Dungeondweller Development Diary Archive

November 27 2001

My school projects will soon be finished, giving me more time to work on the game. The bodypart system is working (but not finished) now. The bodyparts are stored in a generic m-way unbalanced tree, which will be used later on for skilltrees too. I have also fixed a potential memoryleak and changed the classes used to store monsters and object. I decided to merge the OBJECT and ACTOR classes again, since they have so much in common. I used a single class from the beginning, so I guess I'm back where I started :-) The factoryclass that creates the entities (objects and monsters) works really well, and it's a really neat way for creating the entities. The statmodifiers in monsters.txt and objects.txt have been changed from an additive bonus to a multiplying bonus. This allows me to zero stats without problems (stat modifier = 0). I think I'll have a new version ready before the weekend...

Changes have also been made to the version increment plan. Version 0.5 will be out as soon as the bodyparts system is finished. Version 0.6 will have a new system for effects and damages. Up until now effects (light, poison etc) and damages have been two different things, but I plan to merge them into a more generic system. The system for usages will also undergo change. Each entity in the game will have a default usage, thus making inventory management much easier. Each usage will also be linked to a list of effects in order to create traps and other events easier. A chest with a trap will have a poison effect linked to the usage OPEN for instance.

November 8 2001

I'm making changes to the monster and object generation. I've used a pseudo prototype factory approach, that didn't work very well. I have collected the parsed .txt-files along with templates and *tadaa*, the soon to come bodyparts in a factoryclass. Yep, you heard me! The bodyparts are coming soon! I've come to the conclusion that bodyparts shouldn't be that much of a problem to implement. It's a big step, but I think I'll pull it off!

November 5 2001

The work on the AI attackselection has begun. I have a working system implemented that selects the most efficient attack against a specific target. More intelligence needs to be added to the system. At the moment only possible maximum damage and attack modifiers are taken into account. Later on the system will examine the target's armour and chose the kind of attack that is most likely to do damage, for instance piercing damage against chainmail or firedamage against cloth. I'm planning on using a similar system for defence, but I will wait with the implementation until I get some response at r.g.r.development.

November 3 2001

My sincere apologies goes to anyone who has tried to access these pages the last couple of days. I've had trouble with the supplier of the countercode that I'm using. I have therefore decided to remove the countercode, which will result in faster and better access to these pages...

I've had little or no time at all to work on Dungeondweller the past few weeks. I have changed the eventscheduler to work as a priority que against a fictive gametime. The shadowcasting LOS code have also been implemented. The game is much faster now, with an average FOV calculationtime of about 5-15 ms. The code produces some symmetry errors, but I plan on fixing that later. I will focus on the AI attackselection and a new system for itemusage.

October 12 2001

I just realized that the homepage looks terrible on all webbrowsers except Internet Explorer... Other browsers doesn't seem to support CSS classes, thereby messing up my pages. I've made changes to my style sheet and to all pages.

When it comes to coding, I've started work on a more versatile list for attacks. The new attacklist will make AI decisions concerning the choice of most appropriate attack much easier. After a new LOS discussion at r.g.r.d. I finally understand the principle behind shadowcasting LOS, and I have decided to implement my own recursive shadowcasting LOS code. This will hopefully speed things up a bit, at least in larger areas. My conclusions and descriptions of the algorithm will be published in a new LOS article on this page when I'm done...

October 3 2001

The object templates are working! Basic templates such as '... of cutting', '... of venom' and 'Rusty ...' are implemented. I haven't made any templates for monsters yet. It is just a few lines of code to make that work too, but I will wat just a bit longer with that and make sure that the system works first. The objects.txt and monsters.txt have changed format a bit. The files are more readable and versatile and make use of the new system with linked lists for attacks and damages. Graphicsoutput now uses a mask. New version uploaded (0.4.3).

October 2 2001

I finally got some work done on Dungeondweller today! The fixed arrays for attacks and damages are replaced by linked lists. I have also made some small changes to my position- and direction-classes. Mostly small OO changes but now that I'm done with that I can start working on some cool templates for the objects and monsters.