Progress

• Added a landslide "trap".
  
• The wind bridge mechanism now delays two turns before rotating, giving the player time to get his party to safety if he's paying attention.
  
• Added a risky but necessary kernel change to fix the lingering LOS bug. This bug was caused by a leftover map view from the previous session, which I was neglecting to clean up (and feeling guilty about it, but not guilty enough to try and fix it for this release, until now). No doubt this change will reveal a horde of bugs due to improper teardown in various situations.
  

Pre-release mayhem has begun

Kris has kept me hopping with fixes and enhancements to the new quest dungeons, enhancements related to chest and door traps, chasms, and some new monster types. Hopefully the stream will diminish soon, I can catch up, and then start a fresh game with the goal of making it through before the release date.

At the last minute I decided to pull diagonal movement. Too many maps have been built that assume straight north-south-east-west movement. We have some ideas to put it back for the next release with some changes to accomodate the older maps; I just didn't think we had time to settle on something for this release.

I'm already thinking about the next release, and can't wait to get started. I think I'll devote the first month to code maintenance, there are some hairy spots that could use some cleaning up. Then maybe a few weeks on really interesting or feature suggestions (loot drops for sure, probably diag movement).

Then comes the interesting part. I want to devote the entire release effort to automatic dungeon generation. In fact, depending on how it goes, I want to push on automatic "interesting" NPC generation. If we can get something decent there then I think town generation will fall right out, and world generation should not be too hard. But that's a big "if". I have yet to meet an automatically-generated scripted NPC that was at all interesting. I'd rather have a few really interesting NPC's (like Ultima 5-7) then thousands of boring ones (like the early Elder Scrolls efforts, which were so dull I haven't bothered with their later ones).

Blog is back

I've decided to give Blogger another shot so I'm back here to see how it goes. I'll work around the browser compatibility issue as best I can.

I thought I'd start with a follow-up to my "It's just what I asked for, but not what I wanted" post below. I'm happy to report that a spate of new hi-res sprites which make use of the alpha channel will appear in the next release. In less happy news, I did not come up with a paper-doll sprite system that I am satisfied with and have postponed that for a while. Meanwhile, kaypy has come up with a reasonably efficient way to create layered sprites in Gimp. These don't change at runtime, but it is possible to make a wide variety of sprites with minor differences. Maybe I'll post a little HOWTO hear in the future as a blog topic.

In other news, the next release is planned for December 22, so if you don't get that PS3 perhaps this will be some consolation and give you something to do over Christmas break. Among other things this release will contain a new quest aimed at the early game.