Version 1.13...

Is now available on Steam.

Competent henchmen...

I've started working on the Dread Lord boss encounter and it's progressing quite nicely. The boss itself will be nasty but this time the henchmen, or Immortals as they're called, may be competent as well. The boss and the henchmen have one thing in common and that is that they don't seem to stay dead.

Here's a sneak peek of: Immortals

Potions and poisons...

Potions have always been somewhat boring because of the ratio of good vs bad potions (5 vs 19). This will change in the next patch. Seven out of the eight disease potions will be replaced by ones that can be useful in some way (see Potions).

Poisoned weapons have also been weak because the poisons wear out after one one or two hits. This has been so partially because it could increase random player deaths at low levels (NPC's with poisoned weapons often spend their charges on snails and whatnot and the player is rarely affected by them).

I plan to change this so that poisons don't wear out as fast because it makes it more rewarding to use poisons. Instead of having a 100% chance to reduce potency of poisons on a weapon when it damages a target, adding this one line will make a huge difference:

if (Dice.roll("2D6") - potency <= 2)
    weapon.setPoison(poison, potency - 1);

What it does is that if you apply a potent poison (2) on your weapon then there is a 1:6 chance that its potency drops to 1. After that there is a 1:12 chance that it drops to 0, and after that there is 1:36 chance that it wears out completely. So, on average a potent poison gets to affect 48 times instead of 3.

Anyway, poisons will be a thing in the next patch.

All hail Dread Lord Nabon...

I suppose the heroic difficulty isn't too hard then. Apparently sometime yesterday while I was getting drunk at a Mötley Crüe concert here in Hell, Nabon met the King and lol pwned his ass.

Now, after sobering up (and since I wasn't blasted away by the islamic goat fuckers), I can resume working on the next version.

AI hit on the head, again...

And perhaps this time it's not dumb enough to step on lava but smart enough to step on bridges that are on lava.

Let the games begin...

It's been a while since this game has had any new encounters or quests added and now it's time to add one. I'm very bad at naming things (like Gurmur) and I will leave that to you. The first person to spank the King on heroic difficulty on the Epixx.org server will have his name deviously stolen by the next quest boss.

More specifically, the first person to say "lol pwned" while having the Kingslayer title will have his name stolen. There won't be any direct feedback on the client but I'll get the message and let you know here when that happens (this is just in case someone is bored and spanks the King but does not want his character's name stolen).

If the name is not medievil enough or it is otherwise inappropriate, I might have to do some tweaking to make it fit. Also, if you have already named a few of the encounter bosses while left handedly unlocking the Pacifist title two years before Woof, I may have to go Alucard on your name.

The boss itself is just an average bad guy with an army of immortals and a shabby little castle.

AI hit on the head...

And now it should be dumb enough to run smoothly. The hotfix is available on Steam but it may take a few days to get it up in the demo version.

Too smart AI...

It seems that some monsters have learned how to use a shield even though they shouldn't equip items. This causes them to crash the game when they try to attack with the shield just as if it were a weapon.

I'll see if I can whip out a hot fix that will take care of that and which hopefully recovers issues created by it.

Numbers...

Every now and then I see mentions of how many lines of code and how many source files some game has and whatnot. Well, I found some command line spell that listed the numbers for this little 7 year roguelike and they are as follows: 134609 lines of code and 289 source files.

Those are the lines in the rogue library, utility libraries, client application and launcher application (this game doesn't use any 3rd party libraries and every single line is original). There's also a few thousand lines in the server application (3325 in 5 files to be exact) and some in the C++ Steam wrapper code.

There's some 229 xml data files, 1366 image files and 268 sound files. The number of images is in the range of thousands as many image files contain at least 2 images each while tilesets have up to 300 or more.

The number of lines shown above, however, is no excuse to produce bugs in the code but perhaps it gives some perspective to the task at hand that the latest version had changes in 63 source files and some of them looked like this:

That's roughly 10000 lines of code in total in those two files and yellow color means that there's changes and gray color means that the changes are new code. Some code hippies might say that 6k lines of code in a single file is bad but sometimes you just have to bend over and shove it all in.

Version 1.12...

Is now available on Steam.

This was originally meant to come out at the end of the month but somehow I managed to clock almost 40 hours in front of a computer in the past two days and now my bottom hurts and my left leg feels numb. Anyway, have fun dying in the first room!

Getting there...

The changelog is now final.

New things...

I've finally managed to specify what will be included in the next version and what still needs to be done, and they are: a bunch of premade level templates with chasms, some bug fixes, 10 shapeshifting heritages, 10 new challenges and titles (some of them are slightly harder than your average challenge), some AI code and other stuff.

The new titles are: the Firelord, the Octopus, the Untouchable, the Vampire, the Trump, the Munchkin, the Saint, the Festive Poo, the Houndmaster and the Kingslayer. I don't know which one is the hardest. Perhaps it's the one where you have to kill 70 to 100 daemons and infernals in one go (I checked that it worked by tuning the number down to 3 and it was fine).

There will be a heroic difficulty level in which no heritages are available, enemies are harder and they come straight to your face at level 1 as there's no snail cushion to smooth the way. This difficulty level is meant to be played through only once for the challenge (and I have some ideas for it that I can't mention yet). This is the closest thing to the early days of the beta and before everything was nerfed.

Wet tentacle action...

I'm sure that you'll all agree that there can't be enough tentacles in watery chasms. Although they're not as deadly as lava, I'm sure someone will eventually get slapped by one. Oh, and if you happen to be surrounded and can't be pushed aside, the full body tentacle penetration will surely teach you to avoid that the next time.

Here's a sneak peek of: Water Chasms & Lurkers

New pixels in action...

I've heard how you all love boulder traps and how you'd want more of them. Unfortunately there can be only one trap of that kind, but hopefully you can appreciate a slightly different way to die in a horribly "unfair" and totally "unavoidable" way by the environment.

Here's a sneak peek of: Lava Chasms & Bridges

Some new pixels...

Well, there's some lava (which will kill a player in a couple of turns). Perhaps there should be some knockback creatures? There's a new talent totem, probably called "Spirit Totem" or "Animal Totem" or something like that, and it will teach the new talents when it is unlocked. There's also this new monster which will probably be called "Floater" and it has a special ability that can charm anyone it attacks (before eating them).

Work never ends...

Something must be wrong with me. It's been a week since my summer vacation ended and after five days of fixing bugs (mine and others) on my day job, I wake up at 9am on a Saturday morning and come up with this crazy idea of going through the todo-list and do something.

Sun is shining, weather is the best that it can be in this corner of the world and instead of going out I open Inkscape and draw an icon, draw another icon and another one after that. Sun is still shining and I open a web browser to update the talents page with the ideas that keep bursting around my head. There, now I have specs and now I can start programming.

After taking a moment to read what I just wrote, I have to say to myself - Jesus effing Christ, you sound like some hipster looking for sympathy on fecesbook and it must stop now - code can't wait!

TLDR: Work has started on 1.12.

Version 1.11...

Is now available on Steam. It will take a few days for the standalone versions to be available on other vendors.

Weird science...

The changelog is now final. I'll just have to do some testing to see how many things I have broken. At some point I did consider adding more stuff but then I decided to eat icecream and enjoy summer instead.

Something strange happened after I ate too much icecream and my brain froze. My two remaining brain cells started to wonder how to protect all of them usernames and passwords to bazillion different services that have been piling up in the past two decades, and after one of the brain cells knocked the other one unconscious, the remaining one thought of steganography.

One thing led to another and after a few days I came up with this: Epixx Encrypter

I'm not sure what will become of it but at least my passwords are relatively secure now while hiding in plain sight.

Desura bankruptcy...

There's been some news that Desura's parent company has gone titsup and I have no idea how and when it will affect the players. Therefore, if you have purchased Rogue's Tale on Desura and haven't yet snatched your Steam key, go get it now from http://www.desura.com/collection.

Seems balanced to me...

I've been tinkering with elementals and their damage auras and now they seem just about right. The following video shows some action in a rigged dungeon with lvl 1 elementals versus a casual warrior.

1.11 Elementals & Damage Auras

Rules for damage auras can be found in the basics section.

Version 1.10 take 2...

There's a quick patch available on Steam that includes the first four lines of 1.11's changelog. There's no fast way to fix the standalone versions and they may have to wait until the next version.

Version 1.10...

Is now available on Steam. It will take a few days for the standalone versions to be available on other vendors.

Whatnots part 3...

Version 1.10 is now available on Steam if you select "test - Public test branch" under the BETAS tab.

The actual release takes place in a week or two, depending on how lazy I am. Obviously the changelog is now final and as you may have guessed the last entry was about Linux support.

The Linux version should run in the latest distros with Steam installed, 32 bit libraries, properly installed drivers and a beefy graphics card etc, but if it doesn't even show a window or runs very slow, then adding "-opengl" in the launcher's expert settings should do the trick.

The game has been succesfully run in 32 & 64 bit Debians (Wheezy & Jessie) as well as 32 & 64 bit Ubuntus (12++). It should run on other distros as long as all the 32 bit libraries are present, but ldd, grep and your favorite search engine are your friends in this case.

Whatnots part 2...

Well, I attempted to fix some graphics issues in the penguin powered operating system and ended up improving performance in Windows by 25% or so. The downside is that now the game is much more reliant on the amount of VRAM on the graphics card and low end machines could run better without hardware accelerated surfaces.

Again, if you would like to help test it out, type the following spells in the nearest terminal:

wget http://rogue.epixx.org/files/rt-launcher-1.10.150501.tar.gz

tar xzf rt-launcher-1.10.150501.tar.gz

cd rt-launcher-1.10.150501

./launcher

If everything runs very slow (even the mouse pointer takes seconds to draw), then one of the following command line parameter sets placed in the launcher's expert settings can possibly fix it:

-debug -opengl

-debug -swrender

-debug -swrender -opengl

The first one enables opengl pipeline and the requirements for that are listed on the previous post. The second one disables hardware surfaces and probably won't work very good on its own (at least on one machine it dropped FPS from 150 to 15 on the default pipeline). The third one, however, got an 8 year old piece of donkey dung mini laptop (1.6GHz Atom, 1GB RAM, Intel with 8MB VRAM, 1280x800) to run the game at 20+ FPS (~50 in the menu), which seemed surprisingly good for something that can't even load web pages properly.

Whatnots...

Apparently the changelog for the next version is almost final. It is still missing one more "feature" and a boatload of testing. If you would like to assist in testing it, type the following spells in the nearest terminal:

wget http://rogue.epixx.org/files/rt-launcher-1.10.150430.tar.gz

tar xzf rt-launcher-1.10.150430.tar.gz

cd rt-launcher-1.10.150430

./launcher

Obviously those spells will require a penguin powered operating system, 32 bit libraries, hardware accelerated OpenGL/GLX libraries installed and configured properly, OpenGL version 1.2 or higher, GLX version 1.3 or higher and at least one TrueColor visual with depth buffer (properly installed Steam should bring all of these).

Work work...

Well, it seems I can't get my lazy ass off the chair and go outside to smell flowers and enjoy the sun, or whatever it is that hippies do when they go outside, and I might as well start working on the next version.

I haven't quite figured out yet what the next version will bring but I'm sure there's going to be some bug fixes, feature requests, new creatures and whatnots. As always, the latest changes can be found in the changelog.

Version 1.09...

Is now available on Steam. It will take a few days for the standalone versions to be available on other vendors.

Almost there...

The changelog is now final. What remains to do now is some testing and preparing for the release (it's probably going to take a couple of weeks to check that everything works). Elementals, however, will have to wait for the next version even though their graphics are done now.

Closing in...

Almost all of the functional code is done now. The only major thing remaining is the crafting interface and it might take some time because it hasn't been designed yet. I'm not sure if it ends up having some new graphics components or is it possible to do using the existing ones but it will require a lot of tinkering to get it done.

Once the crafting interface is done there might be one more thing to do assuming the graphics will make it in time, but I guess we'll see what happens. I'd love to see them puny rogues burn in agony but perhaps it will happen later =)

Are we there yet...

Sadly, no. As it turns out, when I checked my to-do list I noticed this entry about new items and something about crafting. Oh and then I also remembered about this website and thought, hmmm it might have to be updated at some point to reflect the changes.

Green marks changes that take place in 1.09.

I've started to update the website and implemented changes are marked in green - I don't have a specific date when all is done but if it's written in green it has been fully implemented (graphics, sounds, code, scripts etc). For example, on the crafting page, there's some green text and a lot of items with blank entries. Obviously the items have their graphics done but they are not yet fully implemented. The crafting materials, however, are written in green and spanking a bear produces a bearskin.

Anyway, the casual mode mentioned earlier is now done and it comes with 6 different character classes to begin with - Warrior, Archer, Assassin, Paladin, Wizard and Warlock. Each one of them starts with equipment, talents and spells that should be good enough to carry them through almost every time.

Another year and another version...

Coming out at some point in the near future.

So, uhm, I went to a store and bought the cheapest Windoze 8 tablet and tried to play this game. In addition to it being slow due to hardware that would've been awesome in 2005, it was also totally unplayable as there was so many things that were impossible to do with just left and right click available on the touch screen.

Anyway, I stood up and took three steps from the couch to the development lair and drew a semi transparent rounded rectangle. Then I opened a text editor and repeatedly slammed my forehead on the keyboard and suddenly, in addition to seeing stars, I saw these rounded rectangles appear in the game.

The list of coming changes can be seen in the changelog, but one of the new features is not yet there as it is still being designed, and that is the "casual" difficulty level. There's still some things that need to be decided, such as which heritages can be unlocked while casually strolling about, and if there is, *gasp*, almost permanent death.

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