There have been quite a few bugfixes to Notrium, and I’m proud to present Notrium 1.345 downloadable here.

All of the bugs already existed in the vanilla 2005 version, but thanks to improvements in compiler technology we’re now getting hard crashes for these instead of random behaviour. This enables me to find the problems and fix them. If you’re getting any crashes, please comment here so I can fix it.

If you’re working on a mod for Notrium, I encourage you to use this latest version. If you’re now getting crashes and didn’t previously, just tell me and I’ll get it fixed.

PS. Thank you everyone who submitted bug reports! Special thanks  to Tschmopp who found out interesting crashes in various mods.

I dumped my old Irrlicht particle system for a new custom system. I needed some additional flexibility that the previous one couldn’t provide, so I took the week to make a new one. Now we’ve got a nice smoke effect, plus a whole new fire effect! Compared to the previous one the smoke and the fire also rise up, and you can see the smoke getting darker the farther it goes. That’s probably not how it would go in real life, but the effect looks nice.

I bet you didn’t know I don’t code anything anymore. No sir! All I do is tell her what I want, and she does all the work!

The title says it all, ranged combat is bugging me. To be more precise, backing up bugs me. You see, in Notrium and the current Driftmoon the most efficient way to fight your enemies is to fire at them while running away. That’s a surefire strategy, if your enemy doesn’t have a ranged weapon he can never get to you, and even if he does he’s going to get killed chasing you. In Notrium I didn’t see this as a problem, it fit into the atmosphere of running away from alien hordes. But in Driftmoon it just doesn’t feel right.

In first person shooters you can always back away and shoot, but it’s not a problem there. You move slower backwards and you can’t see behind you, so you’ll eventually bump into something. In Driftmoon I’m not sure if I can make the player move slower backwards – backwards doesn’t really exist since you’re looking at the game top-down. I could make the player move slower whenever he starts ranged combat, but moving slower is usually very frustrating in games, and I’d like to avoid it if possible.

One option I can think of is reducing aim when moving, or possibly disallowing reloading when moving. Using a bow or a crossbow you’d have to reload after every shot, so that would count to a lot. What do you think? How can I turn the running away strategy into something that’s fun to play?

I’ve now added the launcher code to all of my games. The most difficult task was adding it to Notrium, since there wasn’t exactly a trivial amount of code, and I needed to get it to compile with modern compilers. As a bonus I spotted some minor bugs in Notrium, and I may have caused a couple of others. Please tell me if the new version crashes at any point for you. So here’s your chance to fire up your favourite mod again!

Since I’ve gotten Notrium to finally compile, I might as well ask. Are there any outstanding major bugs that you would like to see fixed to get your mod to work?

I spent the weekend working on a launcher screen for the monkkonen.net games. At first I will put it into my older games to advertise Driftmoon, and in Driftmoon I’m hoping to make it a config utility, mod selector and perhaps an autoupdater.

Anyone care to test whether it works or not? All you need is to download Bikez II and see if it looks like above, and works with your firewall. If you have any additional ideas on what purpose it could serve in Driftmoon, I’m all ears.

This will come as a shock to a lot of you: I have a day job. And not just any job, I make games for kids! If you don’t believe me, see the Graphogame demo for yourself: http://info.graphogame.com/

I’m the lead developer for games called Ekapeli and Graphogame. It’s really fun and I enjoy the diversity. At the moment we have a team of four programmers including me, and a whole bunch of researchers going about in loops trying to figure out how to teach kids how to read. Some of you may know my darling wife Anne used to be one of those researchers, but that’s another story.

I make most of the graphics for the games, though the other programmers help me as much as they can. Usually we use Inkscape, mostly because I wanted to learn it a few years back, and I think it gives a nice childish look.

Most days I end up working on games for over 10 hours, with first my day job and then work on Driftmoon. Sometimes I get them mixed up, at work we’ve begun implementing roleplaying stuff into Ekapeli, and at home I constantly have to fight the urge to use very simple language and easy missions.

So what do you think? Do I have a risk of getting a little schizophrenic with the totally different games I’m working on?

PS. We switched to a faster server. Anybody notice the difference?

Here’s the latest plan for combat:

• Clicking on an enemy will start combat. The characters will take turns to deal blows to each other. This is very similar to modern western RPG’s, such as Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon Age.
• In combat you can choose to use special melee skills. You can learn these as the game progresses, probably from certain people (zelda style) or from leveling up.
• Total damage dealt is taken from the equipped weapon, so you still have an incentive to use bigger weapons. Using melee skills you can choose how to distribute the damage from the weapon, giving you a strategic benefit.
• Skills may be scripted using the Driftmoon scripting language. The system could easily be used for magic as well as combat.

Some possible skills:

• Berserk attack, deal plenty of damage to the enemy, but take some as well.
• Stun, enemy loses next turn.
• Swirling attack, damage to everyone around.
• Fire attack, time based damage.
• Concentrate strength to next attack.
• Armor piercing attack.
• Weaken enemy’s shields for next attack.
• Reflect next attack.
• Block next attack.

So that would give you a fair bit of melee strategies. Also giving a different set of skills to enemies will make them different and perhaps more interesting to fight. If you have any new skills to add, and I’m talking about actual combat skills and not magic, I’m quite keen on hearing your ideas.

For balancing, I’m thinking of a system where it would automatically make the less frequently used skills less expensive. Any thoughts on that?