Wednesday 29 July 2009

Kharne 0.03b available

v0.03b is now available. This is another mainly bugfix version (a bugfix of a bugfix?), to fix many of the bugs that have been reported in 0.03a. Thanks to Tekela Fisher, 'pol' and Mario Donick for all their bug reports. This version also includes more monster speech and actions.

Changes in this version are:
  • Ranged Combat now works again.
  • More monsters now have actions and speech.
  • Using stairs now requires <> instead of , and ;
  • The particular set of stairs taken to go down and up levels in the dungeon are now remembered.
  • The standard 0 and 5 keys now allow resting as well.
  • Keyboard commands that previously were only responsive to capital letters (e.g. 'S') now work with lower-case letters as well (e.g. 's').
  • Font size and typeface have been made consistent across all the main window interfaces.
  • The Status Bar has been redesigned.
  • Attributes are no longer displayed on the Status Bar.
  • There is now a short pause after death and before the Character Summary is displayed.
  • Skills that are 100% progressed to the next skill level no longer have their progress indicators clipped.
  • Artifact Names are now prefixed correctly whilst unidentified.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the continuous work. Again a good improvement. But of course I have new nitpicks ;)

When I hover the mouse over the vertical tabs during character creation, the tabs flicker. This is not critical, but an optical glitch you might fix.

Then, why has character creation to take place in a dialog frame? Couldn't you use the main window? The problem is that, when I switch between programs and return to Kharne, the main window is brought to front and I have to do some nasty window movement of other programs to bring back the character creation screen. I also noticed that Kharne is not shown when I ALT-TAB through the tasks.

The random generated character background contains to square characters between sentence 1 and 2 -- as if the text box wants to show something not which is not showable (like CR/LF or something).

I used the useful command summary screen. Place a hint somewhere that PgDn/PgUp scroll the contents of the text field.

< and > still do not work for me :-( Might be my keyboard mode. (The < and > key is left from my space key). Don't you use unicode or a similar method to internationalize key input?

I like that special items are colored. It reminds me of WoW ;)

I now managed to play through lvl 1 of the wilderness, but on lvl 2 an "initiate rune hunter" killed me nearly immediatly.

Keep it up! Kharne may become a very good game someday.

Dave said...

Thanks for the continuous work. Again a good improvement. But of course I have new nitpicks ;)

Not nitpicks! Crucial User Testing! I'm grateful for all the effort you've put in.

When I hover the mouse over the vertical tabs during character creation, the tabs flicker. This is not critical, but an optical glitch you might fix.

See the next answer for the solution ;-)

Then, why has character creation to take place in a dialog frame? Couldn't you use the main window? The problem is that, when I switch between programs and return to Kharne, the main window is brought to front and I have to do some nasty window movement of other programs to bring back the character creation screen. I also noticed that Kharne is not shown when I ALT-TAB through the tasks.

I'm going to get rid of the extraneous window entirerly. The reason it was done originally in this way was that it was written as a DLL and was the first part of the new Kharne written, almost two years ago now. As soon as I can, I'll move it back into the main screen.

The random generated character background contains to square characters between sentence 1 and 2 -- as if the text box wants to show something not which is not showable (like CR/LF or something).

Yes, that's exactly what it is.

I used the useful command summary screen. Place a hint somewhere that PgDn/PgUp scroll the contents of the text field.

Will do.

< and > still do not work for me :-( Might be my keyboard mode. (The < and > key is left from my space key). Don't you use unicode or a similar method to internationalize key input?

No, I use Windows Virtual Key Codes. I'll have to investigate alternative ways of input, especially on non-english keyboards.

I like that special items are colored. It reminds me of WoW ;)

Completely ripped off from WoW, yes ;-)

I now managed to play through lvl 1 of the wilderness, but on lvl 2 an "initiate rune hunter" killed me nearly immediatly.

Umm..yes *looks embarassed*. Probably scored a critical hit. Game balance is non-existant at the moment.

Keep it up! Kharne may become a very good game someday.

Thank you very much. Its going to be a long hard slog, but I think it will be worth it.

Unknown said...

I just stumbled across Kharne on RogueBasin and wanted to say I've really been enjoying it. It has some excellent modern features and is a real advancement of the genre. Keep up the good work!