Fame Feedback Thread

[Ancient]

I am glad you tracked down the money exploit. Such bugs are big threats to game balance. Congratulations! I remember an error in PRIME that had to do with 'break' instead of 'continue' too. Curiously this was hiding there from ZapM era which means it also survived a few years. The resulting behavior was just improper message so it was not as harmful. On the other hand it was

As for the three bugs you quoted you need to save the game and reload it to experience them. These never show up on me otherwise. For #2 approach the dungeon site, save, exit, reload and enter. On my side this guarantees a crash. Same for #1. Bug #1 also can happen if you take some items from site but not all and try to reenter it after save/load procedure. Never managed to reproduce #3 though. It happened to me only once.

Yes, I kept the dump. It is uploaded on my site. You will receive download link by personal message shortly.

I never tried to hide what was my primary source of inspiration . Used to play ADOM in the late 90's, when it wasn't completed yet, but it was already a shining star in the roguelike world. I discovered the genre in 1998, having read a large article about it in a gaming magazine. Never really liked Angband or Nethack, but fell in love with ADOM from the first sight. I didn't want to copy entire phrases, but couldn't resist the temptation in case of the "lone wizard" . Let's treat it like a tribute to ADOM.

Having such obvious and strong inspiration is nothing wrong. Even the identical phases which set familiar mood. PRIME is so soaked with NetHack it would be silly for me to badmouth Untitled for borrowing theme partially. :-)

[TheCreator]

Sadly, it seems that I won't be able to do anything with that dump. I thought that having source files for the 0.7.9 version I will just produce PDB files out of them, but apparently Microsoft had another idea: buy yourself a server room and store all your PDB there forever, or otherwise you will never be able to generate them again with correct GUIDs. Doh.

The good news is that #2 can be reproduced easily. I hope to have it solved soon. I didn't manage to reproduce #1, though. Is the location you mentioned ("mine site") actually called "Miners' Camp"? Did  you take any quests  related to that location prior to the crash?

As of the other bugs, they have been all fixed on Sunday and I have also implemented the features requested by you.

[Ancient]

I can't remember what the mine site was called. It was the place with single miner accepting cheese from Akeram and numerous lodes. I couldn't reproduce the crash either.

However, I ran into another crash. After visiting the 3rd level of 100-level dungeon I came back to Eluny because I caught a cold (very annoying thing). Some corpses immediately decayed when I re-entered location with dungeon entrance. These were only items left there before I descended. Then after visiting Elunny game crashed. The sword I left somewhere in the village may or may not have something to do with it.

[TheCreator]

You are obviously skilled at finding such bugs! Luckily, this time I reproduced and fixed the bug with minimum effort. Thanks again! Hopefully I will find the other bugs as well.

[TheCreator]

I think that the other crashes were caused by the same bug. I managed to reproduce the one that occured in the miners' camp.

[Ancient]

I think that the other crashes were caused by the same bug. I managed to reproduce the one that occured in the miners' camp.

Excellent!

Perhaps it is good time for a new release? Eliminating so many bugs is quite an improvement of gameplay. Since you have removed a bug causing a whole class of crashes it would be good to have new build so additional ways to trigger that old bug are not reported as new problems.

[TheCreator]

Yeah, that's what I'm going to do. But there are still some planned improvements left, and those are important ones. Besides I'm going to change the name soon. Simple as it sounds, it's not a thing that can be done with two clicks .

[TheCreator]

The new version is out. A lot of bugs have been fixed, including all known crashes, so now hostile monsters should be the only challenge . I have also implemented most (if not all) of the suggested minor improvements. Oh, and I've given it a real name. And the Linux version is distributed in a tarball. Hopefully everybody will be happy now .

Saved games are compatible back to the version 0.7.7.

[kraflab]

Here is some initial feedback...

The phrase "this is how your character will look like" is in a tooltip.  This is a common mistake non-english speakers make, where they use how and like.  It should either be "this is how your character will look" or "what you character will look like".

On the subject of tooltips, they only show up after hovering your mouse over something and not moving it for some time.  I initially did not know they existed.  Especially in character creation where you have space for the tooltip reserved, it should show up immediately and not disappear if you move your mouse.

Another error in the tooltips, for skills "but ot necessarily", where it should read "but not necessarily"

There should be tooltips on the individual skills.  For instance, what is the difference between melee and axe?  To me melee means any melee weapon, but perhaps it means non-axe melee weapons here?

Clicking the help button does nothing.  Luckily I knew to try '?' when that failed, but others might not.

Dragging a weapon into my hand just sends it back to the inventory instead of swapping with the currently equipped weapon.

I feel like the game needs some kind of explanation at the beginning.  What type of game is this?  What is my goal?  Who/where am i?  Should I wander around or look for quests?  Right now there appears to be no information, and it just drops you somewhere.  This might work for some games, but it doesn't even say what the controls are.  Even just an initial "press ? for help" in the log would be a good step here, although there is certainly a lot to be done.

When you have multiple corpses stacked on the ground, they show as a pile of weapons and scrolls.  This is obviously no good and should be replaced with a corpse image unless there are actually items there.

I came across a traveling family and decided to attack them as I was just messing around.  I'm not sure if the ability to kill children is something that countries ban a game for, but I know that most games avoid it (such as the inability to kill children in fallout 3).  I don't know the details of that, and it almost definitely doesn't matter, but it's just something I noticed

[TheCreator]

As of those tooltips, this is only an initial version. I just couldn't decide how they should work. I'll surely try your suggestions. Tips for skills may not be actually needed (the term 'melee' is of course very ambiguous here, but that's just because of my laziness), but I'll add them anyway.

I feel like the game needs some kind of explanation at the beginning.  What type of game is this?  What is my goal?  Who/where am i?  Should I wander around or look for quests?  Right now there appears to be no information, and it just drops you somewhere.  This might work for some games, but it doesn't even say what the controls are.  Even just an initial "press ? for help" in the log would be a good step here, although there is certainly a lot to be done.

I consider it as an advantage of my game! It is extremely annoying for me that in most of modern games you need to click your way through zillions of windows before you have any chance to actually play. I remember times when you only needed to put a disk into a floppy drive and after few minutes (or hours if you were a lucky owner of C-64) your character was displayed on the screen, ready for your commands. No menus, no tutorials, no stories that nobody ever reads. But yes, I realize that other people do care about stories and tutorials may actually be useful (especially in roguelikes). So I guess this is one of the things I will need to think about when planning the next version.

Dragging a weapon into my hand just sends it back to the inventory instead of swapping with the currently equipped weapon.

This is a nuisance when you want to switch from melee to a ranged weapon... But swapping is not a perfect solution, either. Another thing to think of .

When you have multiple corpses stacked on the ground, they show as a pile of weapons and scrolls.  This is obviously no good and should be replaced with a corpse image unless there are actually items there.

Corpses ARE items, but I know what you mean. I was very concerned about performance (long time ago when I implemented this stuff) do I did not want to do an extended check for type of items in a pile, but you are right that now it badly affects convenience instead.

I came across a traveling family and decided to attack them as I was just messing around.  I'm not sure if the ability to kill children is something that countries ban a game for, but I know that most games avoid it (such as the inability to kill children in fallout 3).  I don't know the details of that, and it almost definitely doesn't matter, but it's just something I noticed

There's a lot hypocrisy about games nowadays. If you create a game in which the player is able to kill, you become a public enemy number one, but if you actually kill someone, all you deserve to is being put in a prison for 15 years, in comfortable conditions. I never wanted to participate in that show. My goal was to create a sense of total freedom. Of course, killing a child would result in a very bad karma or something (to be implemented in the future), but making children immortal or not having them in the game at all would be, well, weird .

[AgingMinotaur]

I came across a traveling family and decided to attack them as I was just messing around.  I'm not sure if the ability to kill children is something that countries ban a game for, but I know that most games avoid it (such as the inability to kill children in fallout 3).  I don't know the details of that, and it almost definitely doesn't matter, but it's just something I noticed

My goal was to create a sense of total freedom. Of course, killing a child would result in a very bad karma or something (to be implemented in the future), but making children immortal or not having them in the game at all would be, well, weird .

Yes comrade! I don't even think you need a system with karma/alignment. Since children et al. will realistically not carry any interesting loot, it doesn't have to be a question of min/maxing or not. It should be the player's sick choice if he goes the extra mile to hunt down and slaughter an "enemy" who does nothing but flee and offers no reward when defeated. (Jeff Lait's Smart kobold does this to a certain extent).

As always,
Minotauros

[Darren Grey]

Hmm, so why Fame?  I can't see a link to the game's content at the moment, unless you're planning for something relating to the quests affecting player reputation.

I was disappointed playing it that I couldn't use the mouse to move around and interact with things.  When menus and such require mouse use it seems jarring the the game doesn't support it.

I agree on the previous comment of tooltips being too delayed.  They should be constantly visible when the mouse is over the relevant area.

Combat feels a bit bland I must say.  I'm bumping into things and killing them, and not paying attention to whether I hit or miss or how my health is doing.  It's just not engaging.  Perhaps I'm spoiled by ToME4's many combat abilities.  Would be nice to see more variety to attacks, like every nth turn I do a sweeping attack that hits all enemies around.  That would give a sense of momentum to battle, and keep the player a bit more keyed in to the turn by turn action.

For a game that claims to not be generic / based on any individual system, it seems very very D&D and very standard fantasy.  Ghouls, goblins, ents...  Why not invent your own names for things?  Overall I think the game needs more of an individual feel.  It mostly feels like a mix of ADOM and AD&D.

In character creation it would be nice to have certain archetypes one could choose so you don't have to fiddle with the stat allocation on every restart.  Saving individual profiles would be handy too.

I like the feel of going straight into the game, but some separate readme on the menu screen to say what the game is about or give some backstory would be good.

The widely expansed map is great, but some sort of overview map could be handy (or does this exist already?)

Some of the icons are a bit unclear or misleading.  The short sword and long knife should be shorter, for instance.  In general I'm not a big fan of the tiles - makes me long for crisp and clear ASCII 

Minor quibble: Your circles have dimples on them   A small tweak to your circle calculator (have the range +/- 0.5) and they'll look much nicer.

[Quendus]

Minor quibble: Your circles have dimples on them   A small tweak to your circle calculator (have the range +/- 0.5) and they'll look much nicer.

You can also de-spike your circles by using a "less than" check instead of a "less than or equal to" check.

[kraflab]

Minor quibble: Your circles have dimples on them   A small tweak to your circle calculator (have the range +/- 0.5) and they'll look much nicer.

You can also de-spike your circles by using a "less than" check instead of a "less than or equal to" check.

Ah yes, Quendus's unending quest to rid the world of pointy circles claims another victim!

[Darren Grey]

I am a supporter of that quest! Dimpled circles look horrible.