Thursday, December 31, 2009

Mac Version, Hallelujah!

Yes!,

I finally managed to compile and package the band from Hell ;)

For your downloading pleasure : Hellband-0.8.7-osx.dmg

Thanks to all those Mac experts in general and Pete Mack in specific!

T.

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Mac : almost there

So,

Successes thus far:
  • Hellband compiles on Snow Leopard, God bless Pete Mack
  • Hellband.app can start, initialize, create character and save
  • Hellband.dmg works fine now
It however does not find the /save directory to load an existing character!!
Once that is fixed, I will release Hellband for Mac as well.

T.

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Hello item descriptions, good bye katana's

So,

item descriptions..
Based on an email someone sent to me years ago I did most of the item descriptions in ToME.
Now, having lost that email and armed with wikipedia and google I am doing item descriptions again ;)

So far only mushrooms have been impacted sideways by this activity, good mushrooms got better, bad mushrooms got worse. And I got rid of Katana's, I doubt any were to be found in the late Middle Ages in Italy. I also changed bastard sword into Gladius since bastard sword really is the same as long sword. Even a broadsword is really a longsword..

Tulwars ( curved blades from India ) pose an interesting question, there are over a dozen Indian blades with an interesting story and unique qualities:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talwar#See_also

But will I include them in Hellband ? No.. Because people already consider Hellband over the edge and at least the weapons keep things familiar. Still, its a shame. Now kids out there think that bastard swords, broadswords, long swords and "2 handed" swords are different things.

T.

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Release HellBand 0.8.7

Hi,
this is the official release of Hellband 0.8.7, since its been a while I've first pre-released it and it seems to work fine. The most important fix here is stability, there should be no more crash bugs. I've been flooding levels with monsters and items in wizard mode and hellband is now responding properly to abuse.

Links :
Download : http://hellband.net/downloads.html
Bugs: http://code.google.com/p/hellband/issues/list
OMG I want to subcribe to a zombie list : http://groups.google.com/group/hellband/topics

*Creatures
- 0.8.7 Quite a few creatures had double genus flags, some even
contradictory ones
- 0.8.7 Uniques that only drop gold drop much more gold now
- 0.8.7 Added Babylonians on level 24 to speed up level generation,
Nimrod was feeling lonely
*Story
- 0.8.7 Story added for the Heretics level
- 0.8.7 Story added for the Satan level
- 0.8.7 Story added for the first pos Dis level
*Equipment
- 0.8.7 Added the infamous white banner of hell, when carrying you
should experience 'hmm','cool!','wot?','f!!','oh','heh'
*Character Building
- 0.8.7 Restarting character creation allows you to re-choose stats
- 0.8.7 Mindcrafters can now be generated again, *blush*
- 0.8.7 The temple can now remove all your corruptions for 1.500.000
gold
- 0.8.7 Werewolves did not get random names
- 0.8.7 Skeletons no longer have the Second Sigh but Second Sight
now ;)
- 0.8.7 Profile file names are now based on the safe name instead of
hard core player name
- 0.8.7 Potential crash bug found and removed for custom names
- 0.8.7 Player names can now be up to 40 characters because of the
Italian names
- 0.8.7 Italian name generator added ( male and female )
- 0.8.7 Fearless and coward mutations could not be gotten, they were
their own opposite
- 0.8.7 Removed reference to 'Draconian', it should all mention
Draco now
- 0.8.7 Minor background spelling mistakes and punctuation fixed
- 0.8.7 Random characters work now
- 0.8.7 Fixed missing space in Ogre descendant description
*Wizard Commands
- 0.8.7 ']' now induces amnesia so I can test graphic effects with
telepathy and squelching better
*UI
- 0.8.7 Editing colors now shows the colors against the 3
differently lit dungeon floors, so the effect can be
measured
- 0.8.7 Added support for 32px tile set and made it the default in
fact
- 0.8.7 Since nothing except floor/walls/doors is done, support for
transparent ASCII symbolds is coded for windows
- 0.8.7 casting *id* now only shows items that have not been *id*'d
yet
- 0.8.7 casting id now only shows items that have not been id'd yet
- 0.8.7 Picking up from the floor now presents a list if more than 1
item is on the floor
- 0.8.7 Ring choosing now asks left or right while showing the rings
in those locations
- 0.8.7 Dragon Armor no longer gets squelched
- 0.8.7 Squelch no longer squelches boots of speed, even if set at
'keep artefact only'
- 0.8.7 Squelch will not squelch terrible artefacts.
- 0.8.7 Native Mac support for intel macs <- broken, sorry
*Help Files
- 0.8.7 Alchemy command key is now integrated into interactive help
* Stuff
- 0.8.7 Chests are now much more interesting like in cool variants
- 0.8.7 Weapons of KILL_ANGEL now protect the player from Lucifers'
curse
*Stores
- 0.8.7 Black Markets have deeper items once you start to get over
character level 25
*Internals
- 0.8.7 Remove compile option ALLOW_EASY_DISARM and
ALLOW_EASY_DISARM, why would you not want it ??
- 0.8.7 Fixed evil wand stacking 'problem'
- 0.8.7 level creation time has decreased MUCH both on count of
object generation and monster generation being more stable
- 0.8.7 Object dropping, stacking and compacting robustified, lots
of arrows should no longer crash the game
- 0.8.7 store item maintenance is now centralize instead of copy
pasted in 4 locations
- 0.8.7 makefile.WHICH now has proper code
- 0.8.7 Stat adjustment tables are merged into 1 2D matrix, cleaning
up 900 lines of code
- 0.8.7 Fixed warlock realm choice

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Even more new life


So,

Dean Anderson returned and I got motivated to release a new version of Hellband : 0.8.7.

You can find it here : http://download.hellband.net/

evil_hellband087.zip contains some extra dll's that you should not need.

I am in the process of adding 32 pixels graphics for buzkill since he probably put the most effort in hellband outside of Dean and myself.

Screenshot ( yes , transparent ASCII symbols ).

I just need to work out how to properly change the color value of the ASCII values depending on torch_light / remembered light / perma light. Then I can release again.

T.