UnBrogue 1.1.2 released

Further fixes. Windows, OS/X.

Known issues
- Monsters will not flee through water.

Changes for 1.1.2
- Ogre shields now less effective when weakened.
- Mandrakes will now follow you down stairs (Requested by tinyrodent).
- Improve some tome names to better distinguish what they do.
- Harpies are more common and always spawn in flocks.
- Made lamias slightly tougher in combat and freely move through deep water.
- Prevent talismans of witchcraft upgrading items which had already been discovered.
- Provide damaging forewarning and additional stage of obsidian collapsing into lava and prevent pathing across any stage of collapsing obsidian.
- Freshly created mandrakes take longer to sprout.
- Fix and rebalance talisman of dungeoneering.
- Fix crash impaling zombies. (Reported by requerant)
- Fix various crashes to do with item workshops that could result in item corruption.
- Fix phasing penetrating or reflecting bolts.
- Fix force bolts damaging enemies which didn't collide with anything.
- Fix mandrake bolts. (Reported by tinyrodent)
- Fix polymorphed dominated monsters resulting in perma-allegiance. (Reported by qlordz).
- Fix elixir of strength (Reported by ggoDeye).
- Fix recharge times on charm of protection (reported by ggoDeye).
- Fix a number of OOS errors when using charms and talismans (reported by ggoDeye).
- Fix a crash when escaping out of enchanting an item (reported by ggoDeye).
- Fix a bug where you could consume any item when applying a potion to darts.
- Fix bug where lamias could spawn embedded in walls.
- Fix another display bug when getting hit while shielded (reported by ggoDeye).
- Fix tome and elixir graphics being the wrong way around.
- Really fix potion and scroll experiments.

UnBrogue 1.1.1 released

As discussed on the Brogue forums, this is a quick bug fix release. Nothing serious but lots of annoying bugs fixed. Windows, OS/X.

Changes for 1.1.1
- Spears, pikes get stained with the blood of any creature they kill by impaling.
- Significantly improve the feedback of identify, enchanting effects which apply to more than one item.
- Improve correctness of spear, pike impaling to try to fix out of sync errors, reports of crashing.
- Made permanent status effects actually permanent.
- Mark monsters as permanently negated only if they have underlying racial abilities/traits which can be negated.
- Make it clear what witch hazel does.
- Add a couple of reward room entrances (one from 1.7.1).
- Add monster tweaks from 1.7.1.
- Add some post-amulet monsters to try to spice up the deep a bit more.
- Improve description and appearance of obsidian walls (reported by tinyrodent).
- Flatten power curve of staff of protection.
- Fix problems with charms, talismans destroying items when using them.
- Fix blinking, pushed monsters failing to impale themselves on an extended spear or pike if they blink or are pushed through the grid.
- Fix various reward rooms not being impregnable (now using 1.7.1 code to prevent corner clipping).
- Fix potion and scroll experiments found throughout the dungeon.
- Fix protection display glitch and logic problems on getting damaged (Reported by Creaphis).
- Fix bug where half of all charms of protection had no recharge time (Reported by tinyrodent).
- Fix bug where you could not injure your allies using throwing weapons (Reported by ggoDeye).
- Fix bug preventing gambling from working.
- Fix occasional crypt weirdness/crash.
- Fix challenging staff/wand workshops and provide more information on construction rules.

Linux, seed scummer builds of 1.1 available

Joshua Day has made me a Linux build of UnBrogue which you can get here. And Patashu has tempted the fate of the RNG to give you a seed scummer version of UnBrogue 1.1 including a Windows compile, which you can get links to from the Brogue thread on UnBrogue.

UnBrogue 1.1 released

Many thanks to Marco Salamone and Harrison Kreimer for taking the time to test the pre-release versions of the 1.1 release. Windows, OS/X Linux (thanks to Joshua Day for compiling this and updating the Linux platform code).

Changes for 1.1
- Code base updated to Brogue 1.7.
- Some changes have been added from 1.7.1: Bloodworts, lunging with rapiers, weapons of Force, reflection is now negatable, improvement to low level charms of protection, moving around obstacles diagonally.
- The majority of Brogue 1.7.1 change will be included in the next major UnBrogue release (1.2); the diff between 1.7.0 and 1.7.1 is approximately twice that of 1.6.3 to 1.7.0, and a number of systems changed significantly (dungeon generation, monster AI) in ways that will require more time to port across.
- Unlike 1.7.1, statues cannot be moved around diagonally.
- Added sabres which attack all adjacent targets in regular combat and when lunging.
- Blinking with a rapier, sabre will perform a lunge while blinking if there is a monster in the path of the blink.
- Moving with a spear or pike extends the weapon into the next grid in the direction you are moving if it is unoccupied. Any monster entering this grid will be automatically hit for x3 times damage.
- Maces, hammers damage is halved but they knock back enemies they hit 2 grids, doing triple damage if the enemy is knocked into an obstruction.
- Talisman of madness bonus now only affects weapons and armour. (One does not simply walk into DL100).
- Spiders summoned by a talisman of spiders appear at the stairs on the current level and begin levelled up twice for each enchantment on the talisman; this does not allow them to learn new abilities.
- Fix potion of winds typo.
- Scrolls of duplication correctly duplicate keys.
- Scrolls, charms of shattering have a chance of shattering reflective monsters, based on proximity and shattering radius.
- Fix protection so that it really only lasts 20 turns.
- Golems are not tortured.
- Dragons attack all adjacent targets; horror attacks penetrate like a Brogue spear/pike.
- Armour AC is increased by 1 for all armors except leather, plate. Plate strength requirement increased by one.
- Imps, nagas, salamanders get flee near death flag.
- Nagas and salamanders rapidly heal when submerged (2 hp per turn).
- Nagas and salamanders hate each other and will always attack each other on sight, even if allied.
- Added 'h'arpies, 'l'amias and [spoiler]. Feedback on how unfair these monsters are is welcome.
- You take half damage falling into shallow water, bogs or dense foliage, or if the air below is filled with strong winds.
- Slays/immunities now apply to a group of similar monsters (dar slaying, jelly slaying) rather than individual monsters in some instances.
- Firebolt is piercing: left over damage is applied to the next monster in line of fire if the first is killed.
- Aggravate Monster temporarily aggravates all monsters in LOS: aggravated monsters attack instead of fleeing, flitting or keeping their distance.
- Throwing potions of fire immunity creates a fire extinguishing gas. Throwing potions of life creates a healing gas.
- Centaur and arrow turret attacks unaffected by negation. Dart and acid turrets are stripped of their special effects but can still attack from a distance if negated. Ogres do not lose their shields if negated.
- Captive and dominated monsters generated out of depth don't begin gaining experience until they reach their minimum depth.
- Removed rings of Accuracy, Wizardry and Alchemy.
- Added Transference as a ring again. Removed Transference runic.
- Excess hit points stolen with transference adds to protection.
- Thrown weapons are not destroyed when they hit a target, unless it is a dart or javelin with a special ability such as incendiary darts. To compensate they all appear in smaller stacks and you begin the game with only 3 darts. (Inspired by morphles' patch).
- Thrown spears and pikes penetrate through to a second target in the next grid along the aimed path; thrown axes, sabres hit all targets adjacent to the grid before the first target they would hit.
- Wand and staff types are combined, with each type randomly being a wand or staff from game to game, but a minimum of two wands and three staffs, one of which will be a direct damage staff (lightning, fire, poison, force).
- Wands/staffs of Force and Nature added. Force pushes monster backwards 1 grid per enchantment and damages them if they hit an obstruction: triple damage if the target is knocked into a wall. Nature stops and grows a plant if the bolt crosses consecutive three fertile grids of the same type - either observe what plants grow on what terrain in the dungeon, or experiment to see what you can grow - and nature wands grow wooden bridges over chasms.
- Added more monsters summoned by wands/staffs of summoning. Staffs of phantoms removed as invisible hard hitting enemies on level 1 was not fun.
- Added more talismans. Check 'D'iscoveries for names.
- Talismans now all significantly change how part of the game works so that the least interesting ones are those which require that you be hallucinating, poisoned or on fire.
- Added some new reward rooms for further mid and end game variety.
- Runic wands and staffs.

UnBrogue 1.0.5 released

Mac OSX + source. Windows + source.

This release fixes all outstanding issues and to do list items, however could do with a little bit more testing before being considered a stable release.

Changes for 1.0.5

- Prevent a player from killing themselves by wielding an enchanted weapon of Transference they lack the strength to use. (Reported by tinyrodent).
- Prevent sparks from [spoiler] causing slow down and visual bugs during playback.
- Correctly calculate shield gold value.
- Allow shields and talismans to be called something, instead of crashing. (Reported by tinyrodent).
- Potion of winds do not help other gases spread.
- Added 3 more machine rooms.
- Talismans generated as rewards will not be cursed (Requested by tinyrodent).
- Fix scroll of duplication messages.
- Prevent scrolls of duplication from duplicating themselves (Reported by multiple people).
- Prevent scrolls of enchantment from enchanting [spoiler].

UnBrogue 1.0.4 released

OS X + source. Windows + source.

Changes for 1.0.4

- Wearing an uncursed but unknown item marks it as not cursed.
- Fix drop message when you drop one item from a stack. (Reported by tinyrodent).
- Remove debugging code which made one type of machine room far too frequent.
- Fix sparks so that they don't have a directional bias. (Reported by tinyrodent).
- Fix [spoiler] machines so that exits are not blocked.
- Fix crash caused by staff of reflection (Reported by autoquark).

To do list - some user interface clean up stuff:
- Sparks mess up recordings when emitted by [spoiler].
- Potion of duplication can duplicate itself. This is a UI bug/very slight exploit has a high(ish) risk fix.
- Talismans can be enchanted when [spoiler].

Unconfirmed, works fine for me and haven't been able to duplicate:
- Food isn't being created as frequently as possible, or regeneration is too slow.
Please drop a note in the comments if you see any other bugs or are experiencing either of the unconfirmed issues, as I'd love to get these fixed or confirmed as working fine.

UnBrogue 1.0.3 released

UnBrogue 1.0.3 has been released. OS X + source, Windows + source. Let me know in the comments if you're able to compile a Linux version.

Changes for 1.0.3

- Add Talisman of Spiders.
- Fix healing so that Talisman of Shadows prevents your darkened state from being completely removed.
- Fix bug preventing talismans from being enchanted.
- Altered talisman relative frequencies to make the most useful talismans appear more often.
- Ensured every machine room has solution available on the same level.
- Added [spoiler] which can be manufactured with [spoiler].
- Add 3 machine rooms which use [spoiler].
- Lightning which hits a target standing in water causes the lightning bolt to ground: creating up to 6 sparks which randomly travel from the target to nearby conductive grids with the bolt damage divided between them. A conductive grid either contains water, metallic terrain such as iron manacles and chains or a monster (or the player) which is not flying or levitating, and sparks will travel through up to two non-conductive grids to get to a conductive grid.

Unangband 0.6.4b released

This is a back port of a number of features from the SVN version which probably deserve some air time prior to me releasing a broken 0.6.5.  You can download the source code from http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangband/unangband-064b-src.zip and a precompiled Windows build from http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangband/unangband-064b-win.zip.

For the full change log, see the official web page.

Roguelike Release Day

I'm going to take advantage of a) the timezone difference in Australia, and b) the generosity of strangers to contribute very little to Roguelike Release Day a day late.

Please consider Hajo's Iso-unangband WIP4 to be the Unangband Roguelike release for this day.

You may want to check out the official page for Roguelike Release Day.

Unangband 0.6.4 released

This is the "Once your variant gets a nowhere town, it will never leave" release aka "Wasn't this supposed to be out months ago?"

You can download the source code from http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangband/unangband-064-src.zip. You can download a precompiled Windows build from http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangband/unangband-064-win.zip, a pre-compiled Mac OS/X build from http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangband/Unangband-0.6.4-osx.dmg. A Linux version should be following shortly. [Edit: Now available at http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangband/unangband-064.tar.gz - thanks to Mike].

For more details, please see the official website.

I've not spent nearly enough time quashing bugs, but real life has left me pretty drained at the end of the working day. I'm sure my motivation levels will pick up soon enough - just need a little holiday from staring at the source code.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part eleven)

PS: Frender, I really miss you. BFF?

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part ten)

I've got plenty more design notes, but I think you should just get over to the official announcement where you can register your interest.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part nine)

Everyone starts with the camera beard hat unlocked. You may have guessed that we're going with a steam punk theme, and there is nothing more steampunk than a camera beard hat. I'll say it slowly for you. Camera. Beard. Hat.

If you've linked to this announcement from Boing Boing, you may need to get some tissues now.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part eight)

Rather than being skill based, we went with a class based system which is much more representative of the original Disney movie. The classes are Heavy, Scouty, Snipy, Engy, Demi, Soldy, Pyree, Spyee and Doc. To create minority interest, we've left hints that Demi is possibly female, transgendered, sexually ambiguous, straight, gay, black, Amerindian, Hispanic, Scottish, one-eyed, dating Ashton Kutcher and Republican. Luckily, with the full facial and forehead beard, you'll never be able to tell.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part seven)

DF2 is entirely first person view with the fuzziness at the bottom of the screen being a Hollywood cinematic effect used to represent the size of your dwarf's beard. Hideo liked this idea immensely when we showed him the alpha in a private alpha at GDC, but I suspect there were translation issues as he went on to implement a side beard in Metal Gear Solid 3.

You should attempt to increase beard length for additional unlocks, like a sandwich and a jar of urine. And in the game.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part six)

There are some other radical changes that you should be aware of before you download the beta client. One of the first suggestions Tarn came up with when I asked him what he wanted in Dwarf Fortress 2 was 'More dwarves', so you now start the game with 9 dwarves instead of seven. That's been the basis of the viral marketing ARG that we've been running, so if you see 7+2 =9 anywhere, you should strip search anyone nearby who is unusually short of stature or has a beard so you can find the next clue. My next few posts will also have sequences of letters randomly underlined, which should be used to send morse signals across an old Atlantic telephone cable we found to unlock a stenographic photograph of Scamps. And Microsoft have kindly reprogrammed Windows to randomly include a blue screen of death featuring an ASCII rendition of Gabe Newell which will haunt your dreams.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part five)

We were confident enough at this point to open up DF2 to a select group of beta testers and put feelers out to those we knew would take an interest in a multiplayer procedurally generated kick ass fantasy world. It was one of these, Randy Pitchford who was ultimately responsible for the radical change in direction of the visuals for DF2. Randy was concerned that the look of DF2 was 'too shit brown': mostly because he kept locking the doors to the washroom in the fortresses he built, so his dwarves would work overtime. We brainstormed this over Skype - and during the chat, it was almost like a light bulb went off above both our heads at the same time. There was a power cut in my house, and Randy was turning off the lights to save on power bill costs since the light from the monitors was enough to keep his developers awake while they worked overtime. When we reconnected, we were both babbling 'how about red and blue'. I made Randy promise that we'd get to use the look we discussed for our game, not his, and started revising the engine.

What you see in the open beta of DF2 is the original engine ultra-realistic graphics, which are then rotoscoped and painted using another algorithm Chris came up with. Overall, the look was well received by our beta testers, except Eskil Steenberg, who suffers from a rare visual condition that means everything he sees looks like an impressionist painting and who found the new appearance 'derivative'. I'm telling you this story now, ahead of you playing the game, so you don't blame Chris for cartoon like appearance.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part four)

With Chris on board, the pace of development improved considerably, and we were able to include version 2 of the procedural animation system that Spore used, translating the Dwarf Fortress raws that Tarn was building into life like models complete with advanced moves like floppy legs and crab walking that hadn't been possible with the original engine.

Prior to Chris joining, we had done some experimentation with mo cap through a contact of mine at Weta Works. While this didn't pan out, we did use the Battle of Dagorlad from the first Lord of the Rings movie as a reference for DF2 fortress invasions:



Apparently the reason there are no dwarves in this battle is that Peter Jackson wasn't happy with the CGI animation at the time: he felt it couldn't capture their natural grace and athleticism.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part three)

Chris had spent half of 2008 personally replying to every abusive email he had been sent by disappointed purchasers of Spore - including the ones I was procedurally generating using the DF2 Markov chain code. I've not included my original email because removing the more extreme expletives renders it unintelligible, but here's the remaining correspondence, for your edification:

It's clear that you have a passionate love of games. It's just you don't understand the pressure we were under, and you have to admit the final result is still impressive.

-- Chris

[text removed]you, you piece of [text removed]. I could do better. In fact I have: [link removed]

Regards,

Andrew Doull

Wow. I don't know what to say except: how can I get involved?

-- Chris

I would like to apologise now unconditionally for anything mean I've said about Chris, or anyone else who worked on Spore. He is an incredibly hard working and talented individual, and I've learned over the intervening years that in any large software project, compromises have to be made. It turns out that Will was right, and was ultimately responsible for the decisions that led to Spore being a less than completely hard core reinvention of every game genre that ever existed. It's just a shame he wasn't involved in DF2, like Chris was.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part two)

Sam had an agreement with Intel to allow him to license the Offset engine as open source, much as John Carmack had made available earlier iterations of the Doom and Quake engines, and he was willing to make the engine available as an alternative front end for Dwarf Fortress, provided Tarn opened up the DF code.

While Sam's suggestion was appealing, Tarn and I had both moved on considerably from the original Dwarf Fortress concept, and we decided instead to branch the DF code base, and split the work three ways. Tarn would continue to maintain the DF1 code, while I would work on the DF2 code with Sam consulting after hours as time was made available.

Why did I end up being lead developer? Real Life had thrown me a curve ball, in the form of the global financial crisis, and I had lost my job and had to move into my parents basement with my wife. The situation was highly embarrassing - why is why I've not mentioned anything about my personal life on my blog - but it meat I was able to spend a considerable amount of time integrating the code, and building a front end using the Offset engine. The visuals were so impressive that it made the only other 3d Dwarf Fortress viewer available at the time, 3Dwarf look like Populous.

I want to show you this segment from Sam McGrath's demo of Project Offset on Attack of the Show - mostly because I spent about 18 months with the dwarf render Sam shows off to start with. We ended up calling the model Frender because we used him so often as a place holder. He used to get pretty messed up by some of the AI bugs we encountered - if you've read the Dwarf Fortress development logs you'll have an idea of the kind of situations he found himself in.

With the procedural character generation algorithms we use in the beta, you'll have a 1 in 63,000,000,000 chance of running into an exact copy of Frender in the final game:



You don't see it on camera, but a friend of Sam's who was at the filming of the show says that he did an incredible double-take when the host mentions another game with the word Fortress in the title. He recovers by the time they cut back to him, but I wonder if this is where the seed of the idea was first planted.

We knew even from early game play testing, that we had something special, and Tarn started devoting his special project days at the end of the month checking in his 'downstream' Dwarf Fortress changes into upstream DF2 improvements.

It was about this time that Chris Hecker became involved.