Nominate ADOM for the Steam Awards (& update)

Hi everyone!

Three things in this update:

1. A call for action to nominate ADOM for the Steam awards
2. An update on what is going on behind the scenes
3. A reminder concerning the ongoing Autumn sale

Please nominate ADOM for the Steam awards!

Being on Steam (and being successful there) is very important for us as this on one hand guarantees the income we need to continue developing ADOM full throttle and also is important for the future of Ultimate ADOM.

Besides buying ADOM on Steam you can do us another favor: nominate ADOM for the Steam awards - the visibility we might gain is tremendously important for us. I have nominated ADOM myself for the

labour of love category

as that one seems most appropriate to me with a 25+ year history of ADOM development.

Just go to the ADOM Steam page and follow the purple links (somewhat appropriate, aren't they :-) ? )

Thanks for your continuing support!

Behind the scenes

Most of our attention right now goes into finishing the final crowdfunding campaign promise: the global highscore server. The alpha version already is running and soon our prerelease testers will be able to use it for beta testing (and then it's available for everyone who owns a Deluxe version - e.g. the Steam version).

In the future we intend to provide detailed game statistics both for your personal games as well as for all Deluxe games ever played. This should help comparing your play level to other players and give us detailed insights on how to evolve the game and its difficulty level.

That's also what I am working right now - with a little luck ADOM 3.0.3 (or ADOM 3.0.4 as the latest) will have a new statistics module that kind of logs major events during your game and creates a snapshot of many important statistics. And soon afterwards it will be on Steam with the global highscores with our new Rogueleague server.

Demo video coming shortly as soon as I finish the UI for that.

ADOM Autumn Sale

If you haven't bought ADOM on Steam now is the best time to do it as you can get it at a 10% discount (which is the maximum we ever are going to offer - we prefer adding value instead of offering discounts).

It's available for a very brief while still at this discount - so be quick if you have been thinking about getting ADOM.

Surgery Update & Roguelike Celebration 2017 Videos & More

Hi everyone!

Brief update from me:

• Surgery last week went pretty well. My hand does not hurt too much, the wound should be healed in a week or two, I can use my fingers (yeah!), I can type (not a full day yet but getting quickly better, so: rock'n roll) and I'll be back to work tomorrow. Here's a foto of the kind-of-cyberware they removed from my left arm (which is why I was joking about the CyberMonday prequel ;-) ):

• Many people asked about my talks from Roguelike Celebration 2017. You can find them here:
• If you want to see and hear my first talk about our lessons learned from the ADOM crowdfunding campaign you can find it here: https://go.twitch.tv/videos/200492753 (starts at roughly 3 hours, 53 minutes).
• If you want to see and hear my second talk regarding the current state of ADOM, its future and our five big announcements, it is here: https://go.twitch.tv/videos/200740124 (roughly at the 7 minute mark).

(yes, I know - they re-used the 2016 image ;-)

Naturally I also recommend all the other talks from Roguelike Celebration 2017:  https://go.twitch.tv/roguelike_con/videos/all My impression (and I have others heard voice the same opinion) was that the quality level of the talks was even higher this year than in 2016 (and 2016 already was awesome) - so it's worth spending a couple of hours on topics that might interest you (or just sound fascinating - many truly were!).

Regarding ADOM: Next week will be yet another week of completely finishing up the crowdfunding stuff for production release (more bug fixes in the 3.0.x development line in order to get it to Steam and the general public; and we already have been alpha-testing the global highscore server and hopefully will move this at least to beta and a larger audience). And I'm working on fully recovering my hand.

Additionally the team slowly is starting to plan both the 20% future development track for ADOM as well as the 80+% development track for Ultimate ADOM. Exciting times ahead - see you soon!

ADOM 3.0.2 released to our prerelease testers! (& brief pause)

Hi everyone!

The release train still is running at full steam - towards Steam so to speak ;-) We just released ADOM 3.0.2 to our prerelease testers which contains another slew of bug fixes and minor improvements. Sadly I have to report that ADOM 3.0.0 contains a major data corruption issue - save files that were created in 3.0.0 (or went through 3.0.0) probably are broken beyond repair - sorry for that :-(

The changelog can be found in the usual place!

Thanks for testing and enjoy the new release!
Thomas Biskup & Team ADOM

P.S.: After the frantic activity of the past couple of days there now will be a minor lull as I'm getting surgery tomorrow to have the metal in my left arm removed that I received due to an accident last year:

Wish me luck - I'm itching to start seriously working on Ultimate ADOM! Hopefully recovery will be fast and fully complete!

New ADOM overview video posted

Hi everyone!

This morning we finished a new ADOM overview video:

 Enjoy!

Announcing ADOM 3.0.1 for prerelease testers

Hi everyone!

since Thomas is on his way back to Europe, I have the honor to announce ADOM 3.0.1 for our prerelease testers. 

Please check the changelog, this version contains a lot of fixes for ADOM 3.0.0. Have fun testing!

Stay tuned!
Jochen & Team ADOM

Five ADOM announcements made at Roguelike Celebration 2017

Hi everyone!

Today at Roguelike Celebration 2017 we were honored to give a presentation about the future of ADOM. In this post I would like to summarize five key announcements we made, which are instrumental for the future of ADOM.

Questions are welcome (preferrably in the comments below) and we will try to address them to the best of our ability.

ADOM 3.0.0 released as a prerelease test version!

Hi everyone!

Today - as a special treat honoring Roguelike Celebration 2017 - we are very proud to announce the release of ADOM 3.0.0 as a prerelease test version. ADOM 3.0.0 is one of the most feature-heavy releases we ever have done as it wraps up most of the remaining crowdfunding promises. As a consequences it includes:

• Four new mini maps and three new community quests have been added.
• The Ultimate Nihilist ending has been added.
• A new special adventure - taking place after closing the gate - has been added.
• A new special "getting funded" level with a special boss monster & minions as well as two new artifacts has been added (and 16 other new items peculiar to this level).
• 33 (!) new artifacts have been added.
• The legend level donor artifacts have been added.
• Fixed and extensions to the many magical statues (a few still are unimplemented as the wishes of the donors where simply not feasible - we will work out something better with you; expect to be contacted soon).
• The immortalization of the mega-legend level donors has been done.
• The revised manual available in more and smaller pieces throughout the game.
• The basic infrastructure for global highscores has been added (but will not be activated before 3.0.1 as we still are busy testing the server - more on that in an upcoming post).

The changelog has the complete list of changes as usual. 

ADOM 3.0.0 can be downloaded for prerelease testers from the usual location.

All this should make for an exciting new release. After it has been extensively tested it will take the usual route first to Steam and then to the general public.

We are very happy about now coming to a conclusion of our crowdfunding campaign and we are looking forward to the next exciting things looming on the horizont.

Have fun!

Thomas Biskup & Team ADOM

ADOM 2.3.8 is being released to the general public!

Hi everyone!

After a very long time (812 days to be precise) we are very proud to release ADOM 2.3.8 to the general public!

Everyone now will be able to play ADOM 2.3.8 (release 81) and enjoy the progress of more than two years of work. Hopefully, never again so much time will pass between two releases. The changes are too numerous to recount:

• completely revised user interface & HUD & tons of graphical refinements
• animated monsters
• extensive support for mouse-based play
• tons of new support for new players (like quick hints, better mouse support, simplified key mappings, etc.)
• tons of bug fixes and minor improvements

See the changelog for a full list of changes - it's everything from release 60 upwards in the list!

There have been some changes that people ask about very often:

• ADOM now sports a dialog system and speech bubbles for dialogs. Some of the info dialogs can be deactivated if you don't like them (Show_Info_Boxes = false in the configuration accessible via '='). Speech bubbles and most selection dialogs can't be deactivated though. If you find them less efficient than the old way, please submit appropriate criticism and ideas for enhancement.
• ADOM now offers quick hints that explain how to access certain commands. If you don't need them or find them disturbing you can deactivate those, too (Quick_Hint_Limit = 0 in the configuration accessible via '=').
• The pick and drop commands have been completely rewritten. They now are much more consistent and powerful but you need to get accustomed to them if your muscle memory is trained on the old system. For experienced ADOM players we recommend that you familiarize yourself with all the options and play around a little with it. It's different than before but all options are there (and more).

Generally we believe that these (and other changes) are highly beneficial, especially also for new players. If you are very experienced with ADOM it will take a moment to adjust but our experience is that this goes quickly!

ADOM 2.3.8 can be downloaded from two locations:

• IndieDB (for the major variants for the big three platforms plus graphics)
• our own download server (for the minor variants like ASCII-only)

Important: Files are still uploading at the time of this writing and will need a couple of more hours but the Windows version already is available at http://www.indiedb.com/games/adom-ancient-domains-of-mystery/downloads/adom-238-release-81-for-windows

If you find problems or have ideas for improvement please submit them at our bug database.

And now enjoy playing the latest version of ADOM. We are curious about your feedback!

Kind regards
Thomas Biskup & Team ADOM

Character sheet for ADOM Lite RPG now available!

Hi everyone!

Finishing my (as of in: my personal ticket ;-) final crowdfunding promise:

• The ADOM Lite RPG character sheet now is available here for download.
• If you have any suggestions for improving it, please submit them as tickets in our bug database (http://www.adom.de/bugs).

And now enjoy the sheet and keep playing!

Kind regards

Thomas

Full Steam release: ADOM 2.3.8 is here!

Hi everyone!

Because I'm a bit jet-lagged (due to the trip to San Francisco to the Roguelike Celebration 2017) here's just a very quick note:

We have released ADOM 2.3.8 to Steam with but two fixes (see the changelog):

• An important NotEye crash has been fixed.
• A minor frog dialog problem has been fixed.

In the meantime we are already finishing up the next major release with tons of new stuff which you also can expect pretty soon now.

If ADOM 2.3.8 proves to be stable during the next 8-10 hours, we'll also release it as a general public release. So please test extensively!

See ya soon,

Thomas Biskup & Team ADOM

Full Steam release: Welcome ADOM 2.3.7!

Hi everyone!

Today we are happy to announce the release of ADOM 2.3.7 to Steam!

Before I summarize the most important changes and additions I'd like to ask for help in analyzing one problem we still occasionally seem to have: In rare cases there seems to be a NotEye-related crash. The crash first has been reported in the following ticket: http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=5572 This bug also is the main reason for not yet having released a general public version because we didn't want to introduce an annoying crash bug in the first major release after such a long time. If we don't managed to get it solved by next Thursday we'll just be pushing out the general public release hoping to the find more pointers to the root problem.

Ok, back to the release of ADOM 2.3.7, which is very nice as usual. The most important changes are:

• The "open door" menu (when you run into a door) now reacts to the SPACE bar (by selecting 'o'pen as the default). Additionally searching for traps no longer is offered as a choice if you don't possess the relevant skill.
• You now again can open doors by left-clicking onto them.
• Trying to pay if you have no gold no longer crashes the game.
• Auto-swapping positions with monsters (especially in walk-mode) no longer turns them hostile as this really could ruin your game.
• Piety increases for paladin and priest characters now are more meaningful.
• Some other bug fixes and minor improvements.

Here you can find the full change log. So all in all ADOM 2.3.7 is just a fine-tuning of previous releases and available now on Steam.

Behind the scenes we still are searching for above-mentioned bug and are very busy finishing the last crowdfunding promises (three in-game basically left: revision of the manual, immortalizing the legend-level-donors and global highscores and two out-of-game promises: the final shipping wave and the PDF download of the ADOM Lite RPG character sheet).

I'm back to work... enjoy ADOM 2.3.7!

How the revised ADOM manual will turn out... (hopefully)

Hi everyone!

I'd like to share some brief thoughts on my intentions of how I am going to revise the ADOM manual (one of the last crowdfunding promises not yet tackled):

• I have wrestled for a long time with the question on whether it should be web-based, PDF, ASCII or several of these formats. I now have decided that it will remain ASCII because our recent UI/UX tests show that people would enjoy shorter in-game help texts in more places. As (a) ADOM can only display ASCII and PDF or HTML are impossible for ADOM and (b) we do not have the resources to support a variety of documents, ASCII makes most sense.
• I intend to break down the manual into smaller sections so that you e.g. can directly jump from the "Healing" skill to the healing skill description (and not just the whole skill section as of today).
• I intend to add links to the manual in more places (skills, spells).
• I will add more information to the manual. If you feel that some important information is missing please add that request in the comments section of this ticket here.

The technical side behind this plan requires writing a new manual parser and formatter to generate all the sections, links, etc. that we need internally in order to use the improved manual. Not a trivial task but I hope to get this done soon.

Thanks for listening!