Dungeondweller Development Diary Archive

July 31 2001

I made a radical change to the design of the webpage today. I think it looks much better now and I hope that the colours will make the text more readable. The old black and white design started to get on my nerves...

July 28 2001

I have finished the encumbrance system today. It required some changes to the inventory and equipment classes, but everything runs smoothly now. I have also added a timemodifier when performing physical actions. A creatures physical condition along with its encumbrance affects the time it takes to execute an action.

July 21 2001

One more article added today. I have an almost complete set of articles now. I have also been working on adding encumbrance to Dungeondweller. It's easy to add, but I'm not sure where the weight limit should be set between unhinderd movement and a decrease in speed. Perhaps at 20 kg for a human with normal strength?

July 17 2001

I've been adding articles to the development section these last couple of days. I got permission from almost all the authors now. The rest should be up in a day or two...

July 14 2001

I have worked on the homepage the last two days. Roguelike News is dying and I'm trying to salvage the treasures buried within :-) I have mailed to all of the development article authors and asked for their permission to publish their articles here. The articles can be found in the roguelike development section along with links of interest.

July 11 2001

The movement and attackcode for the AI is almost finished. The monsters move around in the dungeon without any trouble and they form groups and attack and retreat. I will leave the AI for now and I have started work on the wear and tear of objects. Weapon and armour get damaged in combat and their effectivness gets reduced. This means that version 0.3 of Dungeondweller is finished!

July 9 2001

I have thrown out the old monster movement code and replaced it with a smaller, cleaner and faster version. The old version navigated the NPCs using waypoints marked on the map. This works well in areas where waypoints are easy to set (at the entrance to a room or at a corridor junction) but in large caves or out in the open it wont.

July 7 2001

Not much work has been done. It is too hot! The temperature is above 30 degrees Celsius and just to think makes me swet! I've been working on the AI and made the changes proposed by Hansjörg. It looks good and I think version 0.3 will be released soon!

June 28 2001

The changes to my generic doublelinked list are finished and the result looks nice, but again this is nothing that is visible to anyone except me... The next step is to implement the AI rules suggested by Hansjörg Malthaner at rec.games.roguelike.development.

June 27 2001

My updates to the webpage aren't as frequent as I'd wish, but the nice weather and some holidays have stopped me from working on Dungeondweller as much as I'd like. The game has undergone som "under the hood" changes. Up until now I used a C++ class called ENTITY to represent both objects and monsters. As the size of the code increased it got clear to me that it would be better to have one classed called OBJECT for objects and one class called ACTOR for monsters and the player. Both the ACTOR and OBJECT class are subclasses of the ENTITY class. This makes more sense and makes the code much nicer. I'm also working on some changes to my generic double linked list which is used throughout the game. This will take some time, but it will result in a more object oriented code. None of the above changes will affect the gameplay, but I believe that the changes are necessary in order to take the game to version 1.0 :-) I have added a link to my version increment plan and to the very brief game documentation. Version 0.2 was reached some days ago. You now have hunger and thirst, natural healing of wounds and the ability to eat food to satisfy your hunger. The ability to drink will not be added until I have implemented container objects properly (ie. flasks, chests etc.). See the version increment plan to get an idea of when this will be done.

June 15 2001

Added nightvision as a flag (FLAG_NIGHTVISION). Cleaned up the LOS code and made it smaller. The game crashed when the LOS code was used on squares at the edge of the MAP, but this is also fixed now.

June 13 2001

Changed the combat code so that it automatically chooses the best weapon to parry with. Up until now the secondary weapon was always choosen. This heaviliy reduced the chance of successfully parrying an attack since a torch is often wielded as a secondary weapon.

June 12 2001

I have made some more code cleanups today. It is a well known fact that the first solution or design for a problem isn't the best, and that is definately true when it comes to this project. I have rewritten and restructured parts of the code several times and the result is getting better every time. The object oriented thinking and design is very important and a person working on a large project will run into trouble if he or she doesn't understand this...

I have added the effects HUNGER,THIRST and HEALING that all living creatures should have. The effects are used to simulate a living organisms natural healing process and needs. Other effects such as BLOODTHIRST and similar could be interesting for the future...

June 7 2001

Made some changes so that the player can control more than one PC, hireling or similar. Added a new material called IMMATERIAL. Objects that are immaterial can only be damaged by magic and can pass through walls. Made a ghost to test it and it works fine. The ghost is a bit difficult to kill since weapons that do MAGIC damage haven't been added yet ;-) (But if someone would like to try it just create a weapon and add MAGIC to it's damagelist...) Magic items and weapons will be created using templates later on. The objects in object.txt are the basic items that exists in the gameworld. When an item is generated it is modified using one or more templates. The templates will give items new powers (of Slaying, Demonbane, Dragonbane, of Shadows etc) and change it's statistics somewhat (rusty, master crafted etc). All of this will probably be added in version 0.8, all according to my version increment plan.