Author Archives: Nicholas

Dredmor iPad Frequently Asked Questions

April 3, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

When a product such as Dredmor reaches maturity, it is often ported to a mobile tablet. During this awkward time of transition, you will doubtless have certain questions about the changes that your video game is going through. You may have strange feelings and sudden urges, and you may also note your tablet sprouting hair in strange places.

Please rest assured, this is perfectly normal.

Fortunately, Gaslamp Games is here to help you through this time of change and transition with our Dredmor-for-iPad Frequently Asked Questions guide. So here goes:

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Dredmor for iPad

April 2, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

… we’ll just leave these here.

Choose Your Skills - anywhere you like, feel free.

Oh, it's just so little!

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Patch 1.0.10 Slowly Trickling Out; New Distributor

March 30, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

Patch 1.0.10 is slowly making its way through the various distribution channels. Desura has it up, and hopefully the Humble Bundle webstore will have it up shortly. We’ve run into a slight hiccup with Steam – I have to get the previously packaged off of our old build machine and onto our new build machine, which has involved (amongst other things) rebuilding its RAID array. Hopefully that will be up around Tuesday.

We are also pleased to announce that Dungeons of Dredmor is now available on GameFly! You can pick up Dredmor and Realm of the Diggle Gods as a complete package for a mere $3.75 – go buy some Dredmor today!

Yet more strange icons? What could it possibly mean!

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On Testing

March 22, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

When I started working on 1.0.10 at the start of this year, one of the things I asked myself was how to improve our patching process – or how to stop horribly game-breaking patches from happening ever again. First, let us review the Dredmor patch history:

0.9 -> 1.0.0 – The Greatest Crashing Beta Test Ever of 2011.
1.0.0 – Dredmor released with mysterious audio crashing problems, exposed by a change to the audio code at the last minute.
1.0.1 – Fixed the audio crash.
1.0.2 – Fixed the audio crash which was exposed by the fix for the first audio crash.
1.0.3 – Zillions of bugfixes.
1.0.4 – A hastily released patch after 1.0.3 broke save game compatibility with 1.0.2, and the laser-like glare of the Eye of Sauron turned upon me. (And I wept.)
1.0.5 – Was reasonably boring and nothing happened.
1.0.6 – Broke achievements; was hotfixed. (Some people consider this version a “classic” Dredmor for some reason.)
1.0.7 – Humble Bundle build; added Linux support and, also, bonus crashing.
1.0.8 – Diggle Gods build. Included things like “the n-Dimensional Lathe, a giant, crashing, unexploded bomb”, things not giving people the correct stats, crashing mysterious portals, eleventy billion broken tutorials…
1.0.9 – Patch for everything that went wrong with the Diggle Gods build. Added crashing bookcases, crashing savegames, save game corruption, and stuff not loading in the mod launcher. This also marked the start of the attempts at fixing the “belt eating problem.”
1.0.9 REV B – patch for all of these things, some of which actually stayed patch.

One of the conclusions that I reached was that a lot of the really bad problems (save game compatibility; n-dimensional lathe; hideous random audio crashes) were things that showed up when we had a thoroughly tested build, made one small change to it, and then put up the build with that one small change (which, consequently, was the change that broke everything.) As a result, we decided to instigate a new policy: any time we make any change to a Dredmor release candidate, no matter how small, the patch goes out for testing and is banged upon for at least 48 hours (preferably 72) before we ship it. Dredmor 1.0.10 is the first build we’re shipping with this new policy; we hope it works out well for all parties concerned, but it does mean that deadlines are a little hit or miss.

As always, thanks for your patience! We will try to keep the forums updated on where we stand in the QA process. If you want to grab patch RC7 and try it out, OS X and Windows versions are now available in our forums.

What's this? I don't know. Look over there!

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Dredmor Patch Status

March 20, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

For those of you who aren’t hanging out in our forums (and why not?) Dredmor Patch 1.0.10 release candidate #7 has now been put up. So we’ve gone through seven of these now. So far things seem to be much more stable than 1.0.9, and I’m happy. I’m hoping that as soon as the testing Squad gives me the word, we can have this up on Steam, Desura, and the Humble Bundle download page by the end of the week.

Full changelog, and some Odin teasing, below.

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Patch 1.0.10 Changelog

February 16, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

EDIT: We totally forgot to mention that we’re PC Gamer’s Indie Game of the Year for 2011. Yeah. Oops. In celebration, we drew a wallpaper which they’re putting up at some point in the near future; we’ll host it over here as soon as they give us the go-ahead.

Gaslamp News

We have outgrown our offices, and are moving again! As previously briefly mentioned, the new offices have a spiral staircase and remind Daniel of the Ghostbusters (no pole though… yet). I interviewed for a job in this building eleven years ago, back when Black Box Games was still an independent studio and before they were purchased by EA. The thought of now renting an office, for Gaslamp, in the same building … is a little mindblowing.

I also have a giant mechanical clicking keyboard of doom now. It’s extremely noisy, and everybody else in the office hates it. I love it.

Dredmor News

Now that things are a little more organized on the Odin front, and now that our days are no longer a giant sink-hole of meetings and job interviews, we’ve found some time to finish pushing that patch out the door. A beta should be floating through the IRC channel any day now; at that point, we’ll have a week of testing, and then we will push everything to Steam, Desura, and the Humble Bundle. The current changelog is below the cut, as well as a handful of Odin teasers.

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More General Bits of News

February 3, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

Simba!

Some more quick news fluff from the front:

  • Congratulations to Gaslamp Programmer-Affiliate Ryan C. Gordon (better known as “icculus”, the great and knowledgeable), who is now the proud father of a lovely daughter. (This has slightly delayed our incoming patch yet more; just before dashing to the hospital, Ryan immediately said “Here! Have an entirely new SDL library and audio driver!” This fixes a lot of the stuttering issues, as well as various performance issues and crashes under OS X, but I’m currently quietly poking his changelist with a stick, somewhat afraid that it will bite me.) We have celebrated by having Chris Triolo produce this small homage to the Lion King.
  • We are pleased to announce that Sean Hamilton has joined the Gaslamp Games team. Sean will be working with us on Project Odin; since his arrival on the project, he has already produced three crates, a selection of small shanty houses, two logs, one ingot, and a mineshaft. Auspicious.
  • We are still looking for a character modeler and a gameplay programmer to do some contract work on Dredmor with us. I think we’ve got everything else taken care of  at this point. Exciting. If you think you’d be a good fit for either of these things, please drop us a line at jobs@gaslampgames.com ; I think, at this point, that we are restricting ourselves to locals after all for the most part.
  • There is vague talk of doing another Dredmor DLC pack, either as an additional paid expansion (of a form to be determined) or a free DLC package of some sort to be determined. Other than our continued commitment to patching and general subterfuge, is there anything else specific that you’d like to see from us? Let us know in the comments.
  • Finally, here’s another Odin teaser.
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Teensy Patch Hold-up

January 26, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

There’s been a little, unforeseen patch hiccup. Interestingly, this isn’t as a result of Dredmor, but as part of a Dredmor-related secret project that we have been working on, quietly and mysteriously. We’re not saying what it is yet, save that it is something that a lot of people have expressed interest in.

As a result of this work, we’ve had to remove two libraries from Dredmor, in order to replace them with… well, equivalents that are suitable. We have only just finished rewriting all of Dredmor’s audio code to use OpenAL; because this is a fairly major rewrite, we actually have to sit down and run a Real Beta now instead of just testing the bugfixes, vaguely making sure we didn’t break anything major, and calling it a day.

Some test binaries will probably show up in the IRC channel either late today or early tomorrow, and based on how well that turns out we will let you know what a better ETA for the patch looks like. This is mainly us being ultra-cautious and trying to make sure that we don’t shower you all with broken pixels and static in our quest for increased portability.

That said, the new audio is a heck of a lot better, and also fixes all the little lag issues when changing music or wandering in and out of stores. We’ve also managed to cut down on our memory use a bit as a result of this secret project, although we still have further work to do on this front. Levels now use about 20 megabytes less memory on average. It’s not quite enough for our svelte new lifestyle, but it’s a start.

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