ADOM 1.2.0 Prerelease 15 now is available!

Hi everyone!

I am very happy and proud to announce the release of ADOM 1.2.0 Prerelease 15 to the public. We had a pretty huge time gap between p14 and p15 as a lot of complex technical stuff internally got finished and moved out of the way (great thanks to Jochen who shouldered an immense workload but also to the rest of Team ADOM for incredible improvements to the NotEye integration, graphics and soundtracks... I personally believe that the latest prerelease is nothing short of amazing).

Warning: Below there are some graphical spoilers regarding prerelease 15 (as we added lots of new images and I want to show off a few of them). As usual you can download the latest prerelease from your prerelease access account. If you are not yet part of the prerelease program you might want to enter. While a great number of the internal additions only will become visible in the next couple of prereleases (e.g. global highscores, achievements and more) you can find the latest changes here.

Before I come to the spoilers here are a couple of important changes in the latest prerelease:

• ADOM for Windows now uses a game data directory that is easier to access (it's not hidden). On the first start of Prerelease 15 the old directory (if it exists) is automatically moved to the new location (only if it doesn't already exists), so you don't have to move the files yourself.

Examples:

%USERPROFILE%\My Documents\ADOM (Windows XP)
%USERPROFILE%\Eigene Dateien\ADOM (Windows XP)
%USERPROFILE%\Documents\ADOM (Windows 7)
%USERPROFILE%\Eigene Dokumente\ADOM (Windows 7)

• People who don't like the default game perspective with NotEye should try the new tactical mode (acessible through the NotEye menu by pressing CTRL+m, A and T to activate it). It provides a kind of "top down" look which helps to determine the real position of monsters and items more easily.

• In case you haven't seen them yet, you should take a look at the HTML files in the docs directory. They contain overviews of all monster, item and PC images.

And now for some graphical spoilers...
(click on the images for larger views)

First of all ADOM has become a lot bloodier. Actually blood now gets splattered all over the place when the going gets tough. Maybe this will help those folks who found the new images "too nice" :-) We love the addition even though it's a rather gruesome feature :-)

Then there are new animated special effects which the picture below can't really convey. Just try to get to the casino level and you will see :-)

Next we have more complete (and new) tile sets, e.g. for the pyramid which now has a very distinct flavor. I'm totally in love with the new features.

 A certain fiery tower also got some new additions and an overhaul. Truly hot stuff :-)

 And for a little cool down we now also have a very distinct underwater flavor :-)

Other important new additions (besides lots of optimizations and bug fixes) include

• a new easter egg (so to speak)
• more music
• less CPU load in the graphical mode
• finally correctly gendered pictures plus variants for all starting race combinations

On a personal note the family-related health problems that distracted me during past couple of months hopefully get less distracting so that I hopefully finally will finish the initial version of the ADOM Lite RPG by the end of the month (including layout and stuff, just four months late :-P ) and will get it shipped before Christmas. At least I hope so. Even more important is that finishing it by the end of August finally will mean that I can focus once more on programming work for ADOM - something I very much look forward to.

Ok, that's it for now. Enjoy the latest prerelease and let us know what you think (forums, bug tracker).