Communication bubbles in ADOM

Hi everyone!

Today I'm particularly proud to present a masterpiece of ASCII art (*cough*, *cough* - bare with me - without Krys my artistic abilities are somewhat rudimentary ;-) ).

For a long time (and especially with the new graphical mode) people rightfully complained about dialogs with NPCs and monsters and the texts uttered by them were not very well readable.

I have taken these complaints to heart and proudly present the new ADOM speech bubble mechanism I implemented:

These bubbles adjust in size, in theory the text contained can be pageable and ADOM tries to position them smartly so that neither the involved speakers nor the nearby context gets obscured. There yet has to be a lot of testing to see if this works well in all instances (prerelease testers, you'll get work in the nearer future :-) ) but I am very happy with the current mechanism. And I find it remarkably beautiful for ASCII art :-)

Let me know what you think!
(and as usual my dear compatriots in crime [Team ADOM] are under pressure to catch up graphically with my ASCII designs ;-) )

New dialog widgets in ADOM

Hi everyone!

Another milestone has been completed in our quest to simplify the ADOM user interface and make it more accessible for new players: Starting with the next release ADOM is going to use dialog widgets to display meta game information and to input values expected from the PC.

The video below gives a brief demo about how this will look in ASCII mode - graphical mode is still under construction:



Especially in graphical mode players often believed that the game was "hung" when they just had hit an key combination that resulted in some input request and said request was barely noticeable in the message buffer. In the revised implementation the message buffer is only used for actual game information concerning your actions and surroundings and all (most?) meta information is displayed in dialogs.

Next up: Speech bubbles / dialog boxes for conversations to make it easier to follow discussions with NPCs and to reduce irritations about missed message texts from NPCs.

Better direction selection in ADOM

Hi everyone!

As part of our "Ease of Use UI" milestone I am happy to present the new ADOM direction selector in the following video (it is easy to notice, reminds you of which action you currently are trying to execute and lists the keys for selecting a direction in a more mnemonic way):


As usual the NotEye implementation for our graphical mode is upcoming.

Enjoy!

Look better in ADOM

Hi everyone!

As part of our "Ease of use UI" milestone we are tackling a variety of issues with ADOM. Today I spent quite a number of hours on completely rewriting 'l'ook mode and by now think that the new look mode has become really nice and beautiful.

We still need to implement it in NotEye but below you can already find a video that shows you the new 'l'ook mode in ADOM:

• Navigation now adds the ability to iterate through "interesting" spots (e.g. stairs, altars, item stacks and more) besides the existing ability to iterate through monsters and manually navigating the map.
• The information about the current spot now is displayed in a kind of ASCII information window that collects all information about the current map spot. ADOM tries to position the information window as smartly as possible so that it is close enough to the cursor for easy persual but far enough away in order to not obscure your view.
• You now can inspect item stacks as long as they are in sight.
• Monster memory is available as usual.
• For all types of situations all information now is displayed (e.g. tiles, features, monsters and items).
• As all information is displayed in an information window the key help for look mode no longer will be obscured and you can see all available keys all the time.
• The mechanism is easily extendable so that if we decide to add more data we no longer will have problems with lack of space in the message area.

In total I believe that the new look mode really has become pretty beautiful. I'm also looking forward to the NotEye implementation for our graphical mode. Hopefully we will be able to implement true tooltips so that you don't even need to activate look mode explicitly but rather just can hover over the map with the mouse.

And now enjoy the ASCII demo video:

Simplifying the ADOM UI...

Hi everyone!

In our continuing quest to simplify ADOM we today have gathered a long list of issues with the goal of simplifying ADOM more for new players. You can find it here: http://www.adom.de/forums/projectmilestone.php?milestoneid=8

And now we are looking for more input - but the goal is not to refine the UI for expert players and longtime fans - we know that there is a ton of proposals to fine-tune the UI even more for people expertly battling Chaos for a long time. Quite to the contrary we would like to unexperienced players, casual players and newcomers to the roguelike genre more favours. We have made several attempts in the past and want to continue to evolve the UI.

Thus we'd be very grateful for comments on the issues listed in the milestone above. If you have new or other ideas please add issues to our issue tracker and post a link in the comments below for us to review, so that we can decide whether to include your issues in that milestone or not.

Thanks for your continuing support!
Thomas & Team ADOM

P.S.: Naturally in the background we are working on finishing lots of new content. Stay tuned for that, too!

Weekly Progress Report - A Sneak Peek into the Donor Rewards.

Hi guys,

No seismic changes since last week. Physical crowdfunding rewards right now are in our focus. Just dropping in to give you a peek at the Arcana suplement unboxing and the Boxed Edition cover.

Weekly Development Update

Hello,

Short recap of the week :) We're picking up tempo and the dev repository is firing up with daily changes. Let's shed some light about what's going on.

Dev State update - June 2017

Hi everyone!

Quick update on the status of each developer, and our current tasks / focus areas. But first, an animated Hydra with some lesser daemons to catch your eye ;)