We are doomed..

-> I cannot wait to try it. JADE is one of these mega-hyper-roguelike
projects,
> which usually never get anywhere, but given TB's track record.. maybe he
> will actually do it..

I'm reasonably sure he will. His dev style seems a lot like mine,
in that he works on something heavily privately and then releases
it only when it satisfies him.

> ADOM is already the most popular roguelike,

NetHack might contest that; Crawl is rising, too.

> Here is a copy of the JADE feature list, just to remind you:
> --------
> A complete world with continents, weather patterns, settlements, dungeons
> and strange places, either randomly generated at the start of each game or
> chosen from a number of preselected worlds
>
> [...] together with a guild system
> providing special benefits for guild membership.
>
> Complete freedom in what you want to do (e.g. explore dungeons, work as a
> caravan guardian, build your own castle, conquer cities, lead a life as a
> simple farmer, become a shopkeeper or whatever).
>
> Hidden plots.
>
> Monster inventories.
>
> The ability to transform into another being.
>
> A detailed system for morale values (on an Order...Balance...Chaos scale)
> and ethics (on a Good...Uncaring...Evil scale).
>
> Compressed save files.

There's a _lot_ of symmetry here with my planned design goals
for the "full" Return of the Forsaken version of Incursion, which I
will admit I find a bit intimidating. Still, I think this kind of
feature-
list has been fairly standard for those who aspire to "next-gen"
roguelikes for a while now, /especially/ since Dwarf Fortress has
shown that the whole random world gen thing is actually viable
in real life.

I wanted to post about the feature list symmetry, because it
seems that Incursion and ADOM are going in very similar
directions, and Incursion is a much younger game and will
take longer to "get there", so I'm going to get "scooped" and
end up looking like I'm ripping off ADOM.

Ah, well, Thomas has always been one of the great innovaters
in the RL community, and I wish him all the best in getting JADE
out to all his fans. I tend to believe it will have been worth the
wait!

> I guess for the rest of us that means we will have to take our projects and
> hide in shame

I will admit to feeling very intimidated by this, initially, but on
consideration that isn't really either a rational or a mature
response. It does look like newer games may get beaten
in the feature race by JADE, but really what does that matter
in the long run? Most players play several different games,
anyway.

I think there's definitely room for more than one "next-gen" RL;
in addition to my own ambitions, Dwarf Fortress is very clearly
moving in the same "sim-world freedom" direction, and I suspect
it is more mature in the world-sim area than ADOM 0.1 will be.

NetHack, Angband and Omega all co-existed in their time
without impinging on each other, after all -- I can't imagine that
the current generation will be any different.

> If TB really manages to make this a reality, he will move the roguelike
> genre to a whole new level.

If JADE really does everything listed above, then it surely
deserves a great deal of credit for blazing ahead on the trail
the rest of us ('us' being conventional fantasy RL devs) will
follow!

Definitely curious,

-- Julian Mensch

On 2007-12-31 17:18:42, Ray Dillinger <bear RemoveThis @sonic.net> wrote:

> Jeff Lait wrote:
>
> > On an unrelated note, I'm having a lot of fun watching POWDER in
> > stress test mode. Last night I found another rare crash bug after
> > 470,000 moves. Current run is up to 443,500 moves without crashing...
>
> On a related note, I thought your unrelated note was
> interesting enough to start its own thread.
>
> Do I understand correctly that you have a robot tester,
> or "borg", that you can run in your game for the express
> purpose of finding bugs?
>
> Cool!
>
> Now I'm imagining the feature set one wants for such a
> thing: Like starting at a random level with a random
> character after each crash (with some fraction exercising
> the initial character-generation code), etc.
>
> Do you proceed by feeding random characters into the
> keyboard buffer, or have you coded an AI in a serious
> attempt to win? Or some combination of the two, like
> "every fifth move random" or something?
>
> I made a standard debugging output where debug "trace"
> statements write sentences about what the game is doing.
> If the game crashes I can pop up TrDebug.txt and see
> what it was doing right before it crashed. That has
> helped a lot.
>
> What do other people do?
>
> Bear
>

I assert return values in functions prior to returning them. I have those
messages either thrown into the player message log, or stop the game execution
and display on screen.

I have caught several crashes this way.

Finding the bugs that don't crash the game are harder to pinpoint with this
method, so
I test by implememting a feature and playing the game for several minutes before
and after each coding session. This allows me to observe game behavior that
isn't what I want, so I can make changes.

Adding this automated testing sounds like a great idea, I'm adding it to my todo
list for development tools.
--
Elsairon