ADOM 1.2.0 Prerelease 17 is now available!

I am very proud to announce the availability of ADOM 1.2.0 Prerelease 17. As usual I am totally convinced that this is the best version of ADOM ever - but this time even more so in so many ways I am going to explain below.

Again a lot of special things have been added, particularly awesome are the first ADOM Sage enhancements being added to the game. This ticket lists all the details and Jochen has outdone himself keeping compatibility to ADOM Sage. Also totally cool is the new feature allowing you to play the game again and again without having to restart it or the new game end menu that makes it much easier and less error-prone to see all important information.

After installing the new version please keep the following things in mind:

• It is very important to remove the adom.kbd and adom.cfg files for some of the new features to work. If you have modified these files yourself, you should make a backup of them first.
• You can disable the "animation mode" by changing the following settings:
• Open the NotEye menu with "Ctrl+m"
• Open to the animations & scrolling menu: press "m" followed by "c"
• Change both "movement animation speed" and "auto-centering speed" to 10000
• You can disable the mouse scrolling:
• Open the NotEye menu with "Ctrl+m"
• Open to the animations & scrolling menu: press "m" followed by "c"
• Change the "manual scrolling speed" to 0

The prerelease is - as usual - only available for folks participating in the prerelease program of ADOM or those who donated to the crowd funding campaign. As usual it's available from the usual place.

Why do I think that this release truly the best and most important release of ADOM ever? For several reasons:

1. This version of ADOM truly starts to showcase the immense quality of the graphical variant. While I at first was not a glowing supporter of a graphical mode, I'm totally awed by Krys', Zenos and Jochens immense additions to the game. We now not only have a stunning graphical mode and the most beautiful tile set to ever grace a roguelike game, but we also start to have high end features like movement animations (not per icon but for the icons moving on the map), the mini map, various features in the mini map, etc. Additionally Krys really is blowing my mind with totally awesome images for various special places in the game, some of which I would like showcase below. Being able to add such images to al important places in the game is a dream for me by now and one of several things we will be doing once we can secure more funding (Krys needs to eat, too, so I can't expect him to sacrifice major parts of his life without fair compensation, especially as he keeps outdoing himself all the time).
2. The sound support is getting better and better. While a lot more of that will be added to p18 (as Lucas really added lots of stuff in the past couple of days we couldn't fully integrate yet). Now we are starting to add more individual sounds and we are recording voice overs for a special place in the team, where you'll be able to experience Team ADOM live in a special situation :-) Look forward to a very fun easter egg :-) Lucas' idea just rawkz!
3. Zenos NotEye integration is getting better and better and enables more and more power features that I never would have dreamed of when we started the project.

In summary I truly believe that we now can move forward to Steam and other gaming sites in order to create a long term funding model for ADOM besides the free version of ADOM. Team ADOM is a dream come true and my most important mission - besides finishing the promises from the crowd fundign campaign - will be to find a working business model that allows me to keep these great folks on board for as long as possible, preferrably full time (yes, just to avoid misunderstandings like we had before the crowd funding campaign: it's not about money for me right now but about money for those amazingly talented people to be able to have them working on ADOM as full time as possible).

Over the next couple of days - while I keep fighting with the ADOM Lite RPG - I will post more about these ventures as we now need to move forward with renewed vigor into new worlds of adventure to make ADOM the best roguelike game ever - in any category. That's the goal and we all burn for it!

Enough rambling, here are a couple of the new images of Krys that totally blew my mind. Krys for me really is the demigod of roguelike imagery and together with Jochen, Lucas and Zeno these guys keep moving ADOM to new glorious heights.

Here we go:

The new splash when getting killed:

The new slash when winning the game:

And now imagine having such glorious art throughout the game... when finding special locations, encountering special beings and in other specia situation.

Especially the victory splash is giving me total shivers :-)

And now: Enjoy p17. More blog posts are going to come up in the evening to get the next events moving!