Old Business: I think I have finally banished the last of the issues to do with scaling. The game now handles any resolution we throw at it up to 1680 x 1050, and that should last us for awhile. I think we will also kill 800×600 off completely, meaning that our minimum in game resolution will now be 1024 x 768. This gives us some extra real estate on screen.
New Business: Hello, new readers from linuxgames.com – and also Reddit, apparently! In response to our recent blop of extra publicity, here are some answers to your recently asked questions:
Q. How do you move? If you have to point-and-click to go everywhere, I’ll DIE.
A. You have a choice between point-and-click, WASD, and the arrow keys. The mouse is still the default paradigm for performing actions, although there are hotkeys for opening menus and things that you should feel free to avail yourself of.
Q. How does crafting work?
A. As of the current implementation, you find ingots or smelt ingots from raw ores. (Raw ores include Uranium, Plastic, and … well, some other stuff. There’s a table.) We don’t have demons guarding Adamantium, although I think the Uranium Ore may end up being guarded by Super Mutants or something. Ores can be smelted into ingots, which can be further refined into other ingots. You can then upgrade your weaponry with ingots. Certain combinations of ingots + weapons and armour will either a) add attributes to your equipment (adding damages in damage categories or resistances), b) add artifact powers, or c) will result in a “useless decoration” (of the form: On the axe is a carving of a Thrusty facing a Human in Pitchblende by Mordred the Warrior. The Thrusty is Thrusting. The Human is Screaming.) Somewhere is an absolutely massive table of ingot combinations, and we have to go through and figure out how all of this is going to work. Crafting is now done on the Anvil of Krong. Smelting… well, you’ll need a forge.
Alchemy works in the same way, except you will need either an Alchemist’s Station or the portable Alchemy Kit. Cooking involves an intricate system of marinating and grilling; you can find potions in refrigerators and small barbeques lovingly placed throughout the dungeon.
Weapons that you have crafted and that have become artifacts in and of themselves… well, they may live on after their creators are banished. Just sayin’.
Q. If you want to distribute this on Linux, you should put this in the Ubuntu Store-Thing!
A. Well, we’ll see what’s involved in this. (Also, that’s not a question.)
Q. Moddability! Can I mod the game?
A. I need to clean this up before we ship, but the short answer is yes. You will be able to add new items, add some new skills, re-balance the equipment, so on and so forth. I would like to make it so that you can distribute mods nicely, but this involves a fair amount of interesting engineering that I just didn’t do when I started the project. (We’ll be learning from this for the next game.) Additionally, the game logic in Dredmor is C++ instead of any other scripting language, and while I may do the work necessary to expose it to a scripting language, this would involve a significant code rewrite that I don’t have any appetite for.
Q. Since this is a Linux Game, will it be open source?
A. Not at this time, no. For one thing, there are a lot of places where the source tree needs cleaning up – I’m a good coder, but there are a few things that are a wee bit embarrassing. That said, I have always liked John Carmack’s model. Ship a game, open source the previous generation of technology. If we sell enough Dredmor, or if we sell enough copies of the next game, I have no objections to taking the time to clean up the source tree and put together a really nice open source release for the community.
If you have any other questions, or want to know more about Dredmor, feel free to ask. On that note, I’m going back to the code mines – David just gave me a ton of Vending Machine art that I’m going to hook up, and then… well, I think it’s time I revisit this artifact code again…
Wait wait wait, is this going to be Linux only or am I silly? Cause I didn’t see it anywhere.
On another note, that crafting system looks great, and I see the Dwarf Fortress influences.
You’re being silly: as wonderful as the Linux community is, we fully admit that Windows people like to play games too. We’ll be rolling out versions for Windows, OS X and Linux, and we keep kicking around the possibility of doing some kind of iPad spin-off as well.
Haha alright, sweet.
Still anxiously waiting for the beta then, keep me in mind if you need testers.
Saddened a bit to see the min resolution bumped up to 1024×768. While you’ll never see lower on a desktop system these days, my netbook is 1024×600, and I was hoping this would be a good game for loading on there as well as my desktop.
Really looking forward to this release.
… ooh, netbooks. We’d forgotten about those, to be honest – I suppose I figured that their minimum resolution was 1024×768 but I suppose you might see oddball resolutions like 1024 x 600. I guess those are on those funny “small, yet wide-screen” style laptops.
That said, it’s not a big deal for us to support 1024 x 600. None of our art is *vertically* challenged in any way; it’s just that the bottom bar expanded to be 1024 pixels wide in order for us to add the portrait back in again (and more decorative art!) Accordingly, I’ve added 1024 x 600 back into the game resolution list for you.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention!