Monster Descriptions

As far as it goes, "The Vampire hits you inflicting 6 points of damage" isn't particularily atmosphere. One of the larger tasks coming up, as soon as I have defined the behaviour of each of them, is to give more flavour to each monster.

Artifacts

Artifacts are the most powerful (yet rarest) items in the game. The one above is an example of a lvl 6 artifact. Artifacts have multiple effects, and the effects can stack. They are designed to affect the balance of the gameplay quite considerably.

But there is always the possibility of a cursed artifact! The question is, how do we handle cursed artifacts? Do we allow a means of uncursing them?

Potions and Scrolls

I've just started implementing the use of potions and scrolls. They will follow the usual roguelike convention, i.e. they start off scrambled and can have a "{tried}" status if they produce no obvious effects. The list of potions and scrolls I intend to implement at first is given here.

One additional piece of functionality which I'd like to implement but will probably not for the time being is adding the standard roguelike shortcut of (q)uaffing an item by assigning keyboard shortcuts on the inventory (as opposed to the current method of dragging the item onto the small icon (shown above)). This will require some refactoring.

SQLLite and the further revenge of C

As a followup to this and this, this is the sort of thing I miss about C.

In other news, this (reasonable to me) suggestion to use SQLLite for Angband data didn't go down too well on the forums. I'm not sure why - even DCSS has used SQLLite for a long time now. Some of the objections that are raised remind me of late '99, when I was developing applications in the Telecomms Industry using C++ on Solaris boxes, and several teams in the department I was in refused to use C++ because "its too slow".

Inertia is a powerful force, it seems.

High Score Preview

The new High Score screen in Alpha 0.03.

0.03 Preview #1

Here is another preview of Alpha 0.0.3. A rather tricky situation, n'est pas?

I've been working today on the hi-score functionality. It is my intention not to display the entire character dump on death, but instead go to the hi-score screen and then give the option to save the character dump to a file or to view it in an external program such as Notepad.

Eventually, its my intention also to make the HITPOINT WARNING messages configurable as well.

Towards a Unified UI in 0.03

Here is a glimpse of the new frontscreen of Alpha 0.03. It will do away with extraneous forms and be a single window application (effectively a good approximation of a DOS/Console App). The refactoring out of the character creation and such like is proving to be a bit of a pain, as it was written originally in a seperate DLL. A different type of DLL Hell, indeed.