Bi-weekly ADOM update: Lots of progress everywhere

Hi everyone!

I'm at least a day late with my biweekly update - still catching up from our ten-day cruise vacation. Despite having been on vacation there has been lots of good progress in many departments:

• We have kept the separation of work items: Zeno, Krys, Lucas and Jochen still are working on finishing ADOM R66 (and getting very close). They fine-tuned the new character generation process and now are very busy testing all the new features in graphical mode. We now should be very close to a release.
• I have switched from working on bug fixes (as mentioned in the last update) to implementing new content:


• I have finalized my storybook for both the Rolf quest and the Volcano quest (which have been promised as rewards during the crowdfunding campaign). Both quests will be related and also tie in to other existing locations in the game.
• I have started implementing both quests and am 40-60% done (although many details probably still will come up). These quests will introduce a lot of new content and history to ADOM (e.g. covering ancient dwarves cultures, antediluvian orcs, artifacts from ages long gone and more like that). They also will add new means to alter the world (from completely nuking it to solving a not really known quest in a hopefully very surprising way and doing something very good). I particularly enjoy the idea of antediluvian orcs :-]
• The Rolf quest can start rather early (level 5+) and will take some time to be completed (if you ever manage it - it's neither a trivial nor an obvious quest) and it will take you across many levels. Thus I intend to add lots of interesting new details for as many players as possible.
• A new item material will be added to the game, hailing from truly ancient times.
• As a side effect I started implementing lots of new items (41 new items right now, more coming). I also introduced a completely new category of items (staves) which contain automatically rechargeable magic effects (e.g. you use it once and then have to wait for a certain amount of time to be able to use it again... and again... and again... and so on). While this currently is only implemented for staves it could be used for any kind of item - so in the future we will have to discuss if we should extend existing items or artifacts with appropriate new abilities. I'd like to see how people enjoy these new items before I start extending existing stuff but all the preparatory work has been done.
• Two new intrinsics have been added: 

• resistance to disease
• immunity to disease
• Levitation has been added as an ability that can be provided by items - with obvious benefits when interacting with water, traps and other elements.
• "Pure items" (which kind of increase your resistance to background corruption) have been added.
• I have fiddled with ice and water squares. There were many instances in which the PC entering (or falling) into water did not quite have the desired effect. This now has been taken care of.
• Tiny side note: Too many levels were not really affected by earthquakes. This also has been fixed. And don't wonder why I'm fiddling with earthquakes :-)
• I have started to work on a special effects system for ADOM. It's basically a back port of ideas conceived for ADOM II that will allow far more intricate effects for ADOM. You can get an idea of what will be possible at some future point by watching this old ADOM II video. These effects will not be possible in the very near future (because ADOM e.g. lacks an "Imbue" skill) but they are something I'm going for at some future point (probably after finishing the remaining crowdfunding promises). Nonetheless the new special effects system hopefully will help me to bring certain artificial contraptions in ancient dwarven strongholds to live (like crushers and more moving wall types and flame blasters and radiators and... well, we'll see - I still need to discuss those details with the rest of Team ADOM ;-) ) 
• None of these content additions will make it into the next release of ADOM. Rather they probably will follow very quickly in the release after our next stable Steam release. I will use that time to test them intensely (and do the tons of work still open ;-) ).
• Regarding ADOM Lite RPG I checked the second proof copy as indicated. Sadly I stumbled upon a couple of mistakes I still need to fix (this week) and then have to order a third (and hopefully final) copy from Lulu. The most glaring problem is the transparency issue on the cover (the parameters are set correctly in my Indesign file - it seems that something has changed in the Lulu printing process). I hope to be able to easily fix this by exporting the cover as a high resolution PNG (instead of PDF) and uploading that to Lulu. Keep your fingers crossed!

So that is the progress for the past two weeks. Quite a bit of stuff has been done but a lot more is ahead of us. For the next week I will continue working on the two new huge quests, many dozens of new items and the new animation and item recharging subsystems. So things are moving... and at good speed :-) So I'm happy and hope that you will be happy soon, too.