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[Nivim]

 Meanmelter, you make it sound hard to edit the those text files...

[timmeh]

@Meanmelter - Yeah, the "Shadow" creature is generated as needed to fill in if the player gets to a point where there aren't any monsters of the appropriate level.

@Nivm - Difficult, no, time consuming, yes....

Also, for anyone who messes with the raws, if you've created a bunch of new enemies and the game becomes too easy or too hard, you can use the "difficulty" tag in the "data/settings.txt" file to adjust what level monsters are spawned.  The first number is the minimum difficulty, the second is the maximum.  Basically, you multiply the player's level by both values, and the monster's level had to fall between the two resulting numbers.

You can also adjust spell magnitude, drop rates/ratio, and some other things.

I think, in the next version, I'm going to let the player see the combinations that have spell effects from the beginning, but hide the effect until you have enough experience.  Normally I was only going to show that once they had 1/2 of the experience needed to see all the information, but until there's another way to learn spells, I think I may reveal it, so you guys can mess around with spells.

[Outcast Orange]

Sounds good as always Timmeh, keep being awesome.

The shadow creature idea is pretty cool.
I wonder if I'd ever use something like that.

[timmeh]

New release is up, hopefully it'll work as intended

Now, when you quit, a file called "tower.save" is created in the same directory as the executable.  You can load the last saved game via the main menu.  Once I can figure out how best to handle multiple saves, I'll be adding support for that.

Also, the sequences that have effects are now always shown on the magic knowledge screen.  The effects they have are not though, so be careful experimenting...   In the future, I'll probably turn this back off, and let the player find scrolls or similar items that reveal these....

Link is in the first post, and the repository has been updated.  The source code is also included in a .zip file in the main download.

[EDIT]:  I've added an effect for creating portals, which can either teleport the player to a random location, or teleport him back to town.  I've also added an effect to increase spell knowledge.  This means items can be created for things like Diablo's "Town Portal", or scrolls that increase spell knowledge   The portals are a little bit buggy, so I may have to adjust them later.  At the moment, it might create a portal inside a wall or over a pit, in which case you can't get to it, and you've wasted the spell/item.  If I don't fix this before the release, just make sure you cast any portal spells with all adjacent squares open, just to be safe.  And if it doesn't look like it created the portal right away, try moving, it may have created it on top of you.

Unfortunately, this next version is going to break save compatibility, cause I completely forgot to plan for it earlier.  That being said, I have framework in place to prevent future breaks.  I also have it loading item rarity now (defaults to 100), which will work similar to the room weighting, so items with a higher rarity will show up more often.  It doesn't do anything yet, but that's the plan.  Also going to add a "look-at" function, so you can identify items and such without picking them up.

The last thing I want to do before the next release is fairly transparent, but I want to set up room links, so that a given room will know which rooms it's connected to.  It won't do anything now, but it'll let me do some fun things with stair placement, boss monsters and keys/locks later...

[EDIT2]:  Not sure if it was broken in the last release or not (I don't think so...), but in the version I'm working on there's some problems loading and saving items... going to look into it a bit more today.  Fix'd... really retarded error too....

One of the changes I'd made after the release, is that I wrote a function that handled item loading for me.  Before that, each type of item had it's own save and load functions, and I would save the item type before the item, and when loading, would decide what kind of item to load based on the item type it loaded.  This worked, but it was a bit messy, so I tried putting all that into a function, and just calling the function.  Apparently though, that doesn't work.  I think it's because the item classes I actually use are all "child" classes of a base class that has information that's applicable to any and all items.  So for some reason, when I would create a new instance of the more specific class, it wouldn't remember that outside the function... maybe it left the scope of the variable (although it get's passed a pointer...) or something.  Whatever, it's still a little messy, but it works exactly like it's supposed to.

Once I knock out item rarity I may do another release... lots of small stuff for you guys to mess around with.

[Outcast Orange]

It sounds like there should be a solution to that problem.

I am currently doing all sorts of odd things with my loading function.

[timmeh]

There probably is, but I don't want to mess with it until I get a little more comfortable with inheritance and such.

In the mean time, the next release is almost finished (funny how the time between releases seems inversely related to the amount other stuff I have to do )  Item rarity seems like it's working.  I think I may make one more change before releasing, and that's changing the "[rare]" tag to "[treasure]" or something, since rarity determines how hard an object is to find, while the "[treasure]" tag would determine weather the item can be found in a store, or only as treasure.  Perhaps in the future, items with particularly low rarity (I.E. really hard to find) will only show up in locked chests or as drops of particularly powerful monsters....

Speaking of which, after this release I'm gonna do some clean-up and comment the code (maybe in Doxygen format, so I can auto-generate documentation for anyone interested in making changes...) and make any bug-fixes necessary, then release v0.31, since at that point the rewrite will be completely finished, and I can start working on some other fun things... like dynamic/procedural room descriptions, boss creatures, furniture, locks/keys, etc.

[Meanmelter]

Idea: Monsters spawn with equipment.
Super Idea: ability to get an Item on starting classes

[timmeh]

Both of those are great ideas, the only tricky bit is going to be telling it what items the class or monster starts with....  If you use the name of an item, but the item is later removed from the list, or has a name that doesn't match perfectly, it wouldn't get anything....  I suppose the other way to handle it would be to tell it to give them a weapon (or helmet, or body armor or whatever) with a value that lies within a specific range, but that makes it rather difficult to customize.  Still, I really like the idea, just gotta figure out how to handle it

Haven't actually made any changes since my last post, took a break to play some Neverwinter Nights 2, but I may get some more done tonight yet.  I'll probably get less and less done though as the end of the week approaches, since my graduation ceremony is Saturday....

[timmeh]

New version is up, see first post for download link.  (And yes, I do realize I skipped v0.308, but since all that's left till the next version is clean up, and I wanted the completed rewrite to be version 0.31, I'm skipping it )

CHANGES:

• Framework put in place to prevent breaking save compatability in future releases.
• Replaced [rare] tag with [treasure].  Functionally identical.
• Added [rarity] tag to items.  Items with lower rarity are harder to find, defaults to 50.
• Added [l]ook-at action, so you can examine items or monsters without interacting with them.
• Rooms now track their connections with other rooms.  No effect now, but it will serve as the framework for some cool stuff later.
• Added [portal] and [learn_spell] effect tags for items.  Allows items that teach spells or create portals (both within the dungeon, and back to town.)

[EDIT]:  Sorry, typo in previous posts: Maximum energy for a single square (and by extension, for the energy tag when loading rooms) is 100, not 255.

[Nivim]

 Well, it looks like I can't open the new version; tells me it's not a valid executive, at least on this operating system.

[timmeh]

What OS would that be?  It's only been compiled for Windows, and only really tested on XP, although in theory most of the code is cross-platform....

[Outcast Orange]

ToA doesn't use any dll's, does it?

[timmeh]

Why, is it asking for one?

Might be another MSVC error, I may not have it set up right on my desktop yet, so it may still be asking for DLLs....

[Nivim]

Windows 2000. It tells me that "[file path]\TowerOfAzari.exe is not a valid Win32 application." If it helps, the other versions up right now do work.

[timmeh]

Wait, so the version with magic worked (v0.307) but the latest one (v0.309) didn't?  That is seriously weird....  I don't think I did anything differently packaging it or building it... I'll look into it tomorrow (well, later today anyways, 1AM ), I can't think straight now