Category Archives: Dungeons of Dredmor

Community Spotlight #3

January 27, 2012 by Daynab

Hey everyone! It’s modding time again. I wanted to touch up on some older mods this week and will be doing so as well in the next weeks, but Ruigi surprised us with a new masterwork that deserved immediate mention. And that is…


Runecaster

“You’re very scholarly, you also make runes.”

Runecaster is a wizard skill that combines crafting with spell casting. You create runes out of mana, which you then combine with the n-Dimensional lathe to create runewords. These runewords are throwing weapons that cast a spell when hitting enemies/the ground.

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Modding | Tagged , , ,
2 Comments

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.

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Games, Gaslamp | Tagged , , , ,
19 Comments

Community Spotlight #2

January 19, 2012 by Daynab

Hi everybody, it’s modding time again! Last week I talked about a few melee/crafting mods, so it’s fair to delve in sorcery this time around. These are two skills I enjoyed playing with because they add variety and support to existing magic options.


Wind Magic

“You are the master of all winds in the sealed off underground dungeon with no access to the sky.”

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Modding | Tagged , , , ,
9 Comments

Dredmor; Odin

January 16, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

A quick status update: Dredmor should be getting a second patch – 1.0.10 – this Thursday, or – worst-case scenario next Tuesday. (I’m not releasing patches on Fridays any more. Once bitten, twice shy.) This will be going to Steam, Desura, and the HIB simultaneously, so everybody will finally be up to date. This fixes the bookshelf crash, the weird loading of saves related crashes on OS X and Linux machines, and adds a few cosmetic niceties (working magic reflection, remembering what mods are loaded, remembering if you have disabled click-to-move, random boss monsters occasionally having additional magic resistance, that kind of thing) that have been on people’s lists for awhile.

We have been uncommunicative lately, and this is our fault. Owing to external factors which we cannot announce yet, we have suddenly found ourselves catapulted into Project Odin, almost full-time, somewhat quicker than we anticipated. We’re not entirely sure how much we can talk about this yet, which is problematic, and everybody is probably wondering what’s going on. Ah, growing pains. (This has also been one of the reasons why we are looking for additional gameplay programmers; at least one person will be working on Dredmor with me, on a full-time basis, for the next few months.)

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Other Games, Programming | Tagged ,
45 Comments

Community Spotlight #1

January 11, 2012 by Daynab

Hi everyone! I am Daynab, resident community/tester/DoD enthusiast guy. I’m gonna be doing weekly posts about mods and other things going on over at the forums and elsewhere.

The past few weeks have shown an amazing growth in interest and we’re now up to around 30 functional mods. It may not seem like much, but keep in mind they’re pretty major, such as completely new skill lines. Since I can’t describe every one in a single post, here are two among my personal favorites.

(Please read this guide if you don’t know how to install mods.)

Clockwork Knights

This skill is an interesting combination between combat and crafting. It boosts your survival by giving you a trap scanner and some movement spells, and it ups your general crafting skills while giving access to a bunch of special new recipes for (mostly) melee characters.

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , ,
4 Comments

Happy New Year!

January 7, 2012 by Nicholas Vining

Well, folks, we made it to 2012. Barely, but we made it. For those of you worried about the Mayan Doom Prophecy – fear not! Like all good Canadians, we scoff at your doom prophecies, and know that there are in fact 100 years until the arrival of the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx.

Our contact e-mail is completely jammed up, and we’re trying to work through everything, but here’s some news and status updates on things.

First off: the hotfixes that we put out earlier for various save issues over Christmas are now live on Steam and Desura. We’ll be putting another one up later this week to clean up an additional three crash issues that have reared their ugly heads. If you installed a hotfix from our webpage, we recommend uninstalling local content and making sure you grab a fresh install from Steam. If it does *not* say something like “1.0.9 REVISION B” on the title screen, something’s gone wrong.

There have been a few reports of older save games still being broke on OS X; we’re on it. That said, we have also heard reports of older save games working just fine on OS X, so… it’s a bit puzzling, really.

Second off: Desura and HIB users who want to purchase the Realm of the Diggle Gods, we are working on this but have no ETAs yet. As soon as we know how we’re going to do this and have it set up, we’ll let you know. Watch this space.

Third off: with Dredmor and the expansion pack behind us, our plan at this point is to finish stabilizing any last issues caused by the 1.0.7->1.0.8->1.0.9 patch cycle, and then to keep proceeding with smaller, more incremental patches. Hopefully we should be as stable at the end of this week as we were when we released 1.0.6 (voted “Most Stable Patch of 2011” by our user base.) Balancing and fixes are a continual process, and we’re taking our inspiration from Team Fortress 2 in terms of how we’d like Dredmor to continue evolving. (This does not include a) a hat store, b) becoming free-to-play, c) “Meet the Diggle.”) We’re also looking at the mod support that we put in with release 1.0.7; people have made some *very* cool things, and we are going to continue to provide support for this developing part of the community. Additionally, we will be starting a “mod spotlight” feature on the blog, featuring a mod selected once… every so often… by our community moderator, Mathieu “Daynab” Dugon. We should have the first one up sometime next week.

Finally: not content to rest on our laurels, this week has officially marked the start of work on Project Odin. I am up to my neck in network code and the innards of Google V8, David has been drawing concept art and running art tests, and Daniel is doing The Dark Paperwork. What are we up to? Well… watch this space for hints.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp, Programming | Tagged , , ,
35 Comments

Post-Holiday Update

December 28, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

EDIT 3:This is now on Desura. Once it looks like nothing else has gone hideously wrong, we’ll move it to Steam and the HIB.

EDIT 2:Alright Mac users, we’ve heard you. You think you’ve got what it takes to apply HOTFIXES. Well, here you go. Grab it, try it, let us know what you think; you’ll need to put it in your Dungeons of Dredmor.app in Contents/MacOS – it should replace an existing file called Dredmor.

All this chicanery will be on Steam and Desura some time tomorrow, provided that just throwing the patches out there doesn’t show us any new problems. 🙂

EDIT: We have a patch being tested that fixes the other three major issues with 1.0.9: mysterious portal issues, the crashing after level 1, and quest hordes not spawning. Windows users, if you want to test the patch at home: grab it here and throw that EXE into your Steam/steamapps/common/dungeons of dredmor folder. Mac users, we can’t give you a test patch quite as easily, but rest assured, we’re working on it. Again, this is an unofficial test patch, and is offered without guarantees, but we would like to know if it works or not. (It should, theoretically, fix your old crashing saves, too.)

Having survived the ancient ritual known as “Christmas with the Families”, we are back in the office today. For what it’s worth, I’m not sure that we actually remember how to relax any more.

That said: we’re back, we’re fixing things. Expect some kind of a status update on a) the OS X nonsense, b) the missing quest monsters, c) getting all of this pushed to Steam – in a bit.

Now has anybody seen my fire extinguisher…?

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor, Gaslamp | Tagged , , , ,
113 Comments

Bride of the Scorpion Diggle

December 22, 2011 by Nicholas Vining

EDIT: Hotfix below! See below the cut.
EDIT 2: OS X users, we are working on getting you something as fast as we can, but it will likely be after boxing day. (This is mainly due to the fact that I am on the road, and have no access to a Mac.) That said, we are aware of the situation and you guys are my first priority.

First off, my apologies for both letting the teleportation glitch – and our resulting slow response time – happen. In the case of the glitch happening: patch 1.0.9 got rushed in order to try and get it out before the holidays; this turned out to be a bad move. It was my judgement call, and in hindsight we should have given it more QA time (although, interestingly, we did test old saves) and just released it after Boxing Day. In the case of the response time… this is a little more entertaining. Daniel gave me the word, via cellphone, that something was wrong; unfortunately, at the time I was stuck on a Grayhound headed for the middle of nowhere, visiting relatives – having previously been lulled into a false sense of security by the quiet patch reception caused by… well, by the patch not actually being released yet.

Oops.

Mad panic ensued – which is not easy to do on a bus – but I managed. Having now recovered the laptop, and having now found wireless Internet thanks to the good people at Starbucks, we have some answers.

First off: yes, we can fix your save games. I will be putting up a hotfix tonight; I’m not sure how fast we will be able to get things onto Steam and Desura. Humble Bundle users – since this only actually affects 1.0.8 savegames, you *should* be okay.

Second off: this only affects save games made with Dredmor 1.0.8. Dredmor 1.0.9 saves should be fine.

Again, I apologize for this mess and will be coming up with some additional QA improvements in the future.  I will personally find some way to make it up to you in January with something awesome.

{ read this article }

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , ,
78 Comments