Bloody well about time..

Yeah, it's been too long. Been some busy weeks, but work is still going on. And soon, the new official ATBRPG website will be going up (once I make it:p). I've made some progress on the inventory system, however right now my main concern is resolving the inside/outside bug - it's not handling the values correctly, leading to a situation where you're in the wilderness, but still inside. Its possible I will edit the system to use a separate grid for the inside areas, like a sub-level of the outside world. I will now attempt to use ASCII art to illustrate:

This is an example of an outside area, with #, ^ and = being different kind of terrain, and ¤ representing entrances to inside areas.

####==#####
####===####
^#¤##====##
^####===###
^^====##¤##
^^^^^######

Then, a map of the inside area, with # being walls, X solid ground, _ floor and ¤ exits to the outside world.

X######XXX
X#____#XXX
X#¤___####
X#######_#
==XXX#_¤_#
XXXXX#####

If you compare the two, you'll see that the exits and river (=) connects. Although this makes sense with caves and dungeons, I will also be placing cities in this sublevel, so technically all cities will be underground. In reality, this is just to make things more practical - cities will still be on the surface for all relevant purposes. I can also add multiple sublevels this way, making multilevel dungeons fairly easy to add.

It's been a while, but the project is still alive. Just a bit slow.

The first official ATBRPG contest!

That's right, and we've even got a neato prize! One of the artists making art for the ATBRPG manual will be providing a picture of a new race, and we will be running a naming contest on the ATBRPG forums. Watch the forums for the contest rules and more info. The prize for the lucky winner will be a t-shirt with the picture in question, as well as a signed copy of ATBRPG on a choice of CD, DVD or floppy disk! So get your submissions ready, lads and ladies!

Avoiding the big black void

I'm working on the new navigation system right now. I've finally worked it out, so now all that remains is coding the rest of it and edit out the old system. I ran into a few issues, e.g. players moving to a location that doesn't exist and ending up in the big black void. This is a bad thing, so I've added failsafes to prevent that from happening. You can happily adventure wthout fear of falling off the edge of the world. Provided no distracting events occur I'll have a new version out tonight, complete with the new navigation system. The next step is adding the inventory system. I've got the system ready, but I need to find a good way to pull the stats out of the arrays. Stay tuned for more news...

More news coming in just now - the new navigation system is in place and the new release is going up. I've also changed the way the game saves, so the saves aren't so easily haxed now. The ATBRPG forum is also up and running, you can find both the new release and the link to the forums on the right.

Arrays = juberly^n

Inventories and coordinates

I've been poking around with arrays for the last few days, and I've assembled a rough draft of how I can get the various things to work with them. The navigation system, as it is now, has to be written again for every single area. It's not that much now, with the game only having 36 areas - but it'll get a bit tedious. It'll also be easier to control what areas link to which, I had a bit of work figuring out how the areas interconnected (I haven't looked at the navigation code for ages).

Basically, I'll be using arrays to store coordinates, so I'll have a north-south axis and an east-west axis. By storing these values in an array, I can easily access and manipulate them without having to write so much code, and I'll have less names to worry about. You won't be seeing this in the next update, though - before I make these changes to the existing code, I'll be testing it out by adding player inventory. That's right - you'll be able to put on a +5 helmet of buttock prodding in the next release.

Game balance and the user interface

The user interface is still somewhat of a mess. The next release will significantly improve this by adding more spacing and colors. This will hopefully make it easier to separate different blocks of text, and make the whole thing more readable.

Elves are at this point so fragile it's not even funny. Sure, they have great int, but they'll usually die from a single crit, which isn't really what I intended. You'll be seeing slightly less intelligence and slightly more dexterity, as well as a hp boost, to make elves more survivable.

A sneak peek

Yep, as a closing I'll give you a look at what is to come: the fifth race, drakelings. These guys are similar to lizardfolk, and they'll be the first race with an active racial ability: acid spit. This will probably see the other races get a racial bonus as well, for more balance. Here's the current statline of the drakeling, so you have some solid numbers to think about:

Str: 6 Con: 6 Dex: 4 Int: 3 Luk: 6 HP: 30 MP: 15
Racial ability: acid spit, deals INT((8*RND+1)+(intHcon/3)+intHlvl) damage.

Note that these are not neccesarily the final stats of drakelings - these may be changed before drakelings are released. And of course, if you have any ideas for the game that you'd like to share, feel free to leave me a comment.

(for those who want an explanation of the acid spit damage formula - INT means the damage is a whole number (no decimals), 8*RND+1 is a random number from 1 to 8, intHcon/3 is constitution/3, and finally intHlvl is character level. These are the internal names I use when coding, and are made so I'll easily recognize them while still being short.

The writing must go on.

Well Iron has brought me on to help him out with the creative process. I will be helping him write new material such as quests and so forth so that he can spend more time working on the hard stuff, such as coding and fixing bugs. So far I have one quest basically done with a few tweaks needed here and there, another one in the works and some areas and monsters to go along with everything. Look forward for some more updates as progress moves along.

Your friendly neighborhood heretic,
Jay

Spring, uh, autumn cleaning

Although I fixed all the major bugs (I think) the game is still looking rather messy. So I'll be working on layout and visuals, making the game more tidy and good-looking. Some of the areas already have color descriptions, which I think makes the text more easily readable. I'm also gonna add some more spacing to some of the menus, and try to improve on the text flow in some parts. I'll also be reworking the navigation soon, so I won't have to write the nav system again every time I add a new area.

I'll also be completing the classes for the next release, adding in the first DoT attack (rogue poison attack), and possibly adding another skill for each class. I'll also be adding a way of increasing skill levels.

New version... oh, whoooops

Well, the new version had a combat choice list where all the choices are numbered 1. Fixed that now though, but if you already got v0.91 you'll have to update it.

/update

The update archive will also make a small change to the menu (it used to say "not for distribution" behind the version number, this is now removed).

/yet more update

So I broke the navigation code, so the player would get stuck in the badlands unable to reach the outpost. This has now been resolved.