Silence due to broken arm

Hi everyone!

Just a brief update: I managed to break my left arm last weekend. It's a clean break but the bones are completely separated. As a consequence I will be undergoing surgery tomorrow (Friday, 16th of December) and am facing several weeks of recovery. Sadly programming/writing are among the things that don't work well with one hand - which throws quite a wrench into the machinations I had planned to finally get the crowdfunding stuff done within the next couple of weeks.

Sorry for yet another batch of delays but this time the RNG really hit me hard.

I'll keep you updated on the recovery process. And 2017 thus is going to become an even more interesting year... promise.

Regards
Thomas

ADOM Lite RPG is shipping today (yeah!)

Hi everyone!

It was a long day and a longer night. Quite long actually for a normal working week (which in December usually is somewhere between 50 to 60 hours due to the way IT service business seems to work in our region). But it is done. In one monumental act of energy my wife Melanie, my good friend Claudia and me managed to pack all ADOM Lite RPGs (for all the folks who up to know validated their shipping addresses). There are a few more that need to be done at some point (because they are moving right now, have not yet validated their addresses or whatever) but the vast majority of all RPGs is going to be send out in about two hours. Read on for the dirty details...

The Eagle Has Landed

16 boxes full of ADOM Lite RPG copies arrived today:

Boy, that looks like quite a bit of work :-) And here they are:

I'm still waiting for some special packaging material (after my lessons learned with the postcards at the weekend). I had recruited the help of friends of family in getting the stuff packaged so that we will start on Wednesday packing stuff (and probably shipping by Thursday). I still am optimistic and hope that we manage to get all RPGs packed in one fell swoop but we will see. Usually things take a lot longer than I imagine in the beginning. I will keep you updated :-)

It feels awesome to finally get this done (although I just noticed that I completely forgot about the ADOM Lite RPG character sheet I still wanted to design - I so far have always been using hand-crawled notes and still need to get that thing up; maybe it will be a little late - but as it is an extra I hope that you will forgive me for that ;-) )

Reverse ADOM postcard quest (almost) finished (for now)!

Yeah, it's done. After a very, very long day I am happy to report that I have personalized 150 postcards promised during the "Resurrect ADOM development" crowdfunding campaign with an individualized drawing on each of them :-) In the middle I was not sure if I would have enough ideas but now there are 150 iconic scenes from ADOM, hand-drawn by me :-)

Here's how orderly my table was in the beginning:

I won't show the finished cards here but maybe people would like to post pictures when they receive their cards. If you feel like it please post them either in the forums or in our Facebook group. The cards will be posted to the mail tomorrow morning (right now it's 10:45pm over here).

I'm curious to hear what you think when you receive them. Collected they would make for a cute exhibition I think :-) And now I'm off for today in order to cool my hurting hand ;-)

Next up: Packing about 480 ADOM Lite RPG issues to have them sent out before Christmas (they should arrive by tomorrow at my location over here - after the experience with the postcards today I will start packing them by Tuesday or Wednesday because I this afternoon ordered some special materials which should greatly simplify packing). I also already have called for support - so hopefully this will go quickly (as I don't need to come up with individualized drawings anymore ;-) ). I'll keep you all updated!

ADOM Steam Award nominations and 10% winter sale!

Hi everyone!

Two exciting things are happening for ADOM @ Steam right now:

1. The Steam Award nominations are running right now. We feel that ADOM fits the "Stood the test of time" category particularly well as there are probably are very few (if any?) games on Steam that have been under development for more than 20 years and can show the results! If you think likewise please head over to Steam and give us your vote on the ADOM Steam store page! Thanks a lot!
2. Right now ADOM is taking part in the Winter sales event (something we are not doing very often). If you have not yet tried ADOM Deluxe on Steam with its ton if incredible extra features (see this list for a complete overview) now is a good time to cash in on a 10% discount and get started with ADOM at Steam. Have fun!

In the meantime we continue to work on getting various physical crowdfunding rewards shipping (the ADOM Lite RPG books should arrive around the 28th of November at my location - all 16 boxes from what UPS told me ;-) and we will start packaging and shipping immediately) and this weekend I hopefully will get all postcards for the reverse postcard quests prepared and send. So if you still haven't confirmed your shipping address now the final hours for the first batch are running out!

(people below already seem to be lining up to get in on the fun ;-) )

Digital crowdfunding reward ready: Map of the Drakalor Chain

Dear ADOM: Resurrect ADOM Development crowdfunding donors,

if you donated in the campaign at the Champion level (or above) you now can download your digital copy of our beautiful Drakalor Chain map (designed by our incredible Team ADOM art director, the one and only Krzysztof Dycha ["Ravenmore"]). It already has been presented on the back cover of the ADOM Lite RPG and now is available in a huge resolution optimally suited for beautiful prints.

Update 13th of November: 9:31pm GMT +1: The PDF download now also is available.

To get your download just log in to the ADOM crowdfunding fulfillment portal and click on the download links.

Have fun!

Thomas Biskup
ADOM Maintainer

P.S.: And if you have not registered your current address for physical rewards you might be eligible to, please do that right now, too ;-)

Crowdfunding address verification activated (ADOM Lite RPG & stuff)

*** IMPORTANT UPDATE *** 
24th of October, 10pm German time: I somehow managed to break the character encoding when saving address data. The problem is pretty weird as my code basically stopped working overnight: When I debugged my code I still had working data from yesterdays tests in the database - but I was unable to correctly store the data today. Even though I hadn't changed anything about the code. It seems that ChAoS somehow is involved o_O 

As a consequence I sadly have to ask everyone to login once more, check their old inputs (or enter their data for the first time) and confirm the address data once again (I reset the confirmation flag to force you to check once more what you entered and prevent any new problems). I'm very sorry for the inconvenience and hopefully I didn't break anything else (this time I even tested with Mandarine and other exotic encodings... everything now seems to work). So please check your address data!

Sorry once more - I am deeply ashamed!

Hi everyone!

Finally the address survey is online for ADOM Lite RPG (and the other physical rewards like the postcards, code certificates and RPG boxes from our crowdfunding campaign).

Please go to the ADOM: The Resurrection fulfillment portal, login or (or request your password data if you never before logged in or forgot your password) and then fill out the address form. Save the data and check the address confirmation box once you are sure that your full address is correct. Please note that I only will send out physical rewards to confirmed addresses!

Currently I plan a first shipment of stuff roughly for the 15th of November (so that everyone has a chance to get goodies before Christmas).

If there are any problems, you can't login, the number of RPG copies shown is incorrect, etc. please drop me an email at creator(at)ancientdomainsofmystery.com and I will try to work out any kinks during the next weeks.

Thanks for your patience and now let's get your addresses confirmed.

ADOM R72 (version 2.2.6) released as a Steam beta!

Hi everyone!

We are proud to announce the release of ADOM R72 as a Steam beta. This release should be another very big step forward in our quest improving the ADOM/NotEye performance, the biggest change being the introduction of a JIT (just in time) compiler for the LUA scripting language which is used by major parts of the NotEye engine (which in turn drives all our output stuff for both ASCII and tiled modes on Steam). LUA is a scripting language that normally is interpreted at runtime (and thus slower than compiled languages). With the integration of LuaJIT we now combine the advantages of a scripting language with the performance of compiled languages - on some older test systems of ours we have seen a performance increase of up to 1500% (!) (but don't expect that as a general case... it's more of a special case for older systems... although many cases should see at least a doubling). Additionally the UI output now seems to behave less erratic and provides more constant frame rates.

Since this is our first experience with LuaJIT we again decided to go for a Steam beta release. To use it follow these instructions:

• Go to your Steam games library.
• Right-click on the ADOM entry.
• Click on "Properties".
• Select the "Betas" tab.
• Select "Beta - public beta test" in the dropdown box.
• Close the dialog.
• Play.

As usual you can find the changelog here (there are some more internal performance improvements and minor bugfixes).

And now enjoy playing!

Thomas & Team ADOM

ADOM R71 (version 2.2.5) released as a Steam beta!

Hi everyone!

And here we go again with the next minor ADOM release (while I keep working on the next truly major ADOM release and Jochen is reworking our build infrastructure): ADOM R71 (version 2.2.5) now is available as a Steam beta. Follow the instructions provided for previous beta releases to install ADOM R71. The changeling is available in the usual place.

Again we have a slew of minor improvements, the most importantly probably being the ability to configure the classic interface via a configuration option. Additionally we have fixed another batch of minor bugs.

Enjoy!

P.S.: I still have to do my write-up of the roguelike celebration but I spent the past couple of days writing an entity-component-system in order to test out its general viability for ADOM (I got inspired by Cogmind and Caves of Qud during Roguelike Celebration ;-) ). I wrote my prototype in Java, discovered a number of issues (performance specifically) but now have a firm enough grasp on the topic to try mapping the approach to an ADOM quest/story engine I'm right now planning (although this is something that's going to happen after we are done with the crowdfunding stuff... or at least 99% of it).

ADOM R70 released as a Steam beta!

Hi everyone!

Due to my presence at the Roguelike Celebration in San Francisco (and a nasty sunburn right now) I'm a bit late in announcing this: We already yesterday released ADOM R70 as a Steam beta. Update 9/20/2016: Due to positive feedback reports R70 now is the public version for Steam. The biggest change is the introduction of new internal graphics cache mechanisms that greatly should speed up performance. We are quite happy with the results so far and now eagerly wait for responses from the community.

You can the (short) changelog as usual here.

To test ADOM R70 do the following:

• Go to your Steam games library.
• Right-click on the ADOM entry.
• Click on "Properties".
• Select the "Betas" tab.
• Select "Beta - public beta test" in the dropdown box.
• Close the dialog.
• Play.

And now try it out!

Today is the day: Roguelike Celebration in San Francisco

Hi everyone!

Today is (to me) a very exciting day: I'm in San Francisco participating in the Roguelike Celebration conference. All day all kind of roguelike enthusiasts, creators and maintainers will engage in talks, discussions and other activities. You can find the full schedule here.

The talks also will be live-streamed on Twitch (all times in the schedule naturally are local SF times) and are available here:

• Track 1 (that's also where I am in the afternoon): https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con
• Track 2: https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con2

Have fun watching and wish me luck for my presentation (covering 24 years of ADOM in about 24 minutes)  ;-)

Thomas

P.S.: On the ADOM side we hopefully will release ADOM R70 as a Steam beta in the next 24 hours... it will include more performance improvements for the graphics mode (caching and stuff).

ADOM R69 released to both Steam players and prerelease testers

Hi everyone!

We are happy to announce the release of ADOM R69 to both our Steam players and the prerelease tester circle (the usual download access for prerelease testers). Some time later we also might do a general public release of R69 as lots of new stuff has been added to the game since the last public release.

ADOM R68 released as a Steam Beta!

As promised yesterday we released ADOM R68 (version 2.2.2, yeah!) a couple of minutes ago as a Steam Beta version. ADOM R68 has become a surprisingly intricate release. Originally we intended to fix just a few more bugs but by now we have implemented more than 50 changes in the release (bug fixes and new features).

ADOM progress: R68 almost there, RPG unboxing update & more

Hi folks!

Here we go with the latest update on stuff that is happening behind the scenes (and a lot has been happening):

Specific feedback requested for bugs in R67

Hi everyone!

Currently I am highly interested in feedback concerning three topics in the recently released ADOM R67:

• First of all many people seem to disagree with my vision for point-based character generation (see http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=4381). That's ok for me and I am willing to change. The best change (as outlined in the ticket) to me seems to drop the background story generation during point-based character generation and just go with a bigger lump of points. Please leave your views and opinions in that ticket while I am pondering the possible changes.
• Second some people seem to experience performance issues with R67 (which neither nor anyone else in Team ADOM have been seeing; and there was no noticeable feedback from the closed prerelease test either). We are collecting reports here: http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=4193 So if you are experience a noticeable lag in performance please add your comments to the ticket and provide both details on your hardware (including your monitor) and your way of playing (e.g. full-screen versus windowed; are are you using a wide-screen monitor, etc.). Thanks for your support!
• There has been a report about totally broken stats in Challenge mode (and also constant races - the latter has been fixed although the root cause for it still is weird). The broken stats and broken skill level ups might indicate a much deeper and more frightful memory corruption problem - is anybody else experiencing this? Please discuss in http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=4383

Thanks for your help!

ADOM R67 (version 2.2.1) released as a Steam beta release

Hi!

It's the last step before the general public Steam release: If you have bought ADOM on Steam you already now can play the latest release - but you will have to do some extra steps as we still would like to receive some feedback on its stability before releasing it to the general public.

To be able to play ADOM R67 (version 2.2.1) execute the following steps:

• Go to your Steam games library.
• Right-click on the ADOM entry.
• Select the "Betas" tab.
• Select "Beta - public beta test" in the dropdown box.
• Close the dialog.
• Play.

We'll keep it like this for another 3-4 days and if no major bugs are reported we will release ADOM to the general Steam public.

You can find the list of changes here (all the changes since December, 2015, so all for R65, R66 and R67). If you find any problems please report them here. The major changes are:

• Point-based character generation and generally a much more versatile character generation process
• New dungeons, items and adventures (tome of donors added, etc.)
• Many new graphics
• Fine-tuning to many items and monsters (tougher bosses!)
• Better walk-explore mode (just press "-" to see)
• And lots more. Read the change log :-)

And now enjoy the game - we are eagerly waiting for your feedback!

Thomas & Team ADOM

ADOM R66 (version 2.2.0) has been released to prerelease testers!

We are happy to announce the release of ADOM R66 (version 2.2.0). This is a limited prerelease available only to the prerelease testers from the crowd funding campaign. Nonetheless it is a very important step towards a public release as we want to use the limited release for bug testing. If no major problem is found, the next step in the very near future will be a public Steam beta release. And if that works out, too, there soon will be a public Steam release. If all goes well, the public Steam release should happen within the next 6-8 days.

Sadly R66 took us much longer than we expected - getting the new character generation process transformed into a beautiful graphical version cost a lot more time than we had expected.

As explained in other blog posts there has been parallel progress on new features - but the majority of new stuff will be included in the stable release after this one.

As usual you can find a summary of changes here. Prerelease testers can download the prerelease version here. And now go playing the latest release ;-)

Please check it in-depth and report bugs as usual here so that we hopefully soon can release with the Steam beta version.

Thanks!
Thomas & Team ADOM

Bi-weekly ADOM Update: Pending release schedule, roguelike conference, ADOM Lite RPG & progress

Hi everyone!

A couple of days later than planned here we go with the latest ADOM update:

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:

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".

Weekly ADOM update: Character generation, graphics & bug fixes

Hi everyone!

As I already managed to miss the second weekly ADOM update (because we were on a Bruce Springsteen concert in London and I travelled without my computer) here we go with the next regular update:

Weekly ADOM update: Shifting dungeons, character generation & stuff

Hi everyone!

As promised here is a quick weekly update on what is going on (and what not):

• Programming has slowly restarted. Current areas of work are:
• Getting the new character generation process completed in graphical mode (there are still a lot of kinks to work out but it's more a question of discipline than difficulty). Jochen and Zeno are on this for the actual coding and Krys is doing the graphics required.
• Work on the new shifting dungeon sections. Basically there are some problems left with map updates and we also seem to be chasing a weird crash bug. Zeno and I are trying to have the map updates ironed out.
• Fine-tuning the tome of donors. It's in but it still has some kinks related to its placement and functionality. 
• Adding a kind of introductory story to the start of the game to get new players better involved in the story. I'll post some more details in the next couple of days once we have discussed the structure internally. Krys and I are working on this mostly, receiving input from the rest of the team.
• Adding more soundtracks. Lucas is working like a machine on more and more awesome compositions.
• Things I have not progressed on:
• ADOM RPG. Programming felt more important to me so that's what I focussed on during the last couple of days.
• The community highscore stuff. Another issue very dear to my heart but sadly somewhat complicated and quite a big topic. For now we'll be concentrating on the next release which definitely will not include any of those new community features.

So that's it for tonight. I hope to return to a more continuous information flow soon.

The state of ADOM (long overdue update)

As I for more than two months fell for the oldest of mistakes (not talking to the community and fans out there) it now truly is time to restart communication about the state of ADOM. Reasons for not communicating are outlined at the bottom as the state of ADOM seems more important to me.

ADOM Lite RPG is done

Finally it is done. After a journey that seemed to know no end. During the ADOM crowdfunding campaign a reward level was devised that allowed donors to get access to a limited edition of the ADOM Lite RPG rules for pen & paper roleplaying games - available but once and then nevermore. Now it is finished.

ADOM R65 (version 2.1.0) released to prerelease testers!

Hi everyone!

Today I'd like to announce a very special release only for our prerelease testers: ADOM R65 (2.1.0) is available for prerelease testing starting now!

This release is special for several reasons:

Happy New Year (thoughts about ADOM in 2015 & 2016)

A Happy New Year to everyone out there!