so! err, hey guys! been a while since i poasted here. I’ve been mad busy with clbum-related ****.

To be honest, I haven’t done that much. One thing I did is upgrade the message system. Before it was only capable of handling and displaying one message at a time, but now there’s a queue of messages. When the call is made to display them, it displays them on multiple lines if necessary, waiting for a keypress to go on to the next batch. Pretty standard stuff.

Another thing: On a whim, I tried to make my character’s vision range very high to see what would happen. Predictably, it ****ed everything up horrendously. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on there (with some help from sancdar, thanks!) and I finally got it patched up. There are still occasional bouts of weirdness if the range is very high in very specific situations with hallways and stuff, but I decided that the occurences of that happening were low enough and the problem was discrete enough that it’s not a priority issue anymore. Also I made the vision work on a radial basis rather than incremental basis, so the range of vision around a player is a more aesthetically pleasing rounded shape than the diamond it was before.

I’m still torn about whether or not to attempt the scripting system. It’s going to be very tough. I might still try to implement it in a limited way. Regardless, right now I’m brushing up on my I/O skills which are pretty rusty, because whether or not I make a script I still want to move all the basic data to external files. Also i’m going to be putting in a pre-set palette pretty soon so I don’t have to deal with the actual RGB values of color anymore.

To make up for my long silence, here are some tidbits:

Religion – In many roguelikes that feature a deity system, religion is simply a ‘get-out-of-tricky-situation-free’ card. You sacrifice enough to gain favor, and then call on your god to help you out if you’re in a fix.

I have in mind something a little more complex than that, which is fitting because overall plot I have in mind is very deity centric. I’m not going with the whole lawful vs. chaos thing, It’s going to be more of a POWDER type pantheon. One of the choices you’re going to make at the beginning will be which god (if applicable) you choose to align yourself with. Each one will have their own rules of conduct and advantages/disadvantages, and overall will have very different characters.

The way I envision things developing is that at the beginning it will be nigh impossible to get any bumistance from your god. After all, to him/her, you’re just one of millions of followers, why would they stir themselves to help you? As the character grows and becomes stronger and more reknown, your god will be more likely to notice you, and will have more of a reason to keep you alive. At the same time, opposing forces will be more likely to try to interfere. (Again though, things will be different depending on the character of the particular god. An extremely benign, merciful one may lend a hand even to a nobody.)

Of course, this model will only work well in a game that is not overly difficult at first, but considerably ramps up in difficulty as it progresses. More like DoomRL, and less like ADOM where the beginning of the game is very difficult for several clbumes.

Item tiers – I plan for items to be placed based on a tier system. I’ve chosen 7 tiers arbitrarily, but I think it works well. Basically, the more powerful the item is (not necessarily the more beneficial), the higher a tier it is placed on. Things like potions of healing and confusion will be tier 1 items, but those of polymorph will be much higher, say 5. Tiers 6 and 7 will be reserved for artifact items, that is, unique items that can only appear once in a game. 6 will be for less powerful artifacts, and 7 will be some of the most sought-after items in the game. Of course, there will have to be one additional tier for items that can never be placed randomly, such as a special quest reward.

When a new level is randomly populated with items, It will do so according to a set of probabilities. Beginner levels will have the probabilities heavily weighted towards the lower tiers – something like

[80%, 60%, 30%, 20%, 5%, 1%, 0%]

When an item is placed, first it will check the first tier. If that 80% chance doesn’t work, it’ll next try the second one. If that one fails, it’ll try the third, etc. etc. If it reaches the end no item will be placed.

Further on in the game, the probabilities will be weighted differently. It’ll be lower the start, higher in the middle, and then lower again at the end (but perhaps not as low).

This system allows for very good luck in the beginning, since it is remotely possible (though very unlikely) for a new character to get a great item at the beginning, and in the middle of the game it will still be very possible to get hit with low-level items, though mid-range and higher ones will be much more accessible.