ADOM II 0.2.3 progress

Hi folks... time to post yet another update. Last weekend (and the first half of the week) I have been in London (cool business trip for the start of the week, greetings to my Macedonian friends and colleagues) so that I had a little less time to work on ADOM. Nonetheless I made good progress on a couple of issues during the week. Here's what happened:

• All wilderness encounters planned for the next release are done except for roving barbarians and chaos monks. For the former I'm right now implementing the barbarian profession (which thus will be available with 0.2.3) and for the latter I still have to do the monk profession (which thus will also be in 0.2.3).
• Jackalweres are one of the new monsters that were added and this again got me sidetracked for about a day and a half. The reason (again) surprised me: With jackalweres JADE got the first monsters type that really is able to do other (offensive) actions than just fighting in melee... namely summoning. I pondered the implementation for a moment and decided to right away do something more flexible than in ADOM (where there are huge if...then...else... decision making structures). Beings in ADOM II now have a set of active abilities (attack in melee, summon something, pick up things, etc.). Each ability is rated with a preference and thus beings now will decide based on context and personal preferences what they are gonna do. While I'm not going to implement this to full extent for 0.2.3 (the version finally needs to get out - no more week long side treks) the basic infrastructure is finished and used whenever a being is trying to kill someone else.I'll finish it together with dozens of more options towards 0.3.0 (so probably in a couple of weeks). The nice thing is that (action wise) adding missiles, spell casting and other more refined behavior now has become a triviality and I'm locking forward to focus on that in the near future.
• As I'm right now adding barbarians I'm actually just now sidetracked by adding tactics to ADOM II. Barbarians will receive special powers based on berserkering, more on that in a follow up blog post.
• Wights and wraiths (as well as shadows) got added. And they now can turn beings they kill into undead. Cranked up the horror quite a bit :-)
• 21 new monsters have been added over the past five days, two new disease types included :-)
• Aging now is completed.
• Inhabitants of settlements now are much more likely to support each other... there were still some kinks left in that code.
• Swamps got some special treatments...
• Did I mention the new wasteland terrain type? (which might get created due to special interactions with the world)

Looking through DevState I just noticed that most of these things haven't even been listed... but I consider them necessary for the King of the Orcs storyline to work much better. Oh well... progress is being made. And I really will "release early, release often" at some point ;-)