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[Frumple]

News necro!

Summary: Progress, but not terribly much. Engine work continues apace, despite personal hardships for developer. Some fruits of the labor to likely be displayed fairly soon-ish, though apparently nothing particular interesting from a gameplay view.

Incredibly tentative speculation puts release date of new!Incursion at maybe 2012. End of the world indeed

[mongrol]

Good news. At least he's still working on it. I ported Incursion to OSX for him but ain't heard a peep in 2 years. Hopefully he'll get there in the end again and give us something incredible (again).

[Sir Pseudonymous]

It's odd, Incursion is basically just a mildly-ambitious roguelike that uses slightly adapted D&D 3.5 rules, hasn't seen an update in years, and yet no one else with more motivation/free time has taken the concept and run with it. Sad, considering that it's the only proper roguelike I've enjoyed playing (DF being more an odd ASCII god-game), even if it was too buggy and incomplete to play for long.

[Mephisto]

Apparently implementing and troubleshooting an entire Java-clone programming language complete with bytecode VM, IDE support, symbolic debugger, garbage collection and various game-specific language extensions takes a substantial amount of time to get working and stable.

Um... This may be a stupid question, but why not use Java and just code the game-specific extensions yourself?

Yes, I know the dev isn't reading this. It's more of a thought that occurred and not a question to anyone in specific.

[Frumple]

I'd probably guess speed, honestly, but I'm not really sure. I've never seen a Java program of the size or complexity even approaching Inc that ran worth a shit, to be blunt, and Inc's already had some fairly serious resource issues (re: saving, ferex) in the past. That, and Inc's future engine is supposed to have some seriously freaking impressive tools for... whatever it does, I'unno.

That being said, you're welcome to actually ask the dev, who's pretty open about such things. Or read the white page, which probably answers at least part of that question.

Could crosspost the question to the google group, if you're not able to yourself, if you'd like.

[Eagleon]

Um... This may be a stupid question, but why not use Java and just code the game-specific extensions yourself?

It's not a stupid question. It's the question I had after reading that. If he's going for public modability (thinking Java is too complex for the public to learn, which it really isn't), but he still wants all of those features, he might as well use python or lua hooks for in-game methods and information. Fairly simple to create interfaces between the two.

From what I've seen it's a little pointless to design a new scripting language for a game when you aren't working with anyone else, because any speed increase you can get from it is usually negligible compared to the gains you have in development speed by using something simpler (i.e, you can spend more time optimizing the rest of the code for larger performance gains than you'd get over the same time period struggling with developing tighter generic methods for use in scripts)

I'd probably guess speed, honestly, but I'm not really sure. I've never seen a Java program of the size or complexity even approaching Inc that ran worth a shit, to be blunt, and Inc's already had some fairly serious resource issues (re: saving, ferex) in the past.

Java is perfectly fine now speed-wise, especially for a turn-based game. Incursion has a lot of stuff to track per-object, but Java is designed for efficient OOP to begin with, and beyond some small overhead from the VM, it can actually be better out of the box at resource management (the garbage collection he mentions is part of this) and memory footprint.

My guess is that he doesn't want to learn a new language to develop his game, which is perfectly understandable, but if he's developing a type of Java on his own just to avoid that, it becomes a bit questionable in sanity. Hell, he might be doing it for fun, I don't know. It's his game. He's probably already considered it to the extent he wants to/needs to, so asking him won't do much good.

[mongrol]

As far as I'm aware much of the system design of Incursion was as much about learning computer science theory as it is of writing a good roguelike. Using java wouldn't learn you much about design and writing a similar virtual machine. Same with using an already well implemented scripting language.

[0x517A5D]

I'm glad to get a news update, but I'll believe the project isn't dead when there's an actual release beta.

Because ground-up rewrite == perfectionist author == eventual abandonment.  I've seen this with games, with non-game applications, and in non-software areas such as fanfiction.

And spending time hooking into Microsoft's IDE... it's nice to learn something new, but it doesn't appear to help get the game released.

(But I'm feeling grumpy today.)

[Frumple]

Normally I'd agree, but Inc's dev has a pretty good record so far -- the whole 'been working on this since '99 and still going' thing is a pretty strong recommendation for 'im, I'd say, and he's done the year+ long release drought without failing to eventually produce.

The engine re-write popped up because the previous (well, current released one, I guess) had some issues (near game breaking bugs, natch) that, accordin' to th'dev couldn't, be fixed without basically re-writing the whole thing. So 'e's gone and started re-writin' the whole thing, heh. The proposed benefits to come from doing so are impressive, too.

But I hear ya'. I've seen the whole re-write/fail process more than once m'self, and it's never an encouraging thing to see. I'm hopeful, though that's a bit of fanboy going on -- Inc's pretty much the only roguelike I can win with anything approaching regularity. Still, that Mensch is still keeping in contact with the community is a positive sign in my books. We'll see in a couple years

[chaoticag]

Okay, sorry for the necro, but I just downloaded this onto my new laptop and I'm getting some display issues. I can't seem to get the screen to update without moving it around, or playing fullscreen, but playing fullscreen changes the colors around. Does anyone know what is going on?

[Draco18s]

Oh man.
Incursion.
I had totally forgot about this one.

[mcdonaldjord]

This game is abandoned, Correct? Or is it still being worked on?


I would love see some updates. :3

[BishopX]

This game is abandoned, Correct? Or is it still being worked on?


I would love see some updates. :3

The developer has been writing a new game engine for several years. I beleive it will mostly focus on the world, rather than revamping the goblin king dungeon.

[Frumple]

Okay, sorry for the necro, but I just downloaded this onto my new laptop and I'm getting some display issues. I can't seem to get the screen to update without moving it around, or playing fullscreen, but playing fullscreen changes the colors around. Does anyone know what is going on?

Some other folks have had this trouble. Haven't had any luck seeing a proper response to it, unfortunately. Give a shout out in the google group if you can. Julian comes by every once in a while to say something, or respond to stuff.

ETA on the new engine is either later this year or around the fall/winter line (october-ish) next year, maybe. Boss Mensch has had enough trouble with putting down deadlines that he's mostly stopped, heh, but Incursion has had this sort of development hiatus before without stopping. I'm hopeful, if not holding my breath too hard

[Kagus]

Incursion is kind of the phantom of modern Roguelikes...  It pops up now and again, haunts you for a while, and then floats away into the darkness.  But even though you can't see it, you know it's still there, somewhere, waiting to surprise you again at some later date.


I've still got some character designs I haven't tested out with this yet...  Unfortunately, I'm working off of a mini-top that raises a mighty and towering middle finger in the face of Incursions slightly lackluster performance and graphic rendering.