Dungeondweller Development Diary Archive

May 26 2001

I got lots of input from David Mauser about the first release of the game and I've been working on some of the things that need to be improved. From now on you will always get a message when you pick up an object. Locked doors are rarer now. Poisondamage is displayed with the correct debug output now. The gamewindow is updated when you move it or change its focus. A versionplan will be uploaded to the page soon. I have set some goals for the game's progress up until version 1.0. I found that it is much easier to work against a set of goals for each version rather than just adding stuff in a non orderly fashion.

May 20 2001

I forgot to update the .txt files when uploading the last version which resulted in a major lockup of the game. I am terribly sorry for that and I wish to thank Darren Hebden of the Roguelike News and David Mauser for making me aware of this. Thanks guys!

May 19 2001

Made some changes to the dungeon generation today. I added doors to the objects.txt file instead of creating them in the code.

May 18 2001

More work done OOing the code. The code is looking much better now, but there are still more things to do. Added states (OPEN, LOCKED, DESTROYED, IDENTIFIED etc) to all entities (monsters and objects) in the game. A destroyed object becomes passable now, which means that you can move over a slain enemy. Next thing to do is the loot command where you can pickup a dead creatures inventory and equipment. I also fixed a bug in the display of an objects damagelevel (I forgot to take negative damagepoints into consideration).

May 17 2001

Made the code more OO. Also added coins as starting inventory and added doors to the objects.txt instead of creating them in the code.

May 15 2001

I have rewritten the LOS code and it works perfectly now. Now annoying glitches or anything. There are some easy optimizations left, but I'm going to leave it for now.

May 5 2001

I have rewritten the text and graphics IO and made it OO friendly. I made a class called BASICIO which works in the same way as the cout and cin objects. This is ofcourse only "under the hood" improvements, but the code looks much better now. All of the code will eventually be completely objectoriented, but it will take a while longer than I anticipated.

April 27 2001

My computer couldn't find one of the harddisks this morning... April 26 is the activationdate of the infamous CIH (also known as Chernobyl) virus! Man, was I scared or was I scared! Luckily it was a false alarm and I got the computer up and running again. The first thing I did was to install Norton Antivirus 2001! I keep backups of my work ofcourse, but its always tedious to restore everything.

April 20-26 2001

I'm taking a course in object oriented programming at school, and it got me thinking about the overall design of Dungeondweller. Until now the game has been a combination of OO and non-OO code and it doesn't look good. I have decided to make the game completely object oriented, and the work start right now!

April 19 2001

The line of sight code is a bit buggy so after reading some posts to the r.g.r.d newsgroup about efficient LOS I decided to try to fix it. I failed to fix it and decided to post it to see if someone can help me. The day wasn't a complete failure after all. I cleaned up the object and monstergeneration and continued my work with the effectsystem. I coded the lighteffect today so from now on monsters and objects can emit light when wielded or worn or when operating on their own.

April 18 2001

Added unarmed attacks and defence to the combatsystem and reduced the damagebonus based on the attackeffect.

Added attacknaming. Every weaponattack and natural attack must be given a name in the .txt files. The attackname is shown in the messages sent when attacking or being attacked. The attackname is the first entry after the <ATTACK> tag.

Added the damagetypes poison and acid.

The effectsystem is working now, altough I have some minor code cleanups to do. The only effect implemented yet is the poisoneffect. To add more effects are really easy and I think I should have a whole bunch up and running very soon. I'm pleased with the way the game is progressing...

April 14 2001

Not much done today actually. I started working on the effectsystem today. Effects are permanent or temporary and can be anything from poison, invulnerability, bleeding wounds and so on. Effects are linked to attacks and when an attack damages an entity the effects will be dealt to the entity. For instance a poisonuos snakebite or a cut from a weapon. Objects and monsters can also have effects that are active all the time. A dragon causes fear when seen, a lightsource lights up an area and so on.

I've also added the possibility to stop monsters from performing certain actions. For instance preventing a snake from picking up, wearing or wielding objects. This is the <ACTORACTION> tag in the monster.txt and object.txt files.

April 10 2001

I have announced the presence of Dungeondweller at Roguelike News.

April 8 2001

The game is made public via the r.g.r.d newsgroup.

March 25 2001

The homepage is created and a first version is released.

Last update: January 07, 2008. 17:35:20 pm © Björn Bergström 2000-2002