Rogue Fable III News

Hello everyone! Sorry for the long absence. Haven't been feeling well these past few weeks. Apparently working 10-12 hours a day, 7 days a week for 8 months without a break wasn't the greatest idea when it comes to mental and physical health. Who would have thought huh :P

Feeling much better now though and getting back into the swing of things. Sorry for all the bugs and crashes over the past few weeks, this update should fix most of them.

My plan moving forward for the next few months is to focus on each zone, one at a time and spend about a week adding a ton of new content to them. I'm about halfway through doing this with The Upper Dungeon so there's a ton of stuff in this update that's basically incomplete or a work in progress but I figured it would be best to get it out right now since it fixes a lot of crashes.

I'm planning on trying to get a much larger update out once a week on Friday with a bunch of new content for a specific zone. Bug fixes will also be addressed with any serious crashes been fixed with hot fixes asap as usual. I'll be on discord then on Saturday at 2:00pm PST to hangout and discuss the changes once we've had a chance to play with them.

I'll be giving a full update report on Friday when I actually finish this update. As mentioned above there's basically a ton of half finished stuff here that's getting released just in order to get the crash fixes out. A rough overview however:

GRAPHICS:
Totally placeholder at the moment. I'm doing a ton of work on generation that should eventually lead to a lot more interesting terrain in the dungeon with a lot more 'stuff' so that we can move away from the empty rooms connected by bare corridors look.

I'm planning on a lot more vertical elements with raised and lowered floors, platforms, pits, spanning arches, and a lot more multi tile furniture, structures etc.

In order to wrap my head around all of this I figured it would be good to start with an extremely simple art style, basically with no texturing or detail so that I can focus on getting the actual shapes and perspective correct and everything 'reading' clearly.

GENERATION:
A complete overhaul on much of the underlying generators. I'll have a better description of this on Friday once I actually start taking advantage of the new flexibility. Suffice to say, this is one of those huge updates that is required for future updates, but doesn't actually do much on its own.

That being said you might notice some slight differences and new features in The Upper Dungeon generation.

SPECIAL_VAULTS:
The Goblin High Shaman and Goblin Necromancer are now in the game with their own unique vaults. They still need some unique drops and will likely need some balancing so that they don't completely destroy the player. A big focus on much of this dungeon renovation phase will be on adding these unique, mini-boss like encounters.

I'm trying to hold back for the Upper Dungeon however since I don't want to throw anything to crazy or complex at the player in the early levels so these guys are pretty basic.

BUGS_CRASHES_AND_FIXES:
- Reverted the changes to slow movement back to orthogonal only. We had a good discussion on discord about this and I think slow = no diagonal is the best way to go moving forward since it creates much more tactically interesting situations. One of the goals going forward will be to simply never generate a situation in which a character needs to 'squeeze' since it tends to be awkward and littered with odd special cases.
- Between this and a few other fixes, I believe I've caught all the issues that were introduced with the last update.
- Added a check where the player cannot be healed after they are dead. This fixes a bunch of odd edge cases where life taps, regeneration etc. were restoring hit points after the player was already dead.
- Portals and zone lines will not drop 'pulled' npcs onto dangerous terrain. There were a couple of crashes associated with this.
- Fixed the goblin bombers throwing their bombs into solid objects causing them to 'poof'.
- Fixed the crash w/ the freeze spell
- Shields up will no longer work unless you have a melee weapon equipped. This is one of those odd ones where a change to code exposed what was previously a bug but just didn't cause a crash. I'm trying to remember wtf Shields Up was doing now with a projectile weapon equipped.
- Plugged a hole in the end level of The Ice Caves that was causing auto explore crashes and other odd behavior.
- Staff of Poison now has the correct max enchantment level of +3.
- It was possible to fall into the goblet room in one of the Vault of Yendor end variations. This is now fixed.
- Fixed an issue that a number of players were having w/ corrupted save files causing the game to fail loading at 99%. I'm not sure what happened here but I took a look at Zens save files and they were totally unreadable, so the game will now simply clear the saves and throw an error if this occurs but otherwise still start the game. Zen, Reykavik, Limeylocks, please let me know if this fixes the issue!

That's it for now! There's a lot more going on behind the scenes with this update and I have a ton of stuff that's semi complete and is just disabled until I can finish it, so as previously mentioned, I'll be doing a proper full update report on Friday when I actually finalize this stuff.

Thank you everyone for your patience and support!

More bug smashing! Bugs from before, bugs from previous bug fixes, new bugs! Christ I just wanted to be a game developer and make cool dungeons and stuff, now apparently I'm moon lighting as a bug exterminator :P

Despite the occasional new issues introduced, we are however making some serious progress here. I'm taking the time to do a lot of rewriting behind the scenes whenever a crash report forces me into some dark, horrifying section of the code base. So the hope is that not only are we getting all the current bugs worked out but the code base will be much easier to work with going forward.

My strategy has generally always been to write stuff as simple as possible when first implementing it without any consideration for future expansion. This tends to let me move quickly when adding new content or mechanics and not litter the code w/ prematurely generalized systems.

Typically later on I'll find that there's some new mechanic or special case that needs to be added to the previous base code. In this case I tend to just hack it in. I'll do this a few times and sometimes I never need to touch it again in which case it just sits there.

However, and this is whats happened with a lot of these messy parts of code, eventually some of these things turn into just a mess at which point I go in and actually 'systematize' everything in some clean way that handles all the special cases, variations etc.

So far this method seems to be working out. It lets me play with new features quickly, grow and change them quickly, and as long as I do periodic clean ups like these last few weeks, everything tends to stay reasonably clean.

Anyways, enough of that, onto the update:

BUGS_AND_CRASHES:
- Ballistas and other rotating enemies will now save their orientation.
- Cannons are no longer partially visible when out of view (they were treated like turrets and other stationary enemies).
- Flying characters will now take damage from spreading electricity when in steam (previously steam was handled like water and it assumed a levitating character was 'above' the steam).
- Polluted water now makes characters 'wet'.
- Drachnid archers will no longer attack-step their way out of nets.
- Fixed auto explore not attacking crates
- All stationary enemies are now unstableImmune i.e. they won't become unstable if some ice gets under them.
- Fixed a crash w/ hellfire (and other spells) when way to many enemies are on screen at once. tape & scissors had reported this as due to teleporting while charmed (which I still need to investigate), but this was actually due to mousing over your hellfire scroll with some absurd number of slimes on screen and there weren't enough targeting boxes to display.
- Fixed the charge lock up (happened every time).
- Turn count is now saved and loaded correctly
- The 'Partially Explored' auto explore should now correctly try to take you to the trap or obstruction like it was previously doing.

MERCHANT:
- Rand-arts will now sell for 1.5x the base value.
- The merchant will now stock rand-arts.
- The merchant will now sell keys

SLOW_MOVEMENT:
- Changed slow movement from orthogonal only to just take twice as long as normal movement.
- We're gonna have to play with the balance a lot on this one, I'm sure ogres will be running out of food now and slow enemies are going to be quite a bit easier to kite.
- This was probably a long time coming. Originally, when the game was much simpler, I wanted to avoid variable turn timing just since it added unnecessary complexity imo.
- However w/ fast movement already doing this and the necessary introduction of squeeze moves and all the additional special cases and exceptions that introduced its basically become more complicated to have it.
- So despite the fact that I still like the idea of slow movement being orthogonal since it opens up interesting movement strategies, this is just going to be a cleaner option moving forward imo.
- Curious to see what people think of this change and any suggestions for balancing / improving it.
- This also fixes like 100 bugs related to both pc and npc pathfinding, auto-exploring, all sorts of odd interactions w/ multi-moving abilities etc.

Oh yes and a reminder that I'm on discord every Wednesday and Saturday at 4:00pm PST to hang out and chat about the game.

Another big ol pile of bug fixes!

Getting very anxious to start working on content again, every time I get a chance to chat with everyone on discord, or I read through some of the suggestions, or I just sit awhile and think about stuff I'd like to add I get super excited and want to press forward. Nonetheless I'm trying to maintain a bit of discipline here and just keep pressing through all these bugs and crashes. As mentioned before, I'm hoping to get the bulk of it done by this Saturday so that we can get back to the regular schedule of real content updates.

That being said, just based on my own testing / playing, we've def made some serious progress here as far as general stability and squashing all the little annoying bits. Still a ways to go but we're getting there! Thanks as always for everyone's support through this somewhat tedious time! I promise we'l get back to the cool stuff soon!

SPAWNERS AND SUMMONERS:
- Fire bat nests can now spawn their bats over lava
- Fire bat nests can now spawn their bats over pits
- Summoning swords now treat lava, pits etc. as safe.
- Lich king will no longer summon his skeletons over pits, killing them instantly.
- In general I just rewrote the way that spawners and summoners detect 'safe' tiles. They now actually look at the type of monster their about to summon and determine based on its inherent properties.

SWIMMERS: LAVA AND WATER
- Swimmers will no longer follow the player up stairs if they are adjacent.
- Swimmers will now slowly die if knocked out of their element.

MISC:
- Summoned swords (player or NPC) will now cross lava
- Fixed a crash where getting 'pulled' by tongue or tentacle w/ strafe attack resulted in a crash.
- You can no longer jump into a pit when webbed or otherwise immobile.
- Fixed a strafe attack crash when descending stairs.
- Resting will 'pause' now if a status effect wears off.
- When crit hitting an enemy, their blood will never fall on the player. This is to deal with enemies that 'bleed' oil landing directly on player and possibly insta killing them. I've noted before that I'm looking to eliminate any of these stupid unavoidable deaths.
- Fixed a bug where a pyromancer was killed by his own fire storm and the targeting squares never disappeared.
- Clicking on the mini-map to fast move will now perform a 'safe move' i.e. the player will never attack if an enemy is at the end of the path. This stops the possibility of clicking on say a fire pot and dying due to attacking it. Again this is a stupid death that should be eliminated.
- Skeletons killed on pits will no longer leave corpses.

DESCRIPTIVE_TEXT:
- Added descriptive text to the draining status effect
- Updated cleaving weapons text to note max of 3 targets.

Hello Everyone!

Getting into the home stretch of debugging. At least as far as the game goes I'm hoping to get it all cleared up within about a week. Should have about a week for the stat server round II and then we can get back to regular content updates, hopefully much faster than before since we're gonna be building off of a very stable foundation.

ELEMENTAL_WEAPONS:
- Unified the code that handled inferno sword and storm chopper with standard melee code. This should eliminate something like a dozen separate issues. The ones I'm aware of:
- Power strikes, lunges, disengages should now all trigger the correct elemental effect.
- Melee life tap now works with both.
- They should now trigger repostes, damage shields and other defensive abilities on NPCs.
- Both weapons will now be corroded by corrosive slimes.
- Will be paying close attention to discord and forums for bug reports on this one since its a pretty big, low level change.

WEAPONS_MISC:
- Strafe attacking a corrosive slime will now cause you to lose enchantment on your weapon (maybe they should be flagged so it doesn't auto strafe attack? Much like crystal golems and range).
- Lunging onto a corrosive slime will now cause you to lose enchantment as usual.
- Pretty sure same goes for powerstrike.

MERCHANT:
- Will no longer stock items with mods greater than +3.
- Please let me know if you find any more items with mods greater than 3.

SUMMONED_HELL_PORTALS:
- The demonologist will no longer summon his portals on lava or dangerous terrain.
- A dominated demonologist will now summon friendly portals which will summon friendly imps. This is looking like its going to be horribly OP.

SLOW_MOVE:
- Slow moving characters can now pick up items on the diagonal.
- Pretty sure this is what was ment by 'unable to use chests' since they can actually open them, just not pick the item up previously.

SMITE:
- Putting an enemy to sleep will now stop its smite
- Breaking line of sight with an enemy will now stop its smite

TIME_GATES:
- Switches will no longer work unless the door is actually closed.
- This should stop people from getting stuck in timed rooms by pulling the switch first.

Fixing bugs and crashes created by my previous fixes to bugs and crashes! Thanks for all the feedback guys, sorry about the bugs!

- Fixed transference table crash
- Fixed immediate crash when mousing over a rapier
- Made sure to actually fully cap stats at +3 (the mechanic that tries to drop upgrades was overriding it).
- Fixed lunge stepping you onto impassable terrain
- Fixed a crash w/ enchanted charms of MP or HP regeneration
- Fixed tab attack so it works as expected
- Tab attack will now move you into range w/ a ranged weapon, the same way it does w/ a melee weapon.