News from February, 2001

February 24th, 2001

Math has been at my throat, so it took until today to finish a basic material editor.  Nothing fancy, no graphics or anything like that, but it works.  You can save and load files, although right now the universe will use only the stock material file (called "stockmat.txt"), which you can edit as you wish.  I haven't made any stock materials yet.  There's just one called "Metal" that is rigid enough to be used as a weapon material (or else the item generation code crashes:) ).  I've updated the Plan and will continue to press on.

February 19th, 2001

Been doing a little work.  Tweaked the Plan.  Things might be dead for a few days:  math, of course.

February 17th, 2001

I'm back to work on the editors -- mathematics, as ever, is ruthlessly reaping my energy and time, using them to bake bitter bread of misery.  I'm saving all of my editor information as text files that can be tortured directly if you like, or you can use the editors I have yet to code.  Binary would save a little space I suppose, but it's nice to have it all in front of you, and it will save your time if you wanted to hack the files:)

February 14th, 2001

Many reason have compelled me -- I'm starting editors now.  For one, I need a stock set of creatures to test combat more thoroughly.  Editors will also facilitate the rapid edition of new items to the game.  My work on editors will involve saving and loading universes to the disk, so it will include the option to play in a standardized universe or a more random one, and these universes will persist between games -- not just in the current sense of saving the seeds that generated them, but also any alterations made to the universe by an editor.  You will also be able to save universes by name, so you can have many at one time.  In the beginning, I will only provide a universe called "stock" which will be rather dull (ie DND/Tolkien).  The option to create random universes from scratch will still be there, and you should also be able to create your own universes that can be played over and over -- either from scratch, or starting with the stock universe or a random universe to give you some objects to work with.  I will eventually have editors for all sorts of things, including buildings and city layout, as well as spells, materials, item types, species, creature forms (humanoid/quadraped/etc.), creature motifs (mammal/reptile/etc.), entities, specific individuals, specific items, and so on.  Silvair and I were just reminiscing about Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures, and I have no idea how many times Zach and I constructed monstrosities with the Adventure Construction Set.  I think it would be nice to have some aspect like this in the game, for those who want to exercise their creativity, or who want more control -- I'm going to need the editors to make the stock universe anyway.  I think it might be fun to eventually upload player-made universes and pass them around:)  Visit The Forum or contact me if you have any thoughts.

The Plan has been tweaked slightly to include this new direction.

February 13th, 2001

Uck.  Math has been riding me.  But I got some things done today.  I have some short randomly determined character histories in -- it isn't nearly complete, but I'm going to move on for the time being.  Right now, a history simply reads as follows:

"In the year 1396, you were born to Nother and Himfog.  At your birth, Nother died.  Upon reaching adulthood, you were cursed by the gods.  A few years later, Himfog died."

They require a lot of work naturally, but things are moving along again.

February 9th, 2001

I'm still finishing up the last bit of character generation...  I also found time to put up some inspiring pictures in The Log and The Credits (yes, I actually own these things!  Remember, this game was inspired by Rogue-likes).

February 6th, 2001

Alright, my math-infested life finally let me get around to a little work.  The changes I'm making for the character generator will actually be usable by the entire program to create all of the creatures you meet.  There's a topic running on character generation in the Forum if you want to contribute to the design process.

An interesting conversation (by email) regarding time travel and stopping time has led to Ruken's addition to the helpful suggestion credits.  If you have any comments about the Future page, visit the Forum or contact me.

February 4th, 2001

I put up a Forum for Slaves to Armok (or more specifically, Bay 12 Games, an organization that a few of my friends and I are putting together around this and other projects).  Stop by and visit if you like!  I've updated The Plan again, and I should be starting on it in earnest now very soon.

I've also put up a non-Direct X version, although it's not quite up to specs yet.

February 1st, 2001

I cleaned up some more bugs today.  Things are still fugly right now, but here's a new version to mess around with.  I'm still working on some of the things I need to make it really playable, but I thought I'd give you all a peak.  I've also changed The Plan a bit.