Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[getter77]

http://lambdarogue.net/   Spiffy new site with nifty bits as mentioned below incoming

Win/Lion/Linux downloads available, as well as general Source.

Finally, I'm able to release the next significant update for LambdaRogue: LR 1.6.1 "The Morning Star Conspiracy":

    -More Gameplay: Besides a more clever AI, rebalanced magic, and numerous small additions, bug fixes and tweaks, the update introduces a significantly enhanced profession and religion system, with unique powers depending on profession rank.
    -New Graphics: Amazing Brasilian artist Cecilia Favo de Mel created an exclusive new tileset, new effect icons, new GUI elements, and new character portraits. Enjoy a breath of fresh visual air blowing through LambdaRogue's dungeons.
    -New Questline: Ever wondered why Thanan betrayed the Temple of Enoa? Ever wanted to know what the real story behind the Crystal of Redemption is? And ever asked yourself which role Eris really plays in the ongoing events? The Morning Star Conspiracy has all the answers.

Within the next days, the website will be updated with new screenshots, the new quickstart guide, and a complete spoilers file (guidebook) in full-color PDF format -- but the game itself can be enjoyed today!

Full changelog: http://lambdarogue.net/downloads/lambdarogue_changelog.txt  The full, rather enormous, changelog.


Right then folks, this is the largest update I've yet to behold for this project since it got well under way quite awhile ago---the dev has big plans for it for 2012, after being spurred in part by the fantastic overall development of ToME 4, but much of those plans hinge on getting some players into the mix, new and former that might've stepped back for a bit since it has been awhile since last release, to contribute their feedback, good thoughts, and so forth.   The plan at this stage as I understand it, based on feedback, is to smash forward on the next releases between here and March'ish 2012 as that timeframe lends itself well to his development prowess---which means feedback is likely to get timely results.   

For those not familiar with it, it is a free, single-player, story driven Roguelike---not a common thing in this space.   Also, it is sporting .ogg music alongside the freshly upgraded graphical, and classic ASCII display---looking at about a 122MB download package and NO obtuse install nonsense required.

This is pretty approachable stuff here, yet meaty as it does, so I'd hope the fine folks here can make some time to give this new version a spin and spur it in a good direction as the community has done for so many other projects in these parts, Roguelike and otherwise.   

[ChairmanPoo]

Might as well give it a try. I wanted to play something (besides Doom, DF, AZS, and Cataclysm, my four-currently-favored games).

(Ok, TBH I wanted to install tome4, but I'm getting alsa errors upon trying to run it. But I had good experiences with Lambda in the past)

Well, it seems the big roguelikes are angry with me for some reason

An unhandled exception occurred at $080AA36D :
                                              ERangeError : Range check error
                                                                               $080AA36D  TEXTOUT,  line 25 of vidutil.pas
                                            $080FABF5  CHARXY,  line 1057 of BaseOutput.pas
             $080FACD3  TEXTXY,  line 1071 of BaseOutput.pas
                                                              $080FA194  CLEARSCREENSDL,  line 347 of BaseOutput.pas
                                      $0805F99D  TITLESCREEN,  line 3596 of fprl.pas
      $08083DF1  main,  line 10821 of fprl.pas
                                                $B7378E46

                                                         STATUS INFO : @ 15:22:28 MSG : Terminating Application IN : Finalization

[getter77]

Hmm, ya might want to shoot the dev an email with your specs and such as that could be handy to know alongside the error message.  He spent awhile playtesting it all himself, but these things happen.

[mariodonick]

Might as well give it a try. I wanted to play something (besides Doom, DF, AZS, and Cataclysm, my four-currently-favored games).

(Ok, TBH I wanted to install tome4, but I'm getting alsa errors upon trying to run it. But I had good experiences with Lambda in the past)

Well, it seems the big roguelikes are angry with me for some reason

An unhandled exception occurred at $080AA36D :
                                              ERangeError : Range check error
                                                                               $080AA36D  TEXTOUT,  line 25 of vidutil.pas
                                            $080FABF5  CHARXY,  line 1057 of BaseOutput.pas
             $080FACD3  TEXTXY,  line 1071 of BaseOutput.pas
                                                              $080FA194  CLEARSCREENSDL,  line 347 of BaseOutput.pas
                                      $0805F99D  TITLESCREEN,  line 3596 of fprl.pas
      $08083DF1  main,  line 10821 of fprl.pas
                                                $B7378E46

                                                         STATUS INFO : @ 15:22:28 MSG : Terminating Application IN : Finalization

Sorry for the inconvenience.

The line numbers look as if you're trying to run the game in text mode in a terminal window, but this terminal windows seems to have size of 80x24. Try to resize it to 80x25 and tell me if the crash still happens.

If the crash happens in graphics mode, I need some more information -- like OS and version.

Also, if on Linux, make sure you have SDL, SDL_Image, and SDL_Mixer installed.

[Girlinhat]

Cataclysm has a humorous check for terminal size.  If you're playing on default 80x24 it says something along the lines of "whoa whoa whoa, hold up there and resize your window to continue!"  It's much preferred over crashing, and being open-source the solution should be visible, but I believe it's done using some type of ncurses ability to check row and column number?

[mariodonick]

Cataclysm has a humorous check for terminal size.  If you're playing on default 80x24 it says something along the lines of "whoa whoa whoa, hold up there and resize your window to continue!"  It's much preferred over crashing, and being open-source the solution should be visible, but I believe it's done using some type of ncurses ability to check row and column number?

Yeah. I planned to add a message regarding terminal size long ago, but somehow I forgot it -- I already started to work on 1.6.2, and this one will include such a message. I'm really sorry.

[mariodonick]

For those of you recognizing any issues, I have set up the issue tracker to show what will be done in the next update 1.6.2, to be released in January 2012:

http://code.google.com/p/lambdarogue/issues/list?can=2&q=label:plannedfor%20label:1.6.2&sort=priority&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Priority%20Summary%20PlannedFor

Mario

[Rex_Nex]

Can you tell me a little more about the game in general? What, as a potential player, would drive me to play your roguelike instead of another?

[mariodonick]

Can you tell me a little more about the game in general? What, as a potential player, would drive me to play your roguelike instead of another?

Interesting question and hopefully partly answered at the website. I also can't say what YOU would make you play it. I can only tell you what I was missing in other roguelikes that made me create my own. Maybe it's valid for you, too.

* Story. Most roguelikes, except the great Legerdemain, don't have a detailed background, history or even story. Which is understandable, as this can damage replay value, or decrease the abstract feeling of some roguelikes. When I started with LR, I knew no other roguelikes with a rather detailed setting, so I started out. I still add details to the game world's history in each release, while trying to not overwhelm more purist roguelike players with too much text.

* Accessability. In 2009, I started to change the GUI of the game to an MMORPG inspired style. Back then it was the first roguelike that did this and it was received well especially by players new to roguelikes. Nowadays, many other roguelikes are very accessable, too, e.g. ToME 4 or Dungeons of Dredmor.

* Less is more approach. I never had the plan to have zillions of features in the game, because it is very hard to put this in a coherent setting, and to balance it. Thus, I think very long before I decide to add features, even they are perceived as standard in other roguelikes. This also adds to accessability. My goal is to be somewhere in between the big, really complex games, and coffeebreak roguelikes.


So, world background / story, and accessability are for me the main reasons I developed the game. Consequently, not the hardcore roguelike players play LambdaRogue, but players who like the lighter approach and the story things.

[Frumple]

Any suggestions from folks that play this on starting off? My last two characters both died to (I guess) odd status effects I couldn't seem to do anything about -- in the earlier case, his/her strength started dropping for no dicernable reason, leading me to eventually be unable to even lift a fairydagger to defend myself. In the last one, the character apparently got addicted to (vitale? Something like that) asprin on the first level of the dungeon, leading to me losing all my HP, PP, and asprin trying to stave off the HP/PP degen long enough to find something to cure it.

Craving particularly seems really bloody nasty to get hit with without any warning. Doesn't seem to be a 'rest until healed' option, so my melee folks have been leaning hard of the pills. Some way to check level of hunger would also be really ruddy nice.

SDL (graphics) mode seems to make it rather hard to see what the blazes is screwing with you, too. I never did figure out what was causing me to get steadily weaker, because I didn't figure out the 'contextual help' thing until I switched over to ASCII (and was actually able to tell I was under something debilitating).

[mariodonick]

Strength drops if a character is hungry, which should be indicated by an icon (and tooltip) or in text mode by a text hint. Each weapon has a min. strength requirement to be carried. Usually, strength is 100%. Maybe you also tried to kill an enemy which is able to drain your strength. When you have less than 100% without being hungry, strength regenerates automatically.

Craving is the effect when you really need a dose of Vitari. This is a strength drug, being able to push your strength up to unusual 200%, making melee attacks much stronger. This only occurs when you used Vitari earlier. You can be healed from your addiction by making a withdrawal treatment in hospital, or you can try to pray.

[Frumple]

... in the first case, unless the horses were draining my strength, nothing was. I may have been hungry for a bit, but fixed that via, well, food. Strength kept decreasing despite no icon, no indication of what was happening. Just walking around and, suddenly, no dagger. Had lost the lance even earlier. SDL doesn't seem to have a strength indicator, or if it does, I couldn't find it

As for vitari, I didn't have access to it, unless it came from a well. If it was well caused, well, that's pretty ruddy nasty to effectively get the kiss of death from a one-off event. Perhaps require at least two doses of this stuff before craving kicks in? The character in question had jumped straight to the dungeon at start; died before I even found the stairs out, due to craving.

[mariodonick]

... in the first case, unless the horses were draining my strength, nothing was. I may have been hungry for a bit, but fixed that via, well, food. Strength kept decreasing despite no icon, no indication of what was happening. Just walking around and, suddenly, no dagger. Had lost the lance even earlier. SDL doesn't seem to have a strength indicator, or if it does, I couldn't find it

As for vitari, I didn't have access to it, unless it came from a well. If it was well caused, well, that's pretty ruddy nasty to effectively get the kiss of death from a one-off event. Perhaps require at least two doses of this stuff before craving kicks in? The character in question had jumped straight to the dungeon at start; died before I even found the stairs out, due to craving.

Very interesting and NEVER happened to me before since I introduced strength several years ago. I really can only think of monsters, but these are very rare. Perhaps you could try a character with similar stats again and tell me what happens?

In SDL, the green bar beneath HP and PP is showing strength. It's also labeled as STR And you can always hover over the status area to get a status tooltip where everything (all statuses with text description) is shown.

Yeah, seems like drinking from a well. And that's the way wells work: It's always a risk using them, but can safe your life very often.

[Rex_Nex]

This is actually quite nice. Its a great break from usual roguelikes... the focus on a (good) story and the lack of 10000 keybindings makes it quite easy to get into.

However... quarrels:

1. I couldnt find a config.txt or similar, and I couldn't see a way to open the options menu before starting a new character. This forced me to watch the opening sequence in a odd resolution. I fixed the resolution and everything once I got into the game, but it would be nice to have a way to do that beforehand, so it doesn't distract from the opening.

2. I think it would look better and make more sense to have the beginning temple/town area mapped out for you. I mean, you've lived there all your life, you would think your character would know his way around. Plus its helpful for newbies to be able to see everything in the beginning of the game.

3. I dont know where else "4" plays, but I personally really dislike that track in the temple. The sound effects are a bit overdone; they happen too frequently and the sound effects in general dont all fit into something you would expect to hear in an underground city/temple place. Some odd spaceship sounds, rattling etc.

That is all; in general its looking good so far!

[mariodonick]

Thank you To respond to your issues:

1. The config file is "lambdarogue.cfg" and can be edited with any ASCII text editor. In 1.6.2, the options menu will be available from the title screen, though.

2. *lol* In version previous to 1.6.1, the temple level was known already -- I changed it to make everything more consistent. Probably a bad decision? *g* I think I make it a gameplay option.

3. Like the tileset was prior to 1.6.1, the soundtrack is also a mixture of free (creative commons) tracks which fit the intended mood of the game. These tracks have partly an industrial style. If I had enough money for paying somebody for a new soundtrack, like I did for 1.6.1 with the graphics, we'll do tracks which fit to the theme of the dungeon level, i.e. outskirts will have something wilderness-like, temple something peaceful, boss fights will have something more dramatic, etc.