category problem

« on: May 17, 2017, 10:00:19 PM »

I have no idea why. Anyway, another maybe strange category is for building and mining skills which I've named 'working'. Probably not the best one for that. I have 'bushcraft' category so it could be logical to name the category 'minecraft'.

Har, har. You could definitely call it that. Other ideas, something like "labor" if you want a general term, or "stonecraft/stonemasonry" if you want separate skill trees for specific crafts? wrt searching, I guess it could fall into an alertness/perception category if you have enough related skills, else I'd probably group it with the stock thief's skulduggery skills, since it makes sense for this to fall within the skillset of a burglar? At the end of the day, of course, it all depends on how you implement skills overall

An additional trouble when creating this stuff is english which is not my native language.

Me, too. I find using a thesaurus helps a lot when making up names for everything.

As always,
Minotauros

84

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #88) $

« on: May 17, 2017, 10:33:04 AM »

Hehe, thanks, man. I have fun making them, as well.

As always,
Minotauros

85

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #87!) $

« on: May 06, 2017, 06:15:02 PM »

The same happens with fungal outgrowths and other special body parts that can't be unequipped if you get them intrinsically. Quite obviously a bug, so I think there's no in-game way to fix it, short of getting your arm chopped off and wishing for a new one.

I haven't tried the last release, but I looks fantastic. Just when I was hoping that (something like) the water ritual would become available to all characters And I love the fact that you can chat with anybody since a few weeks back. The old CoQ was already one of the truly great RLs, and development is soaring these days.

As always,
Minotaus

86

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Land of Strangers #11 (Mercury Bubblegum)

« on: May 05, 2017, 01:31:06 AM »

Well, I think I fixed the problem with the survey, at least. A new exe has been uploaded, patched to always save a copy of the survey, not mention that it should now be able to actually send the data! Users who run from source/linux are not affected. Thanks again for the head up.

As always,
Minotauros

87

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Land of Strangers #11 (Mercury Bubblegum)

« on: May 04, 2017, 08:40:26 PM »

Yay, comments!

- In the description of Dilettante there is "Guaranteed skills" written

You're right. Removing it, as you suggest, is probably the simplest solution. It was meant to reflect (a bit jokingly) that dilettantes start with two completely random skills, in contrast to the other careers, who each has one guaranteed skill and another skill chosen randomly from the same area/skilltree.

Placeholder for Swordfighter background includes TODO info
Sometimes icons of keyboard shortcuts are displayed wrongly

Heh, my apologies. There's always some pieces that get left (more or less completely) unpolished Those PgUp/PgDn buttons turned out particularly badly because I was very clumsy inserting them into the existing UI. Hopefully fixed within a release or two (and surely with new, unpolished featured added).

sometimes the display of new kind of walls seems a bit glitcher. OK, it happens also for old structures, but - maybe due colors - is less conspicuous

This annoys the hell out of me, as well, and has been particularly frustrating to get working, because of two facts taken together: A. the player is allowed to scale to any resolution, and B. it's on a hexagonal grid. Making tiles that scale perfectly has just proven a bigger task than I can handle. On the long todo-list is to dump this feature and just offer several fixed resolutions (from tiny to huge), and have separate spritesheets for each resolution. That way, I would be able to make all angles fit perfectly, because it would be pregenerated as opposed to scaled during runtime.

Using all skills takes whole turn to activate? It's strange in some cases, like sprinting. It's like, I can move away from that animal... But I can't run away! It's weird.

Sprinting is particularly broken at the moment, nerfed into uselessness. You're right about skills taking a turn to use by default, and sprinting is obviously one thing that should be an exception to this rule. In general, I feel like the tactical system, initiative etc. isn't quite there yet. The underlying system intends to counteract some things like the "hack'n'back" strategy, but I'm stuck with other problems, like how biting animals can instakill (by successively paralyzing with critical hits), or how switching props in the middle of a melee fight is basically suicide. Some times I feel like resigning the underlying rules, but I may be better off finding what doesn't work and fix that.

not sure about that, but it seems that enemies, unlike player, do not have to correct, uhm, line of sight to attack

They shoot according to the same rules as the player, including that their shots can go wild. So they may hit you at an oblique angle if they are aiming next to you. (And in fact, there are techniques to wilfully increase your chance of wildfire, like fanning your gun at a tumbleweed surrounded by baddies. I was wondering about a boss template that trades accuracy for bullet hell by dual-wielding sawed off shotguns or something like that )

regarding to changelog: why rename derringer to pepperbox? Maybe it's worth to keep both?

I'll keep it in mind… The reason I removed the Derringer name, was because it was one of very few named references to Earth, where the other guns have descriptive names ("sixshooter" rather than "Colt"). If LoSt even plays on Earth, it's a quite different Terra than our own. Again, I'm still figuring out some of the basics of the setting, including to which degree I should reference Earth vs. generating lore from scratch all the time. I had an idea to maybe randomly generate spoofs off of famous gun brands, but never got around to doing it (yet). Something is definitely on the horizon in this department, though

In general, I'm content with that release, it's good to see new content and mechanics added. And, man, I'm sorry, I feel terrible when I'm reporting issues, it's like, don't know, sort of discouragement. I hope you don't feel it in that way

Quite the contrary! I think constructive criticism is the highest of praise. Thanks also for typos etc.

I was trying to use in-game survey, but I encountered error. Don't know what, message didn't specify that. It happened when I pressed 'send answers' option. Could you add possibility to copy the comment to the clipboard?

Hm. That survey was a last-minute addition. Are you on Windows? I only properly tested it in Linux; now I feel quite stupid thinking about people who might be doing me the favor of filling out the form only to get their answers flushed. I should have my dusty old netbook with Windows around here somewhere, so I can hopefully make a quick fix.

Thank you for your continued support of the game, man

As always,
Minotauros

88

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Land of Strangers #13 (One Crawled out of the Foxhole)

« on: May 03, 2017, 11:04:05 PM »

LAND OF STRANGERS
alpha open weird wild west fantasy cowboy RL

Get yer downloads here!

Released: Version 11 (Mercury Bubblegum)

This is an interim release of LoSt, preceding a hefty rewrite of some of the systems. I wanted to start refactoring from a clean cut, so to speak, so I'm publishing what I have to date. In other words, LoSt is still in alpha. Compared to #10, this version contains some bug fixes and a bit of content. The most spectacular feature is perhaps that you can now gain followers by choosing the "Populist" shtick.

Comments are always appreciated, on appropriate forum threads, per email, or you can fill out the in-game survey that I added as an experimental feature in this version. It'll be interesting to see whether that garners any response, and if I can use it to guide and motivate further development.

As always,
Minotauros

CHANGELOG
BUG: Couldn't pick up lead slugs when pockets were full
BUG: Buggy inventory interface if pockets were empty
BUG: Critters turned invisible when spending props
BUG: Could see through walls at certain angles
BUG: (Serious) bug that made game pick invalid kits
BUG: Bug that printed nonexisting plants and obstacles
BUG: Spitting bush had forgot how to spit
BUG: Some instances of NPCs getting stuck repeating one action
BUG: Crashed because game tried to draw outside the screen
GAME: Player can now start with up to two shticks
GAME: Some props can be used directly from inventory (experimental)
GAME: Prompt to abort extended actions when hostiles enter line of sight
GAME: Commandline options to set world seed
GAME: Scrollable menus (needs polish, but should work
GAME: Cleaned up the log area a bit
GAME: Can save multiple characters in the same world
GAME: Default field of vision now set to 11
CONTENT: Renamed "derringer" as "pepperbox gun"
CONTENT: Fleshed out animal species a bit
CONTENT: Weapon prefixes
CONTENT: Added some skills, props, places and critters
CONTENT: Backstory generator now spits out terser texts
AI: Added more bias switches: annoy, please, exalt
AI: Action calculation for fields of battle plants should be quicker
AI: Gain followers (experimental)
AI: Most beings now set to stay at home or roam their native region
AI: Toolwielders now better at choosing their weapon
VAR: Added an in-game survey
VAR: Various tweaks and fixes

Edit: Download links

89

Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Which operative system do you use?

« on: April 30, 2017, 06:34:31 AM »

I've been using Linux for most of my life, sticking with Debian since about ten years back.

It's true that Wine can handle a lot of Windows-applications (including Triangle Wizard, last I checked). But it can sometimes be a hassle to install libraries and components (there's an application called winetricks for this). And there's also the occational game that won't even run in Wine, such as The Ground Gives Way.

Have fun.

As always,
Minotauros

90

Player's Plaza / Re: Looking for sci-fi or wild west roguelike

« on: April 23, 2017, 07:06:08 PM »

Will there be some kind of towns since you plan to add bigger houses? Or the world is pretty desolate in general?

Yes, I'm planning a starting town with a few bounties/quests to get you started, plus random towns and pueblos dispersed across the land. But maintaining the general feel of a wild landscape, with unsettled expanses between the various outposts of civilization.

As always,
Minotauros