Most bigly ADOM news update in a long while (physical rewards, videos, pictures, so many new features)

Hi everyone!

After a flurry of posts two weeks ago we fell a little more silent - because sometimes things are just bigger and harder pieces of work. In the past two weeks several topics we begun have been brought to some kind of conclusion while other major topics have been started:

• Point-based attribute generation has been changed. There now are more points and background stories simply affect the point pool for specific race/profession combinations. Additionally the attribute ranges have been extended to allow for more variety.
• Question-based attribute generation has been downgraded to an option that you can turn on or off. By default it now is turned off in order to not scare new players.
• Team ADOM converted more ASCII screens to beautiful graphical designs for the tiled version.
• Missile handling has been greatly simplified: Not only do you know get a graphical reload menu but ADOM also is much smarter at offering the matching types of missiles. Additionally you no longer acccidentally can combine weapon/missile combinations that in the end can't be used. We could do more and probably will - but for now we are very happy with the results.
• Behind the scenes more animations have been added and Lucas is busy composing.
• And we have been working on "the big announcement". Real soon now :-)

Which brings us to the first major topic:

Configuring ADOM

Historically ADOM has been customized (mostly) by editing the adom.cfg file. Nowadays this is rather unconventional and pretty complicated for new players (because you have to now about the existence of the file, you need to know where to find it and finally you need to understand the options and their values).

Starting with the next release of ADOM players will be able to graphically edit the settings. All settings are listed in a pageable list (which indicates if values are acceptable or not) and each can be individually edited:

Edit menus have a similar structure:

• Each setting has a human-readable label.
• The technical name also is shown.
• The current value is displayed.
• The description of the setting and its effects are displayed.
• The choices for values are offered.
• And then you can select one or more choices.

Actual selection dialogs fall into several categories:

You can have simple true/false choices:

You can have lists of permissible values:

You can have multi-selection lists of values:

Changes are saved. The edit dialog has replaced the static "=" display. This also allowed us to remove the ":=" (redefine configuration variable) command (yet one less - by now we have managed to remove something like six or seven commands - still not much but every single one counts).

Additionally the menu is accessible with the ESC key through the general settings menu.

Besides working on this lots of energy went into finally finishing all physical crowdfunding rewards:

Crowdfunding rewards

During the past week Krys and I spent many hours getting all the components for the remaining physical crowdfunding rewards created/ordered. Here's the current state:

• The boxes for the ADOM Classic RPG box have been selected and ordered. They should arrive any day now.
• Stickers for the box covers have been designed and ordered. This should allow us for very beautiful boxes with a decidedly old school effect (I was aiming for the little brown box effect of world's most famous RPG). Here is a sample of our old school design:

• Our boxes are larger than D&D's little brown boxes - DIN A4 because they need to be able to hold the printed Drakalor Chain map. Here we go with a little video :-)

• Each box will hold a collectors certificate, the ADOM Lite RPG, the ADOM Arcana supplement, the poster and a 20-sided die plus a special USB stick (see below).
• Great care went into finding the right kind of die as I wanted the die to have a distinct purple chaos affliction (it's the RNG!). Here are the dice (which were quite hard to find - the largest die production company in the world told me "no, we don't have 60 of that die"). Thus we now have two beautiful die types which will be randomly assigned to donors:

• All dice have been hand-tuned by rolling each and everyone 20 times to have them charged with special "Creator luck".
• One of the many rewards were ADOM code certificates. These have been designed, printed and finally arrived (and now I "just" have to pick about 61 segments of the code to display on them - that alone probably will take a day or two, even if it works out as designed). Here's the sample certificate:

• The ADOM Arcana supplement (included in the ADOM Classic box) went through a final round of proofing, has been ordered from Lulu and now finally arrived in larger numbers:

• Originally we promised a CD in the ADOM Classic boxed set holding the most ancient ADOM binary we could procure. Almost five years later in the crowdfunding process we will change this - the box donors now will receive a beautiful USB stick. The art was designed by Krys, our spectacular artist:

• As you can see we decided to go for a cool USB wafer (which is quite expensive but IMHO worth the money). It is the size of a credit card, has lots of room for our beautiful art and you can extend the USB connector from it by unfolding it. I'm very much looking forward to these USB sticks. They finally have been ordered today and should arrive at the beginning of next week at the latest.
• Here's the ADOM Classic box collector's certificate (it has also been ordered and should arrive any day now):

And the "other stuff"...

• We worked on the big announcement. It's coming very soon now :-) Quite a bit of stuff going on behind the scenes...
• I finally cleaned up my ADOM E-Mail inbox and installed many new rules to have less clutter. While doing that I found 100+ emails I had missed initially due to all the spam and clutter. So don't be surprised should I start answering your emails from 2014 over the next couple of weeks ;-)
• I have modified the code for the ADOM: The Resurrection portal to make it easier to enter your address. Which you now really should do if you haven't done so!!! More than 50 people still have not requested their ADOM Lite RPG copies - so please confirm your addresses!!!
• I have restarted working on tons of content I began in November 2016 before I broke my hand.

What's next?

• Team ADOM is trying to catch up with the many features I already added to ASCII mode.
• The current goal is to finish all features promised for the crowdfunding campaign by end of September (finally!). I hope we succeed in this.
• I want to ship all the physical stuff mentioned above before the 16th of August (because on that day I am leaving for a ten day trip to the USA to visit GEN CON 50 among other things).
• I am now focussing on finishing the Rolf and ADOM quests I hinted at an eternity ago.
• We probably will be doing an ASCII prerelease for the closed circle of prerelease testers in the nearer future in order to get intensive testing - because we don't want to botch the next Steam release with a buggy and unstable release.

That's about it. As you can see two weeks of silence were two weeks of intense work. More intense than in a long while. And we keep pushing!

Axes high!