Incursion: d20 Roguelike

Rhesus Positive

Cheers, mongrol - the WoW servers are down, so it's good timing

Edit: It's failing to open for me. Anybody else having this problem on a Mac?

Estoc

Any recent stories of awesomeness? I kinda stopped playing for a bit after I lost a Mage (Necromancer) on the bottom floor to a "friendly" boner delver. Ha, Freud++. The only thing worse than a bone delver wailing and trying to run you down is a neutral delver who just happens to pass you by and give you grave rot at the same time. About two turns later it's YASD since I realized I forgot to brew a potion of cure disease which would have easily saved me like the last time I ran into a "friendly" bone delver.

I hate bone delvers with every fiber of my being.

mongrol

Rhesus,
Just tested the download from the website and it works fine here. What part doesn't open? Dmg? or the .app itself? Also, did you download a .dmg or a dmg.tar file? I'm sure I seen a tar file there the other day but today it's a straight .dmg.

KiTA

Sooooooo.

Old thread is old. but then again, old game is old. He apparently started developing this again at the start of the year and actually has been getting a lot of work done this month.

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009. Version 0.6.9I

So, some quite unfortunate news in the Incursion scheduling department. At the end of the Heritage Day long weekend at the start of August, I went back over the schedule and timeline that I made for myself when I began the revision of the game in January, and checked time-allotted versus time spent. I have been pathologically underestimating time requirements of various tasks in my wholesale revision of the game, as well as failing to include prerequisite or "more efficient to do now" tasks, and as a result am yet again unable to meet a stated deadline -- it's basically impossible at this point for me to have anything to release for Halloween this year, as I'm still mired in improving IncursionScript, the event system and the dev tools. I hope this major section of the work will be largely complete soon.

Reviewing my scheduling notes from when I started the revision, it seems that each task I had allotted one week for has taken 4-6 weeks (!) to complete in practice. The good news, here, is that I'm just coming up on being halfway through the revision task list overall, which indicates a constant state of forward progress on the revision of the game engine.

Despite the constant delays, recent devwork on the game has been very productive. Multiple goals have been met, including:

A functioning rewrite of the event backbone of the game, allowing much more precise control over event handler timing and data propagation between parent and child events in both directions.
A near-complete recoding of the game's combat engine to be much more extensible and to handle the timing of combat events, overrides and modifiers much more precisely, and to document it to the extent that I can at least maintain it effectively.
A similar revision and documentation of the "magic effect processing" engine that should make it much easier to keep spells and magic items functioning properly as the list grows longer and longer.
A complete rewrite of the IncursionScript compiler in a new compiler-generator tool, ANTLR, as well as adding many features for debugging and troubleshooting to the compiler and bytecode virtual machine.
Many new language features added to the IncursionScript language, specifically including:
Much better type safety and type checking to prevent very difficult-to-spot bugs.
A text-processing facility that will serve to generate better random names, randomized story text for quests and character backgrounds, a much better and easier-to- work with method of building the manual and the in-game descriptions of monsters and items, and so forth.
An 'XData' engine, which allows type-safe data to be declared, named by identifier and associated with any specific instance of a game object (creature, item, map) and allocated on demand only as needed.
This very flexible language subsystem will allow more complex spells and magical effects to be implemented, and will also serve to make existing effects which must store special-case data much more stable and easier to debug.
A general quantum leap in richness, moving the language complexity and features significantly upward.
A facility for writing "validator" scripts to verify other scripts and test for illegal cases, allowing a sort of automated testing of script code to prevent subtle bugs.
I am (largely) finished a side-project which grew very complex and more time-consuming (albiet fun and informative) to integrate the IncursionScript language with Visual Studio, allowing syntax highlighting, background compilation for syntax checking, go-to-definition, autocomplete, etc.
The code dealing with the dungeon map has been rewritten and refactored to incorporate the data structures necessary for a truly three-dimensional dungeon, with much greater realism, logic and consistency in handling terrain. While there is still a great deal of work to do here, the metaphorical foundation has been laid and the cement is dry -- it's just waiting to be fleshed out with new dungeon resource scripts and terraforming code.
Display code has been modified and augmented to support the use of 256 colors rather than the prior 16.
Conversion of character mod calculation, saving throws, skill checks, map generation, encounter generation and area-of-effect calculation into a (more) event-based framework, allowing them to interact more naturally with the scriptcode and to be more customizable.
The data structures governing Creature statistics and special abilities have been completely rewritten as well, to conform much more closely to the d20 ruleset. This will allow monsters to choose their own feats, gain levels in classes just as the player does and so forth.
Feats and skills are now treated as game resources by the engine instead of being hard-coded as arrays and C++ static data, and are fully in the 'script' section of the game. (Of course, individuals skills and feats will take a lot of work to get working again under this new framework...)
Specific, intelligent objects to govern screen glyphs, durations of time, map locations, etc. which both make code cleaner and decrease the chance of subtle errors by self-verification.
The honest truth is, at this point I really don't know when the game will be back to a releasable state. The game currently loads and runs, and is as at stage where you can move the '@' around on the screen and hit-and-kill a few test monsters -- but by and large it's not functional and not playable as a game. I am very reluctant to talk about specific release dates because I've made a huge number of changes to the base data strcuture of the game, and have a very large body of new code that hasn't been (and can't be) properly tested yet. I don't really have a good handle on how long it will take to get all the old features (class abilities, race abilities, monsters, dungeon features, skills, spells, god effects, terrain, social actions, etc. etc.) working correctly with the new engine. Some -- especially those transitioning from hardcode to resources -- will need to be wholly or partially rewritten to work. Most will at least need to be debugged again and tweaked.

It is likely at this point that I will not be able to continue to devote full-time focus to Incursion for the full duration needed to finish the revision without taking another hiatus to work on other projects -- probably a span in the six-month range which isn't fully scheduled yet. Since I'm about 50% through the revision tasks and it took eight months, it seems to be a rational assumption that I need at least another eight months of dev time to get the new game ready for release. I doubt I'll keep up steam to do all that without a hiatus, nor honestly do I want to ignore my other projects for that long a period.

I'm tentatively eyeing Oct 31, 2010 as a possible release date -- moving the prior stated date forward by one year -- in part, honestly, because I find the 'release for Halloween' gimmick attractive. However, I realize at this point that I'm very, very bad at predicting development timeframes, so I'm not making any promises.

I'll post more news about the dev process as it happens, and hopefully by the time I'm ready to take another hiatus, I'll have a firmer idea of the timeframe.

Mighty

im getting a weird bug. Whenever i play the game it randomly decides that its a great idea to go all wonky visually and then windows says it has encountered a serious error.

I don't know how to make it stop doing this. and i only became a problem after i reincarnated my favorite character 10 to 15 times.

So i tried deleting everything and reinstalling, and it STILL DOES IT. i have had it happen when moving quickly (holding down an arrow key) but i also had it happen when i wasn't doing anything in game, and while i was generating a PC's stats.

Does anyone else have this issue?

Mighty

this just in guys, if you are using steam, it will crash incursion whenever there is an alert, so either disable alerts, or quit steam when playing, unless you like fatal errors.