LambdaRogue 1.5 source (excluding the SDL headers) consists of 28.703 lines of code, and I estimate 20 to 30% of it are redundant or not well abstracted, and should be refactored at some point. I really believe that the code length could be reduced to ~20.000 lines. LambdaRogue 2.0, which I started in 2008, shortly after 1.0 release, once was considered to be this point. However, there have been so many bug fixes and additions to 1.x, that the 2.x branch is hopelessly outdated and I could start again. So, what is the status quo ... what are my goals ...
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Well, thanks for the comments on my last blog entry, where I tried to describe the feelings I had at that time regarding roguelikes and doing something different. Of course, a roguelike can have story and fixed places. But what I meant was more something like a 'serious' adventure: linear plot, no replayability (except someone wants to experience the plot again), no RPG elements, but great visuals and sound and story.As I don't have money for hiring people who can provide 'great visuals and sound', it would be some kind of textual interactive fiction, illustrated by some dark, disturbing images. But then, perhaps a game is the wrong medium at all. Perhaps a movie or a written book would suffice. -- but this is missing the interactive elements an adventure or interface fiction can provide.
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Currently I'm a bit tired of LambdaRogue. Not because I think it's a bad game (I certainly don't, I love what I have done so far), but because it's the wrong medium for my current interests -- I want a game with a huge, but (in terms of places and map design) fixed world, a rich story told in lots of dialogues. These are things not really possible with roguelikes, as everything has to be random.So what is the best medium for me?
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Some days ago I replaced Windows XP by 7. I thought I made a backup of everything -- my complete documents folder, incl. LambdaRogue -- on my external hard drive, but apparently only the LambdaRogue 2.x branch was stored safely. The current 1.x branch is lost.The really bad thing is, all changes I made to fight the bugs in the 1.5 release are gone, as well as my inventory experiments.
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In a comment, Grimwerk wrote:I found it weird that I could not drop my aspirin unless it was a full pack. Luckily, I was able to sell it.
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Thanks to some comments by Grimwerk on my "I want to hear from you" posting, I am now aware of some really ugly bugs, which are not on the interface side or make the game crash, but can be exploited by players to survive, or to get endless items/money.1. Fountains grant random effects (either positive or negative) to players. One of the positive one is time freeze. Unfortunately for me, the duration of time freeze seems to be endless sometimes. This allows weak players to enter even the deepest dungeon levels, where they face monsters that can't be killed by them yet, or to accept quests that these player's aren't supposed to accept. (Ehm... besides: Why is talking to NPCs possible when time is frozen??) Due to this bug, time freeze is a real gamebreaker currently.
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By replacing the files bg-1024.png and bg-800.png it is possible to replace the default black background which is shown for unexplored areas. The result may look like on the screenshot below where I use a photo of Iceland as background.While this particular example may not be convincing, it may be possible to find or create background images which really add to the atmosphere of the graphical mode of the game: A picture of a temple in the temple area, a volcanic landscape in the really deep levels, or a hills and forests landscape in the outskirts. I will think about this option -- unless you tell me it's totally nonsense (and please, if you think so, tell me!)
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You have played LambdaRogue? Then send me your feedback! It's a very hard task to develop 'into the blue' without knowing which changes are judged positively and which are not. I know there are more than 300 downloads since relase of 1.5, but I don't know if you like it or not. So here are some concrete questions you may answer:
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This is to inform you about the next steps in development of LambdaRogue.A minor patch (1.5.1) will be released in September 2009, fixing some smaller issues, but this is just some polishment.
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Sorry to everybody who has downloaded the Linux archive. I forgot to include the config file. This file is now available as separate download:http://lambdarogue.googlecode.com/files/lambdarogue.cfg
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I've posted a walkthrough through the main quest at Google Groups. It spoilers the whole main story, so ask yourself twice if you really want to read it. Here's the link:http://groups.google.com/group/lambdarogue/web/spoiler-solving-the-main-quest
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This is a short tutorial for new players, describing the basic elements of the user interface in graphical mode.Overview
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In my attempts to "streamline" LambdaRogue web services, I abandoned the forum and created a Google Group as replacement; the link "Forum" now points to this group. Feel free to post feedback and questions there.
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I decided to move LambdaRogue's project from SourceForge to Google Code, including all relevant downloads. While SourceForge was a great site some years ago, more and more problems occur, including non-working statistics and interface changes to the worse.I will keep the LambdaRogue downloads at SourceForge for some weeks, but the recommended place is now the LambdaRogue project at Google Code.
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In addition to the Windows version and the released source of LambdaRogue 1.5, now the Linux version is ready for download, in a .tar.gz-archive. Get it at SourceForge.
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It is done, I have finally released the next update of LambdaRogue, we are now at 1.5. The most important changes are:
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Here we go in big steps towards 1.5, with a (more or less) slightly redesigned website and blog for LambdaRogue 1.5. Press F5 once or twice to see all updates.Now it's 10:02 PM ... I think I'll need 4 to 5 hours to finish and release everything.
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Here in Germany its 6:28 PM, and LambdaRogue 1.5 will be released sometime the upcoming night, along with a redesign of this website/blog, a basic manual and interface tutorial. Except I fall asleep over my keyboard 
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Just a short demonstration:
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In the past I sometimes wrote about my goal to enhance LambdaRogue's equipment system. Until LR 1.4, you have only the following equipment types:
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I am thinking about replacing the current musical concept (which is, basically, choose a random track and play it) with something more atmospheric. I'd like to have music which reflects the different game situations better than currently. I mean, the soundtrack is nice, it is dark, depressing and quite strange, but its always the same tracks, regardless if you're in the Temple of Enoa (where the music should be somehow spiritual and create the feeling of safety) or in the Halls of Eris (something like hell, which the music should reflect) or, in LR 1.5, the Outskirts of Enoa (a small wilderness) or the Forgotten Realm (a new dungeon). And fighting unique monsters could use some kind of boss music, for example, and a fanfare when the boss is dead.
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I just started a more general roguelike blog at blogspot:
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Nearly all ranks are now implemented; 9 of 18 are gained by achieving certain status combinations, the other half is gained by solving quests. 4 of these 9 quests are implemented, 5 to go.
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Sometimes creativity comes out of nowhere and when you don't expect it. Today I finally finished to implement and test the "Heart of Aphrodite" quests. To play it, you need to go through 13 single quests. Eleven have been created from scratch, but two of them have existed in LambdaRogue since several releases, and while they're not really part of the quest-line, you need to solve them to get the new quests.
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I did not work on LambdaRogue since the last blog posting, so since about 1 month. The reason was basically a big lack of time. I have now started to finish the final parts and hopefully I will release 1.5 soon.
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I've uploaded some screenshots of LambdaRogue 1.5 to flickr. It's a comparison of the same scene in different view modes. Note that in console mode status effects are shown in red (negative) and green (positive) on the left, while resistances are shown in blue on the right.
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Thanks to getter77 who did a complete proof read, all the in-game texts of LambdaRogue should be more correct English in release 1.5. However, I've got a problem now: The ASCII mode of the game simply displays the text files, but the graphical mode displays scrolls and books as jpeg-images on which the text has been written using a graphics program. I don't have the original files with text as separate layers anymore, so I either have to re-create lots of these pictures or do extensive manipulation of the existing files. I am now thinking of just displaying the text files in graphical mode, too. Hard decision.
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In LambdaRogue 1.4, Diplomas are automatically shown in the character's status screen when their requirements are met. Every profession can achieve every diploma, it all depends on the abilities, skills and talents. This was nice, but somewhat unstructered and partly arbitrary.
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I've got a little problem concerning the Northdoom quest, introduced in LambdaRogue 1.4. Nothing technical; it's the story of the quest.
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As far as I can (fore)see, these are the last things I need to implement before feature freezing and testing LR 1.5:
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An excerpt from the upcoming LambdaRogue 1.5:
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Yesterday and today I managed to get a character very far (I had solved the main quest about 35, 40%) until I died because I was too lazy to drink a cola to be able to use my healing chant. Well, the snake was obviously too strong. Silly fault, 'cause my gameplay was good mixture between offensive and defensive acting; when I had to take the Cuirass of Ares back to the Temple, I rushed from 9th to 1st level and back to 9th, thanks to the minimap showing the staircases (once you have used them at least 1 time). This took about 4 minutes and included solving 2 other quests as well. I think this is an important observation, 'cause _if_ I require the player to go back to earlier levels, this should be easy and not that disturbing.
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The thing with higher resolutions than 800x600 is that most netbooks can't show them on their strange 1024x600 screen without needing to scroll with the mouse up and down. Thus, I added a netbook option to LambdaRogue's 1024x768 mode. This mode still uses 1024x768, but the messagelog and dialog frames are drawn at their 800x600 positions. You can still scroll down to profit from the enhanced dungeon view, but you are not forced to do this just to see the message log or the lower parts of dialogs.
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Nothing spectacular, but the gained space in 1024x768 is really good ...
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The biggest challenge for the new, more flexible quickkey system is to design the icons for the graphical SDL mode. In LR 1.4, most spells had their own (sometimes not that beautiful ...) icon. But when I want the user to be able to use the F-keys as shortcut to potions and food, I had to work months this way. Thus, I can't create individual icons. What will I do?
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Since a while, whenever I want to create just a minor update, I get quickly so motivated that I add more and more things, thus I decided that the next release will not be 1.4.1, but 1.5. Besides the usual bunch of bug fixes (this time not so obvious bugs which you might never encounter), I fix of course the mysterious crash bug, thanks to Krice's hint about SDL surface variables being pointers.
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At the moment I'm playing my current 1.4.1 development version of LambdaRogue. The decision to cut down the size of dungeon levels was one of the best I ever made, because it greatly increases the flow of the game just by shortening the ways between important points (staircases, story-relevant NPCs etc.) It is simply less boring than before, 'cause you see more from the game in a shorter time. I was afraid if this might feel squeezed, but it's like throwing out unnecessary words and sentences from a text to make it more readable and fluent.
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I just had a look at the bottom of this page ... this blog is still running on d.elog 0.2 which is a rather outdated version of my blog software. I think I'll have to update it with the current 0.6 release, as used in my other project WISSENSCHAFT in progress (the term "Wissenschaft" is "science" in English, although we refer mainly to the "humanities").
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Is anybody else playing Perfect World International on the Sanctuary Server?
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Today I'm flying to Amman, Jordan, 'cause I'm participating in IMCL 2009, the (4th) International Conference on Interactive and Mobile Computer Aided Learning. There I'll present a paper written by me and two of my co-researchers at Rostock University. It's really exciting, because 1) I never went by plane before, 2) Jordan is an interesting destination, and 3) I'm happy to get in contact with other researchers in the field of e-learning from all over the world. 
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Today I replaced (hopefully all of) my image loading code. Until today I loaded pictures by using SDL's IMG_LOAD(file) function. According to Krice's comment on my last blog entry, this could be the cause for the crash after longer playing, because I never explictly told SDL to free the memory allocated by IMG_LOAD (except before quitting; then all surfaces were freed). I thought it would just replace a fixed amount of memory, forgetting that IMG_LOAD operates on pointers, not on variables. I now call SDL_FREESURFACE on the surface before calling IMG_LOAD again, but this is just a guess. I have to test it over a long period, watching the memory consumption of the game.
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I lag way behind my schedule for LambdaRogue development. Two months ago I created a list with things to do for the next update, but I never touched the game's source since then.
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Yeah! Today I received the first postcard from a LambdaRogue player. 
I'm very happy about it and will prepare the Feelies-Package as soon as possible. Thank you, Jayme!
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As mentioned elsewhere, the next release, LambdaRogue 1.4.1, will be a rather small update. It LambdaRogue 1.5 will bring some bug fixes (hopefully including a fix for this mysterious crash) and a new quest line about the »Heart of Aphrodite«. There will also be some minor interface improvements (for example the number of remaining items shown next to the quickconsume list).
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As you might guess from previous posts, I really like Legerdemain. Today the cluebook, the map and the CD of the game arrived, and I'm excited about the quality. The map is simply beautiful and the writing of the book captured me after only a few seconds. I really adore Nathan for programming the game and writing the book. May roguelikefiction become a successful concept and may Legerdemain once count to the major roguelikes! Ah, and here's a small picture of all the stuff, including this shiny Post-it note (thanks, Nathan )
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Revariel was very brave. A beautiful and clever girl, black eyes and black hair, and always facing the enemies, never retreating. And now she's dead. 
Here's what happened so far.
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This is the start of a "Playing LambdaRogue" series. If you're unexperienced, this series will be some kind of walkthrough and contain many spoilers, so you should be careful while reading.
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The following was written on Friday and today while going by train from Rostock to Berlin and back. It's about the goal of LambdaRogue development, about languages and some other things I'm interested in:
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It is done. I have released LambdaRogue 1.4, the most important update of this roguelike RPG since the 0.3 beta version.
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I just created an installer for my current 1.4 development version, in order to start an extensive test of the whole thing. I believe that I have finished everything that I wanted to accomplish with this version, but probably I will recognize several bugs during this test.
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Currently I am in balancing hell. Over the last releases, many new weapons have been added to LambdaRogue. In my current development version, there are 58 of them. Therefore it's time to muck out the items, by removing unnecessary weapons and by slightly adjusting the values of the remaining weapons.
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I recently mentioned that writing texts is the main thing that remains until I can release LambdaRogue 1.4. I made good progress with that thing today. It is rather satisfactory to see the world grow, simply by writing more texts and creating coherence between formerly loose parts of lore. The background story is becoming epic, and this is something I really like about the next release.
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Feelies are goodies which are not necessary for playing a game, but enrich the experience, like stickers, badges, maps etc. I think the great Legerdemain was the first roguelike which offered feelies in addition to the game itself.
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Watch more videos of Gaming
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Andrew Doull has openend a poll where everybody can vote about the roguelike of the year. If you like LambdaRogue, consider to vote for it And if you don't like it, vote for another roguelike, just to make the results as representative as possible!
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Yesterday evening I thought about a possible change for the 2.x branch of LambdaRogue, precisely of the dungeon concept. In LambdaRogue 1.x, there's the Temple overworld (counted as dungeon level 1) and the dungeon system itself (dlv 2-20). I thought how this could be changed to create a more structured world, by cutting out several parts of the current dungeon and re-creating them as seperate dungeons. Only the catacombs and sewers could then be reached directly from within the temple. The other dungeons first had to be found by the player.
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All required engine enhancements of LambdaRogue 1.4 are now finished, and the most new quests are implemented. Today I revamped the magical chants, to take into account that all spells need a certain number of turns for refreshing after a cast. This included changing the required amount of PP to cast, as well as their efficiency. I also renamed some of the spells and replaced some descriptions with better ones.
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To bridge the time gap between the last release and the upcoming 1.4 release of LambdaRogue, here's a new video. It's a trailer, thus introducing some of the new story elements.
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Besides currently 13 bug fixes, 21 balancing adjustments and 7 misc changes, the next update, i.e. LambdaRogue 1.4, will feature serious improvements both to the game itself and to the interface (the latter one mainly for the graphical SDL mode). The following list is incomplete, but shows the most important of the changes. All of them are already implemented, so it is no TODO list, but a definitive feature list:
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During the last months, Paul Pekkarinen aka Krice worked on Teemu, a roguelike originally intended to show the people that he actually can release a game instead of just half-trolling at r.g.r.d and talking about his long-term project Kaduria. At the Teemu devblog Rogue Hut Krice wrote about his progress and now it is released: Teemu 1.0. Get it here.
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As written earlier, LambdaRogue 1.4 aims for better quests, better in terms of coherence and interestingness. Achieving this goal is very time consuming, because creating one quest involves several steps, each with its own difficulties.
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During the last days, I put lots of time in LambdaRogue development, which is strange, because I have no time. O.o However, I think it is good for the game, both the interface and the content enhancements.
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Since LambdaRogue 1.0, the main quest is clear: Get, somehow, the Book of Stars, and some of you might have read or figured out how to do this. However, I think while playing for a longer time, this goal becomes blurry, i.e. one might forget about it.
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I continued with my efforts to make the UI of the graphical mode cleaner. Today I removed the big black message area which was at the bottom of the screen. Messages are now displayed directly on the bottom of the screen. As the font size stays that big, this is readable even on brighter backgrounds. Status modifications are displayed as small icons beneath the status bars in the upper left corner of the screen. Yes, this may require to look into the documentation before one plays the first time. However, this is true for many games.
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Here's another screenshot of the interface changes. Note that the visible dungeon area in big tile mode is now bigger than before, it covers nearly the whole screen - The small visible area was the biggest problem of the otherwise good-looking big tile mode.
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The UI in the SDL mode of LambdaRogue 1.4 will be changed to show less numbers (and the console mode will show less numbers, too). I was tired of all that information. The display of health, psychic points and strength is stolen from Morrowind. See the screenshot:
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If you have downloaded LambdaRogue 1.3 and are annoyed by the healthbar problem, you can download a fixed lambdarogue.exe for Windows here. Replace the lambdarogue.exe in the program folder with the lambdarogue.exe from the zip-archive. The fix also resolves the problem that healthbars for monsters northwest of the player were not shown. The hotfix will also be included in LambdaRogue 1.4, to be released in December 2008.
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Here's a short character dump from the character I played in the LambdaRogue 1.3 gameplay video.
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I just recognized a bug which occurs only when fighting against big, strong and mighty enemies: These variants of standard monsters have more HP, but their health indicator (the colored bar in SDL mode resp. their color in ASCII mode) is based on the HP of the standard monsters, therefore not showing the correct value. I don't want to release a real update just because of this small bug, but I have compiled a fixed .exe. If anyone is interested in it, just leave a note. You won't see the problem if you have deactivated the creation of monster variants in the options menu.
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After some months, there's a new video, showing an enchanter destroying a monster's hive (... one of my favourite actions in the game, because it gives so many EXP and is a real carnage ...)
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I have released an update of the LambdaRogue roguelike. Currently only Windows binaries (installer as well as zip-archive) and the source are available. The linux version will follow within the next days.
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In rec.games.roguelike.misc, rayres and corremn pointed out a major problem of LambdaRogue's way of handling melee-battle-skills.
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Since my youth (e.g. since the mid-1990s) I have several goals concerning game development, and before I die I want to realize the following things:
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I had not much time to continue development of LambdaRogue 1.3 during the last weeks. In addition to the usual work at university, there was one conference which I had to organize and one I had to attend to. Besides, I still have an interactive fiction project which is postponed since early 2008.
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Some months ago I bought an used Thinkpad T23. Really good machine, especially the keyboard. Unfortunately it is rather slow, sometimes the fan does not work properly and due to the lack of a valid Windows license, it only runs on Linux (Ubuntu 8.04).
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In my last article, I wrote that I will now concentrate a little bit on enhancing dungeon features. My current development version already contains the following features:
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During the last releases, I lost sight of the interestingness of dungeons in LambdaRogue. As of LR 1.2, there are the following specials (besides standards like various floor tiles, walls, normal and locked doors, water):
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Once again Krice has reviewed the recent LambdaRogue release. Read his comments at RogueHut.
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Update (02 Oct 2008, 09:40) I just recognized that I forgot to include all necessary .dll files in the Windows download, so the game won't start in SDL mode. I have already uploaded a new Setup file which fixes this. Sorry.
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If you follow the discussions in the roguelike world, you surely have noticed The Berlin Interpretation (B.I.), trying to name important factors of roguelikes, based on the roguetemple definition. Now Krice announces that he will answer to the B.I. with his own definition – and admits that his definition would currently exclude the original rogue from the collection of roguelikes, because rogue had no possibility to choose a character class.
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LambdaRogue 1.2 will bring a small gameplay enhancement which is standard in many roguelikes: The need for identifying items before using them the first time. So far, I either was too lazy to implement this or I had to implement more important changes first.
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Wow. Privateer: Ascii Sector. Of course I already recognized that this game exists, and I also recognized the positive reactions on it, but I never tried it. Until yesterday, when I downloaded the latest release (0.4.3 from Sep 20th 2008). And now I'm excited and addicted to it.
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Yesterday I had my short presentation at IRDC 2008. Basically I talked about my current thoughts on ASCII symbols in roguelike games. Based on Peirce's well-known categories icon, symbol and index I tried to categorize the use of ASCII in LambdaRogue's dungeon view.
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Saturday and Sunday the first International Roguelike Developers Conference will take place at Berlin, Germany, and I am looking forward to meet some other roguelike developers there, besides speaking about "Context and Meaning in character based roleplaying".
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Since the release of LambdaRogue 1.1 not really much happened concerning further development of either the 1.x branch of the game or my 2.x rewrite project. The reason is easy.
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Since some weeks I have an old, used IBM ThinkPad (T23), which will be my only computer soon. My older computer was an Amilo notebook, faster than the T23, but its keyboard is slightly broken, its damn loud (the fan nearly never stops) and sometimes it behaves strangely. Well, most of the time I was able to work with it very good, but for working purposes I need something more robust. And although this ThinkPad is even older than the Amilo, I can work better with it than before.
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Today I started to re-implement LambdaRogue from scratch. This is the first step towards a 2.0 release in a far future. I have learned a lot while developing LambdaRogue 1.x, and my main goal for a 2.0 release is to create better code: better structured and, even more important, completly object oriented. I already have set up the basic structure of the application (a window where I can press ESC to quit). I was able to use most of the 1.x source for this, and I believe that most other parts of the 1.x LambdaRogue only need a slight rewrite. The main challenge is to recognize code parts which should be recreated as objects and to determine how this could be done. Here especially player, monster and item objects will be interesting. For example, LambdaRogue 1.x has a big "MoveMonsters" function which alters the position of all monsters. LambdaRogue 2.0 instead will have a method "Move" inside the monster objects. However, LambdaRogue 1.x will also receive future updates, as develeopment of 2.0 will be slowly, slowly, slowly. It is even more an experiment than a true project. Perhaps it will not work as I think now, so I will always have a grown 1.x branch to improve on.
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Once again we have an update, and this is a rather important one, because I discovered some serious bugs, one of them hunted here. Another bug seems only to occur on Window platform, due to an uninitialized variable.
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This is a message which sometimes occurs when entering a deeper dungeon level. Unfortunately, what follows is a crash. The bug is not very predictable – it may occur or it may not, and until now, it only occured in levels deeper than 10. Until I have a patch for this, it is a good idea to save the game (as it is a roguelike, this will also quit the game) and make a backup of the savegame file before going downstairs. An inconveniant workaround, I know. I do my best to fix the bug.
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Update ... well, it seems I was not really awake when I wrote this text. The comment I mention was made by Tim. on the features entry.
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From now on, the Windows version of LambdaRogue will also be provided as executable setup file, as alternative to the zip archive. I have created and just uploaded a LambdaRogue-1.0.1-Setup.exe to SourceForge (the site seems to work again, but is still showing wrong statistics).
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Since almost 2 months there are no download statistics available for projects hosted by SourceForge, because they are doing some server migration stuff. Now even project pages are not accessible. And a few days ago they sent a mail that in some days (I think August the 18th) even more server migrations will take place. Well, it is good if you try to provide good servers and to improve overall performance of everything, but this process takes place a long long time now and I'm a little bit tired of it.
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Mainly to fix the broken NumPad in 1.0, I have released a 1.0.1 patch. Note that you NOW have to switch NumLock ON in order to make the NumPad work!
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Update: I managed to rip and edit some tiles from existing tilesets (mainly the Itakura Nethack tileset and the Gervais Angband tileset). Here is a screenshot. I will offer this as optional download for those who won't play ASCII games at all.
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In Rogue Hut, Krice wrote again about LambdaRogue. Besides other things, he writes about a strangely non-working NumPad:
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Once again I forgot to comment out the cheating options from the source before releasing the game ... So pressing Shift + B (i.e. B) will bring up the "cheat prompt" where you could enter certain commands if you knew them The key is hardcoded, so please do not use Shift + B for other commands.
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Over two years have passed since I started to develop a small little program where an @ could be moved on the screen. After lots of unfinished versions with lots of bugs and problems, and after a break of nearly one year, I again accelerated the development process, which resulted in the 0.3 tree in early 2008.
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While I have successfully redesigned the questlog of LambdaRogue, I still have not released 1.0. There are 2 reasons.
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Later this evening I will finally release LambdaRogue 1.0; two days later than planned, but with more bugs fixed. One thing that I really have to improve before the release is the questlog. At the moment, it is simply a list with all quests. But this list does not fit on the screen anymore, because of the high number of quests. So I have to find a way to make it scrollable. Once this works as intended, I will create the .tar.gz- and .zip-archives and upload the whole thing.
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Another great roguelike is certainly Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which recently has been released as version 0.4. Yesterday I played it for the first time and was immediatly impressed, especially by the great graphical version.
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It seems that I am infected by the "use oversized IDEs for developing small projects" virus. Today I installed the FreePascal IDE Lazarus and am now using it to develop LambdaRogue.
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Another useful function of my LambdaRogue Editor (see yesterday's post) is the Monster Balancing Test. It allows me to see effects of monster changes in relation to different player stats without playing the whole game everytime. The test is simple:
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A very helpful tool to create quests and monsters during LambdaRogue development is the LambdaRogue Editor (LRE), a small Linux program written in Gambas (some kind of Visual Basic-like language for QT and GTK+). I have updated this editor to handle the latest developments in LambdaRogue and to offer some new tools for me.
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Only 6 days are left (from the creation date of this blog entry on) until the release of LambdaRogue 1.0 ... As I wrote some days ago, I finally want to have a version of LambdaRogue which can be considered stable and more or less complete (although, of course, roguelikes are never complete and I will continue to add features and fix issues after 1.0). On July the 20th, the game is 2 years old, therefore this will be the glory day. I will update this blog entry regularly with DONE- and TODO-lists.
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The soundtrack contest for roguelike games, initiated by Jice and Mingos, has now entered the voting phase. You can hear all eight contributed songs at the contest's weblog. Vote and add your comments!
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Nearly two years ago I made a posting on rec.games.roguelike.developing, announcing my work on LambdaRogue. The game was a primitive thing, the dungeon generator most buggy and not producing any good, and it had no clear concept, but as you can see, it still exists.
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Currently I feel (again) a bit uncontent with the wilderness in LambdaRogue. It looks good, but is very unstructured. I use puzzle tiles to create the levels in LambdaRogue, and this works great for dungeons and caves; the more puzzle tiles I have, the more interesting the levels. But for wilderness it's not enough and I think a need a second layer above the puzzle tiles to give structure to the wilderness - and make it, while still being randomly created, not to look arbitrary, but instead to provide certain fixed spots (like positions of the dungeon entrance, positions of NPCs etc.)
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Once again I changed the template of this website. This is the way I wanted to look the website since months, with a big big picture above, colorful and strange. Yesterday I found the time to create the picture, again using the various stock photos which make also the most artwork of LambdaRogue itself. I have added a credits page on this website with links to the artists who permitted me to use their work.
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LambdaRogue and this website uses several stock pictures found on deviantART. From most of the artists I got the explict permission to use the photos in this project, but some of them did not answer to my request. So if you see your works used here or in the game and want me to remove it, please leave a note here or at my deviantART-Account.
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I have removed this entry due to many outdated videos.
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LambdaRogue's feature set, esp. the number of different monsters and items, is rather small compared to many other roguelike games. However, all features are chosen in a "less is more" manner by me with clear concepts in mind.
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I just have seen some of the recently released trailers for Diablo III, and I really want to play that thing some day. Unfortunately, as my computer is old and slow, it won't work. It is a shame... *sigh*
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One of the roguelikes I really like is Frozen Depths by Mikko »Glowie« Karttunen. The most distinct feature of Frozen Depths is its temperature feature: there's always the danger of freezing to death if you do not keep warm by wearing clothes, but may also suffer fever if getting ill.
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I just saw that Paul "Krice" Pekkarinen, developer of Kaduria, has set up a blog on a smaller new roguelike project called Teemu. In this blog, he also wrote an entry about LambdaRogue. And, I am really shocked, it is not entirely negative. But of course, the reason why he mentions the game at all is mainly criticism.
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Although I'm not Thomas Biskup (the developer of Adom), who introduced the concept of »postcardware« into roguelike development, I love to receive handwritten mail, too.
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I managed to upload an updated version (some tracks changed, addes two new titltes) of the game's soundtrack to SourceForge. Due to message the windows version of mpg123 shows when playing some of the tracks I stripped all ID3-tags from the files.
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I discovered two small bugs which are by no means critical, but nevertheless you should know:
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So, after I wrote only four little lines about the new release of LambdaRogue, I will now edit this blog entry to provide a little more information. First of all, you might have noticed it already, I released the next major update on LambdaRogue, we are now at 0.3.1, which polishes many things, improves the look (both in console and SDL mode) and offers many new features which should make gameplay more interesting.
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I made some changes to wilderness generation. In particular, they are:
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Most of the changes and additions I wanted to implement in 0.3.1 are finished, but there are still some things to do. Currently I'm writing several short texts (stories, somehow) which can be read ingame by buying or finding several scrolls. These stories give many information on the history of the game's world and especially on the role of the god s in some of the events which lead to the situation the game starts in.
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While testing 0.3.1, I discovered a small bug in monster data file. Two unique monsters, the "weapon smith" (inhabiting LambdaRogue since the earliest versions) and the new unique "lonely librarian" accidently had the same dungeonlevel number.
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Once again, I've created a small trailer for the next release, showing some new features. Enjoy.
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The last few days I wasn't able to do anything on LambdaRogue, mainly because of much work to do at university, but also because it was nice to come back to some other things in my freetime. I finally tuned my Mandola and it is fun to play with that thing.
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I implemented a new effect today, force. It is available as spell with the same name and as potion called "Dust". I can't say why, but I have fun using it.
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I've finished the graphical changes for SDL mode, except perhaps the brightness of newly introduced tiles. This I'll have to check before 0.3.1 will be released. Besides this issue, the adjustments for doubled tile size are complete and I will now concentrate on gameplay additions.
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I thought it is a good idea to show a screenshot of the current development to LambdaRogue 0.3.1, so here it is;
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As mentioned before, I doubled the size of graphical tiles for the next LambdaRogue release. While this can improve the overall look of the game, it causes some problems.
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I really have to mention more often how configurable the game is. The mouse support I just implemented in version 0.3.0.2 can be switched off, of course. So if you prefer playing only with your keyboard and are annoyed by the mouse "dependance", esp. in menus, you can change this the follwing way:
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For the next major update to LambdaRogue, 0.3.1, I doubled the size of graphical tiles in SDL mode. There had been some complaints about the small 10*20 size of current versions, so it will be 20*40 for next releases.
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Once again an update, even minor than the last one: I released a patch that will bring your LambdaRogue 0.3.0.3 installation to 0.3.0.4 and fix mainly two bugs.
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Since several releases, LambdaRogue has the ability to play music while active. However, no official soundtrack was available until today, although since release 0.3.0.1, a selection of very nice and well fitting tracks (totally free and free to give away) had been created. Finally I had the time to upload this rather big package to SourceForge. Get the soundtrack here:
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Ah, how nice: Santiago Zapata a.k.a. Slash has mentioned LambdaRogue 0.3.0.2 at Temple of the Roguelike. He writes:
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I released a minor update to LambdaRogue. This update is available as binary for Windows and Linux. Source code is available, too.
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Since yesterday's release of version 0.3.0.2 of LambdaRogue, the game itself could be considered as nearly finished. All necessary quests are implemented, all textual content (except one textfile) is written and the game is winnable (technical and balancing-wise). So besides optimizing the existing content, fixing possible bugs and delivering the missing textfile, I could stop the whole thing and call it 1.0.
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[UPDATE on 21.05.2008, 21:56: If the game still crashes on startup of the Windows version, please download this replacement for fprl.exe, extract it to your LambdaRogue directory, start the game from a console window and send me the (now more detailed) output (or post it as comment to this blog entry). This might help to fix the bug.]
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As promised an a comment on the first trailer, here's a second one.
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I just uploaded a trailer for the next LambdaRogue release to GoogleVideo. The video shows the SDL version, with the mouse interface, lots of new artwork and parts of the soundtrack (which consists of tracks entirely licensed as Creative Commons).
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Today I optimized the mouse interface to allow movement along different distances.
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I just tried the last development version of LambdaRogue using Windows XP - and I am really shocked how fast the whole thing is. I wonder why the same program, compiled with the same version of FreePascal, is so slow under Linux.
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Here's a screenshot from the optional mouse interface which will be implemented in upcoming 0.3.0.2 update:
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The next update, to be released in a few days, will bring some changes to interface.
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As the r.g.r.d-thread on LambdaRogue 0.3 grows larger and larger, I will keep track of issues posted there concerning the handling and the gameplay of LambdaRogue in this blog entry, with the newest at the beginning.
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The first update to the 0.3 branch has just been released.
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The reactions on rec.games.roguelike.development on LambdaRogue 0.3 showed me that 1) the further development of the game seems to be appreciated; 2) that there are small details which heaten discussion; 3) that the game still has some nasty bugs.
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1.5 previewA comparison of the same scene in different view modes
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Recommended downloads for the current 1.5 releaseThe installer is the easiest way to get a full LambdaRogue package on your Windows PC. The .tar.gz-archive includes a binary for Linux users.
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It seems I was too optimistic concerning the release of LR 0.3 - I worked on polishing it hours and hours, but yesterday evening, between 22:30 and 23:00, I was too tired to go on. There are so many small things to optimize, and after optimizing it, there come alternate ideas in my mind which are not difficult to implement, but delay everything.
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Before packing the actual download files, I will just show a screenshot of the most current version:
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Men and the species of Drekh'nar once lived peaceful together on Earth, both not far away from reaching the stars with spaceships. Sadly, a misunderstanding led to war before these dreams could be realized. However, after a long and bloody battle, a peace treaty was created. This treaty forced mankind to go underground, while the Drekh'nar could stay on the surface of Earth.
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More than one year has passed since the last update on LambdaRogue was given on this website. Now, since the next major release in the development of this roguelike role playing game is near, I took the time to set up a blog for it. So after the announce of the Kharne-blog and after Krice's blog on Kaduria, it's the next roguelike development blog within a few days.
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