Solstice (now at v0.0.44b Alpha)

[Brigand]

I went ahead and created a thread over on Bay12 to see about getting some further visibility and players---perhaps the biggest place out there were ASCII sensibilities are fine and well.

Thanks getter, appreciate the support. But, I may still just call it a day on this project, something I am going to consider over the weekend. I have another half finished action roguelike sitting on my harddrive that is probably too ambitious as well. 

I've been screwing around a bit with libtcod, and am a little tempted to start a new roguelike in a less archaic language, but the idea of beginning anew with a project this size is pretty daunting - it would take a looong time to get back to this point, and there would be a learning curve substantially increasing that time.

[Samildanach]

But, I may still just call it a day on this project, something I am going to consider over the weekend.

I hope you don't. There aren't that many roguelikes that stand out and try to do something interesting. If my antivirus is the only one panicking about Solstice, then giving up would be a tragic waste of a promising start.

[Aukustus]

About the error 13 that was talked on the first page, I can recreate that at will. It happens when player walks into the yellow tiles.

[Xan]

Another thing you could try is submitting a false positive report to Sophos.  Apparently this can actually work.

[Zireael]

Firefox is not blocking your download; it's likely Sophos has a plugin for Firefox, so it's the same thing doing the blocking. I use Firefox exclusively and have never gotten a report of malware.

Firefox itself has no malware reporting/blocking capabilities as opposed to Chrome. However, there are multiple malware blocking plugins for FF.

And on the topic of false positives, I keep getting a false positive on FreeOrion (a freeware 4X game I've been testing for a year) with Norton 360 all the time. After some investigation, it turned out that the report amounted to 'it's suspicious because we think it's suspicious', so I had nothing to point out to the devs, and no reason to

[Brigand]

About the error 13 that was talked on the first page, I can recreate that at will. It happens when player walks into the yellow tiles.

Awesome, thank you for finding this - can you elaborate what you mean by yellow tiles? The village tiles, or the coast line - and when you say walks into them, do you mean simply walking around in the overworld, or zooming into the submap by pressing > ?? If the first case, are you exiting the ship or something like that?


Again, thank you so much - I would love to know how to produce this error.

[Brigand]

Firefox is not blocking your download; it's likely Sophos has a plugin for Firefox, so it's the same thing doing the blocking. I use Firefox exclusively and have never gotten a report of malware.

Firefox itself has no malware reporting/blocking capabilities as opposed to Chrome. However, there are multiple malware blocking plugins for FF.

And on the topic of false positives, I keep getting a false positive on FreeOrion (a freeware 4X game I've been testing for a year) with Norton 360 all the time. After some investigation, it turned out that the report amounted to 'it's suspicious because we think it's suspicious', so I had nothing to point out to the devs, and no reason to

Yeah, URR tells me theres some kind of "Pak" malware associated with it, but I never found where anyone else got that error so I ignored it. I'm finding the 'it's suspicious because we think it's suspicious' thing to be very annoying. I realize it's err on the side of caution, but they really need some better algorithm for identifying the malware pattern than 'it's an exe', or 'it writes a file to disk'. Seem like those are pretty common properties of 'software'.

[Aukustus]

About the error 13 that was talked on the first page, I can recreate that at will. It happens when player walks into the yellow tiles.

Awesome, thank you for finding this - can you elaborate what you mean by yellow tiles? The village tiles, or the coast line - and when you say walks into them, do you mean simply walking around in the overworld, or zooming into the submap by pressing > ?? If the first case, are you exiting the ship or something like that?


Again, thank you so much - I would love to know how to produce this error.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/95372567/Solstice.png

Here's the picture of the exact moment it happens. It seems that it happens the moment '@' comes out of the 'V' or I enter the yellow tile where the '@' is standing.

[Brigand]

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/95372567/Solstice.png

Here's the picture of the exact moment it happens. It seems that it happens the moment '@' comes out of the 'V' or I enter the yellow tile where the '@' is standing.

AH! I think I found it! (Maybe) Thank you so much! I would never have found that just looking at the code, and the nature of the bug made it un-reproducible the way I was testing (it was definitely some malformed code - I just don't know why it didn't throw an error for me - maybe Win 8 enforces the type checking more strictly - I believe VB6 will enforce type variant on expressions of mixed type.)

On a side note - the town and caves aren't supposed to look like that. I'm using the Windows terminal font that came with the system - apparently I was wrong in assuming it was available on all systems. I will investigate and see if I can figure out whats going on.  What version of Windows are you on, by the way?


Thank you again!

[Aukustus]

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/95372567/Solstice.png

Here's the picture of the exact moment it happens. It seems that it happens the moment '@' comes out of the 'V' or I enter the yellow tile where the '@' is standing.

Ah, thank you so much. I think the issue has to do with the font (if doesn't, the font is still an issue). The town and caves aren't supposed to look like that. I'm using the Windows terminal font that came with the system - apparently I was wrong in assuming it was available on all systems. I will investigate and see if I can figure out whats going on. Thank you again!  What version of Windows are you on, by the way?

64bit Windows 8.1.

[Samildanach]

Another thing you could try is submitting a false positive report to Sophos.  Apparently this can actually work.

Ah, good find! I'll try that.

On a side note - the town and caves aren't supposed to look like that. I'm using the Windows terminal font that came with the system - apparently I was wrong in assuming it was available on all systems. I will investigate and see if I can figure out whats going on.  What version of Windows are you on, by the way?

Really? They look like that for me, too. Windows 7, 64-bit.

Incidentally, since apparently no one but me is having this problem with the game being labelled malware, I'm just getting rid of Sophos. I did some digging and found that Sophos has been know to cause problems with various innocuous pieces of software. Moral of the story: don't use an antivirus programme just because your company gives you the paid version for free.

I'm genuinely sorry for any distress my difficulties with this have caused you. The last thing I want is to discourage someone from making their game. If I'd had any inkling that the problem was confined to just me and this ludicrous antivirus, I wouldn't have said anything.

[Brigand]

I added some code and included the font file with a custom name to the data folder (it should add the resource automatically (its only there at run time)). Would one of you be willing to see if v0.0.37d actually looks like the picture I posted above with the correct symbols for towns/caves/submap objects/etc?

I think it should work - my screen is displaying everything correctly and there are no errors - a poll of local resources shows the correct custom font name. I'm just not convinced it's not still using the terminal font in the C:\Windows\Fonts folder.

If it does actually display correctly for you, then it will probably also fix the weird spacing on the condensed display as well.

Thank you

[Samildanach]

Another thing you could try is submitting a false positive report to Sophos.  Apparently this can actually work.

Sure enough, it did indeed work! Sophos no longer has a problem with Solstice. 

[Brigand]

Another thing you could try is submitting a false positive report to Sophos.  Apparently this can actually work.

Sure enough, it did indeed work! Sophos no longer has a problem with Solstice. 

Cool, thanks for doing that for me. I appreciate it a lot. Did the font inclusion work by any chance, or still the old characters?

[Samildanach]

Cool, thanks for doing that for me. I appreciate it a lot. Did the font inclusion work by any chance, or still the old characters?

Yep, seems to have worked. Towns etc now look like your screenshot.