Well, there was this thing, which I prefer to see folks being civil and having a good time with my ire only aimed at damnable spam bots(literally just a thing right before this) versus entirely unprovoked personal attacks on a dev out of nowhere:
http://forums.roguetemple.com/index.php?topic=18.0The "kernel" is there slightly, but in such a case, could've well stood to be just that even if reasoned extrapolation could be had to flesh it out to an actual point versus heaping on this other. Biskup himself has clearly put in quite a lot of hours of archaeology/coding, ample organization efforts, and misc other tasks all while dealing with some serious body blows that life supplied him and his own along the way---it is a pretty low effort thing to just peruse back through the mists of some on the dev blog to dissuade the "did practically nothing" line which I especially shook my head at.
TL, DR: Not so much "Shut up" as "Come on now"
It has always been equal parts adventure and misadventure when it comes to the development of ADOM and ADOM II in relatively modern times---endless communal "expectations", endless conspiracy theories, Biskup's seemingly endless font of work at his day/night job, the sideline non-ADOM P&P thing that looked like it might become something of a thing for awhile there, and so on.
When ADOM II dev actually started to get someplace, full of fury and inscrutable Java, it was the days of Alpha/Early Access that had started to gain traction---so he started to make some headway along those lines as opposed to waiting until however many more years it could well have taken to get it out there in a Complete, or even Beta, form. Then Crowdfunding suddenly became something of a thing, even as a longshot as ADOM didn't do KS where all the real action was and continues to be(his locale wasn't expressly supported by KS in those days)---but the far, far lesser entity that was IndieGoGo(on which he is still, after all these years, probably one of the very few to actually come through on things especially for even the modest amount he raised). With this, Biskup's TEAM, which I place special emphasis on as time and again there's this strange framing undercurrent I don't understand that this whole thing is solely Biskup as per the old days suddenly asking for money in exchange for doings things well beyond his old(and present) skillset, gained some funds to make actual headway on the technical backend, music, art, and so on needed to have ADOM roughly be all it can be.
Perhaps there's some alternate universe out there where Biskup arbitrarily decided to maintain postcardware and pay for all the team stuff entirely out of pocket via some sort of lotto win or treasure discovery---but this universe is the one we've got and it seems a silly thing to begrudge or smear the man on. People can still flood his mailbox with postcards which would probably contribute a fair bit in their own right to motivating the project by putting even more of a tangible, human face to the playerbase.
The free updates are still a thing, with folks that chipped in simply getting to be victims of further testing and whatnot sooner than later---absolutely nothing weird about it as well as the fact that all the old editions are still pretty much there for anybody that fancies a jaunt back through time. There's even Amiga builds, just because---absolutely nobody with any damn sense to cater entirely to sensible business doings as the driving force would dare to entertain such a notion.
NotEye is also more than meets the eye(Sorry Zeno, couldn't resist)---a pathway to the base inclusion of Tiles alongside the ASCII for Steam(and otherwise hopefully to come like GoG...) is only a portion of what it has come to be capable of doing....much of which improvements(Folks that buy into cool feature on things buying into a thing gaining cool features? Seems legit) which can then be of benefit to the entire community of current and future projects came DIRECTLY from the funds/work for ADOM explicitly:
http://www.roguetemple.com/z/noteye/In an age when most Roguelike "tools" meet a sad fate of languishing in a tech debt hell from which they can never quite get their heads above water on(libtcod and so, so many more), it is at least absolutely worth celebrating the ways and means which has allowed for at least one to stand a real chance at actually flourishing for the good of all.
This isn't Reddit(never will be, thankfully---even if the Roguelikes/Roguelikedev subs are pretty nifty overall despite the constraints they have to function in within the sum of Reddit on the whole), and just for the sake of it since I half suspect aversions cast my own way given I somehow often seem to fall into the role of an odd ADOM and such reporter/bibliographer---Biskup, and his team, have yet to see so much of a thin damn dime from the likes of me, so this isn't like I'm trying to self-validate a premium purchase from years ago so much as clear the brackish mists which I so thoroughly don't understand why they continue to be a thing and reappear time and again when the general history is right there for all as it isn't like I'm supping from the esoteric(weird secret goings on is Nethack country for sure) here.
The "cheering" is mainly to do with one of the classic Roguelike devs managing to Do Something again---because as per the Demographics, surprise, most are either already dead and unable to further share their windows to the extraordinary with the world or are very much en route to that phase the same as most of the formative figures in the entire gaming sphere, industry or otherwise. This whole crazy thing only has a couple decades under the belt, which in the sum of humanity's culturally historical doings is positively infant---so in my estimation rallying a bit around some general good bits(Release a thing that is better and works? Neat!) and making note of them for posterity is well in order. The historically curmudgeonly streak is something of an odd quirk that Roguelike scene gained for itself(The Western line anyway) mainly in the Usenet days and flared up again in the modern times of the 'Roguelites impugning The Purity", but just because it is aged doesn't make it sacrosanct or worthy of enshrinement if it doesn't actually foster anything positive and/or lively going forward versus even just a tad of optimism/positivity and benefit of the doubt.
