Bi-weekly ADOM update: Bug smashing, character generation and ADOM RPG unboxing

Hi everyone!

It seems that I just manage to keep up with weekly ADOM updates for now (too much traveling) so I decided to call this one the "bi-weekly ADOM update".
I'm again between trips (last weekend having been the 15th anniversary party of QuinScape on Ibiza and me and my wife starting a cruise tomorrow from Kiel in Northern Germany to St. Petersburg and back). So there will be another week without an update as I don't have Internet while cruising.

But I will take my computer with me and my goal is to tackle both the Rolf and Volcano quests promised during our crowdfunding campaign (as well as maybe other new minor content along the way) while Jochen, Krys and Zeno keeping working on the graphical character generation (it's a surprisingly lot of work).

So let's start with the character generation process. Below you find some screenshots from the new graphical character generation process (but we still are fiddling with many details, e.g. where to position tooltips, how to display the tons of information available in ASCII, how to make the mouse based interface most enjoyable and so on):

While Team ADOM is still busy working on all the intricacies of graphical character generation (it really seems to be 1:20 time effort to do things graphically) I have been busy fixing various open bugs. Most prominently rank these (and I was kind of surprised that a couple of very ugly bugs were hiding behind seemingly innocent bug report titles):

• Spell book reading interrupted - spell still learned: Actually here we got a very critical bug introduced when I replaced the internal REPL with an event based system. Basically any long-running action always succeeded when interrupted. Ouch. But now it's good again and ADOM R66 will be so much better because of that.
• On a related note the change from REPL to event driven also completely broke the speed system, basically causing every being in the game to have the same speed. Double ouch. And also fixed.
• Yet another side effect of the change from REPL to event driven was the disappearance of certain types of messages, vortex warnings among them. Also ouch. And also fixed.
• The explore command ("-") at times was horribly inefficient, backtracking long ways to advance a single space and then backtracking again. This now also is fixed - there was yet another nasty bug in the pathfinding code.
• You now can use the '0' key to explore dungeons as this seems to be easier for some keyboards. Keyboard layouts keep puzzling me...
• Mindless monsters no longer panic. This should add some spice to specific combat situations.
• There were a couple of very nasty JSON-related crashes. With ADOM R66 they should be a thing of the past.

So all in all I guess I made some good progress there so that ADOM R66 will be a much cleaner and more stable release. My gut tells me there will be some more problems be lurking beneath the surface as the change in the internal code structure was really huge. But it's worth it as we will see with the next couple of content releases :-)

Finally for the ADOM Lite RPG: Progress still is mostly nonexistent but... below you finally can find the unboxing video. I got some help filming the video as my wife preferred to working on our travel luggage instead of helping me filming the unboxing:

And here's the actual video, filmed by my cute little assistant:

Next steps for the ADOM Lite RPG are:

• Final check of this print during my holiday. I already noticed some discolorations on the title page and the back page seems to be a bit askew but both hopefully are easy to fix (the discolorations being the tougher problem - something seems to have changed in the printing process). This forces me to order yet another sample. Hopefully the 3rd printing then will be without flaws.
• Directly after my holiday I finally will adjust the crowdfunding portal so that you can check your orders for the ADOM Lite RPG (correct number, special wishes we agreed upon during the campaign, etc.) and also can update your mailing address.
• I will give you about six weeks of time to do so (and you will have to confirm your shipping address in any case). During that time I will order the 550+ print copies of ADOM Lite RPG and then start packaging them and mailing them out.

As this gets asked often: The ADOM Lite RPG only is available to backers of the crowdfunding campaign. I promised that it would be a once-in-a-lifetime thing and so there sadly is no other way to get hold of it. I expect one or the other to show up on eBay as some people ordered several copies but they probably might quickly yield collector prices.

Finally some words regarding ADOM R66 (the next pending ADOM release):

• Feature-wise we already have a code freeze but we still are working on the graphical character generation.
• As soon as it is done and tested we will do a prerelease tester release to verify that we didn't miss any major bugs.
• As soon as we get positive feedback, the next Steam release is due.

In the meantime I am working on new content features and also am moving plans into position to hopefully have much more time for an intense ADOM coding season from August to October. Wish me luck one that one - I really hope to get most of the stuff promised during the crowdfunding campaign finished this year but as always it depends on bugs, time and some luck (health and stuff) ;-)

Ok, that's it for now. I'm off for vacation now and itching to work on the Volcano and Rolf quests... earth-shaking stuff coming up here - in the truest sense of the word. BTW, I intend to make these quests available during character levels 10 to 30, so that most players can access them. They probably will have lots of side effects and some of them might only be noticeable at much higher levels or tie in to other locations.