Alpha 4.11 out in a day or two

Alpha 4.11 should be out tomorrow or the day after, European time.

Tested the fix, works.
Fixed some other bugs.
Added a little something.

While I was in the AI code I improved some stuff there.
...
Sounds good.
...
Of course "improved" does not mean "adding more bugs"
....
It's impossible.
....
Never happens.
....
Right?
....
Please :(

End of post.

Alpha 4.1 The Impeding Death Of The Freezing Bug

FREEZE BUG FROZEN
Thanks for sending all those save files. You guys are great!
The bug is confirmed. All the save files had the same bug.
The CivilianAI is looping on a sequence of Equip-Unequip-Equip-Unequip... which are free actions. This cause the game to hang as the actor never ends his turn.
I will work on fixing it. Make the equip/unequip action takes a turn is the wrong solution as it changes the gameplay and just delays the problem over several turns, I need to change the AI code.
Again, thank you and no need to send me save games for this bug anymore.


OTHER BUGS REPORT
Feel free to post on the Alpha 4.1 bug page, or mail me and send me saved games if you think you spotted a bug or a glitch.

4.11
The freeze bug is a major and needs fixing asap.
So I'll release 4.11 in a few days with a couple more fixes and a little something as bonus.

SAVE/LOAD TIME?
4.1 was supposed to improve loading and saving time performance.
I'd like to know if the effort paid.
Do your games seem to load faster or not?

End of post.

Alpha 4.1 Freezing Game Bug :-}

As the old Chinese saying goes : "new features = new bugs".
I think I know where it comes from but I must be sure before sentencing the culprit to death by coding.


THE BUG
The game appears to freeze randomly and you have to kill the application.


YOUR QUEST
- Play the game doh.
- Same very often. I mean very very often. Like often, but a lot.
- Oh My God! The dreaded Freezing Game bug! :-/
- Kill the game.
- Restart and load.
- If the bugs happens again at about the same time, "YOU ARE WINNER"! (well sorta).
- ZIP the save game file. It is located in your documents folder, eg:
C:\My Documents\\Rogue Survivor\alpha 4.1\Saves\save.dat
- Mail me, or if you can't, host the file somewhere (mediafire, rapidshare....).

MY QUEST
Well....
Mmmmh....
Let me think...
Drink a lot? No.
Have fun with fan girls?... Ah...


FIX THE DAMN BUG? Ah yes!
I'll do it in fun way :
- I'll play the game in debug mode and made a video of it, posted on youtube in my "Play!" serie.
- If the bug happens.I'll keep recording while I debug it, so you'll get to see the code and me raging at it :p
Bug hunt will start at part 7. Wish me luck (or un-luck).

THE REWARD
If all goes well,  I'll fix the bug asap and release a patch/a 4.11 version.

UPDATE:

If found a cause for the bug, but it might be not the only one. A similar bug might be lurking elsewhere so still need your help.

Here is the BugCast :p

Rogue Survivor - 7. BugCast Alpha 4.1!
Rogue Survivor - 8. BugCast Alpha 4.1!
Rogue Survivor - 9. BugCast Alpha 4.1!

For the curious/impatient, jump to the 3rd video at 8:00 to see the bug and the debug session.

End of post.

Alpha 4.1 release!

Release party! Download + Video (+ bunch of bugs)!


Download
http://www.mediafire.com/?2s4kecd284w0vd9

Video
"Let's Play" style, part of a new serie.
Have fun watching me fumbling, bumbling, mumbling and dying.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wmV1O_kgRg


Changelog

ALPHA 4.1 CHANGES
-----------------
Overview:
- Intel fix.
- Ingame help for new players (advisor, item ui help)
- The Hospital (building, map).
- Grenades (action, item).
- Canned Food (item).
- Civilians tips (AI).
- Hardy (skill).
- Late game ally (actor).
- Order to: build fortifications, report events (follower).
- Initiate trade (action).
- Share flashlight FoV bonus (rules).
- Various AI improvements.
- Redone difficulty computation (options).
- Log file to help bugs fixing.


FIXED BUGS
- Fixed crash and missing minimap on Intel video cards! Hurray!
- Fixed crash when attempting to build fortifications on walls.
- Gangstas raid was never triggered.
- Quit quits.
- Day 28 is Day 28.
- Modified starved zombification chance option appears in post mortem.
- Resized skill table so it always fits the screen.
- Jumpables objects do not block exits for actor who can jump.
- Fixed UI glitch where you could look at your inventory when pointing the mouse out of the map.
- Police Station TPWSNB won't trigger if he/she is sleeping.
- Crossbows won't jam anymore.
- Various bugs related to loading a game within a game (achievements, ghost characters...)
- When you die, doesn't wait for the turn to end to go back to the main menu.

PERFORMANCE
- Reduced average save and load time by 20% to 30%.
  Remember that pushing the options too far, especially city and district size, has a significant impact on performance.

GAMEPLAY
Map
- New Unique Maps & building : Hospital.
- Some civilians have stored weapons in their basements (rare).
Actor
- New Unique enemy.
- New recruitable late game ally.
- 2 new factions for the new actors.
Action
- New Action : throw grenades - blow up people and objects. Watch out for chain reactions.
- New Action : initiate trade - offer an item to trade.
Items
- New Item : Grenade.
- New Item : Canned Food.
- New Item : Combat Knife.
- New Unique Item.
- Some rare items are unbreakable and never get destroyed.
- Unique items are never destroyed.
- Wooden planks stacking limit up to 4 (was 3).
Sleeping
- Increased chances to heal when on sleeping a couch (5% vs 3%).
Skill
- New Skill : Hardy - Sleep can heal anywhere (no bed needed), more chances to heal when sleeping (1% per level).
Followers
- New Order : build small/large fortification.
- New Order : report events - which is equivalent to forcing them to tell you their tips.
- New Directive : throw/don't throw grenades - AIs is very cautious when throwing grenades, but you might want another fail-safe :p
FoV
- Standing next to someone with a flashlight on gives the same bonus has having one - you "share" the light.
Difficulty
- More complex calculation, with some parameters effects depending on other parameters (eg: nb of civilians vs zombification % and starving).
  Hard to predict the % effect of changing an option, but the basic effects make sense.
  As reference, min difficulty is 0% (!) and max difficulty 519%.

..And various minor tweaks.

INTERFACE & MANUAL
- In game advisor gives hints to help new players learn the basics - it's on by default.
- Bunch of advisor hints.
- Dying by ranged weapons says "shot" instead of "hit".
- Ranged weapons short description tells how many ammo left (eg: in other people inventory and on the ground).
- Shotgun "shells" not "cartridges".
- Items description in player inventory reminds of special keys or actions (fire, give...).
- Shows a "healing" icon when an actor is healing while sleeping (helpful for new players).
- Updated manual.
- Updated readme to mention the logfile.

GRAPHICS & MUSIC
- New gfx for new stuff.
- New activity icon for NPCs fleeing from explosives (see AI section).
- 3 new musics (total 15 musics).

OPTIONS
- New : Show Minimap on/off - special old school 4.0 emulation mode for hardcore Intel people :p
- City Size min:3 max:6.
- Enabled/Disable Advisor.

AI
- Civilians give tips about enemies, items, soldiers or raids they recently saw/heard. Keep your ears open!
- Followers told to not fire weapons will switch to melee weapons (or barehands) - so you can easily set them to melee or ranged fighter role.
- NPCs raising the alarm say which enemy they sighted.
- Leaders can switch place with their Followers - followers AI won't block leaders AI anymore.
- GangAI and CivilianAI followers stay closer to their Leaders.
- Trading AI refuse deals that makes no sense (eg: "my baseball bat for your baseball bat", "my pistol for your pistol ammo").
  You'll get a "has no interesting deal to offer." message.
- AI use blue pills more often.
- AI sleep more often.
- Improved sleep behavior for GangAI and SoldierAI.
- SoldierAI use medecines.
- Improved AI inventory management logic with weapons.
- Civilians make room for food items by dropping stuff when needed.
- Improved AI gear preference (doesn't affect trade)
  - equip best armor.
  - equip ranged weapons over melee weapons.
  - melee weapons preference : most damage first, then least STA penalty.
- CivilianAI and SoldierAI run away from primed explosives (eg: grenades).
- CivilianAI and SoldierAI *cautiously* throw grenades when appropriate : hurt group of ennemies, don't hurt friends.
- "CUF" map : once you visit the map, AIs will be able to use the exit/entry stairs - carefully choose when to open the pandora box ;)

KNOWN BUGS AND GLITCHES
- If you have a bug, mail the logfile.
- FoV is asymetric along walls.
- Rare crash at map generation complains about a missing CHAR Office.
- When changing some options the difficulty will go up, then slightly down, then resume up again.
- Long messages can be hard to read, use the Message Log command to read them in fullscreen (default Shift-M).


Have fun!
And remember, die with a smile!

SLEEPY
I am. Hope you guys won't need urgent bug fixes.

End of post.

4.1 Followers

Two new orders for followers.

Order : build small/large fortifications
Kinda obvious. It is now useful to give carpentry skill to your followers. Works like the other orders.

Order : report events
You can ask your followers to tell you about enemies, items, soldier or events they recently saw/heard.

Useful when you wake up or come back from a supplies raid and want to know what the hell happened.
This is basically a use of the civilians tips system so it was very easy to do.

Other stuff
Added two new tips about soldiers and events (raids, supplies drop etc...). Civilians are very talkative now.
And a few new stuff I didn't talk about, some of which are requests or suggestions by players. I don't want to spoil all 4.1 novelties, so I'll keep these a secret :-}
Hopefuly you'll found out soon when you get the game in a few days.

STOP!
Again I have to stop the feature creep if I want to respect my deadlines.
Alpha 4.1 is starting to think it is Alpha 5 ;(

End of post.

First graphics mod, 4.1, MP & Zombie mode

GFX MOD
User Chiko has made a graphics mod.
Check out the MODs page above!

4.1
Should be out within a week. I'm testing and consider adding/changing a few minor stuff to make the wait worth it.

Multiplayer mode? No.
There is a demand from a multiplayer mode. Sorry but my answer won't change : no.
Since I keep getting that asked, even if the answer is in FAQ,  I'll explain the reasons.

1. The game engine is purely Single-Player. That is, I designed the game architecture and done the code to support Single-Player only. Even without changing the gameplay, a multiplayer mode as people want would requiere a different kind of architecture, a Client-Server architecture. Changing architecture means rewriting an insane amount of the code. Its easy to do a Single-Player engine from a Multi-Player engine (eg: you can code fake clients or bots), the otherway around is not and at best is cumbersome both for the dev (repeatedly failing sanity check) and the players (lots of data exhanged over the network for each game turn).
2. The gameplay, a turn-by-turn roguelike, is not suited to multiplayer at all. You would have to wait for the other guys to move to do anything. Its ok for a strategy game where turns are long and you can use the time to think, its not ok in a game with very short turns and you act more than you think. Again, changing this aspect to better suit mutli-player means rewriting a bunch of code.

Play as Zombie mode? Maybe.
If I ever get to the point where me and the players are satisfied with the "play as living" mode (the current one),  and it has everything I wanted it to have, and it is balanced, and fun to play, and this and that, I'll consider doing a "play as zombie" mode.
Contrary to the MP mode, the game architecture would support it with no problems. The only major annoyance would be the UI and a couple of things related to how the player is handled.
The way I see it, there would be two modes:

1. Start the game as an undead instead of a survivor.
2. You died, continue your game as your own zombie.

I personally don't like mode 2, because this would make the living part of the game much less interesting ("I died. So what? I continue as zombie.") but I'll add it. For this reason, the game won't allow switching between the two freely during the game (no revive etc...).

End of post.

4.1 Civilians AI improvement

Follower alarm improvement
When one of your follower raise the alarm he will tell you what enemy he sighted.
Small improvement, but might be useful, especially if you keep contact by cellphone.
If you told him to guard your shelter and it is only a skeleton, it might not be worth the trouble to go back there in a hurry.

Civilian Tips
Civilian will have conversation about enemies and items they recently saw. Just hang around them and you might hear interesting tips.
Useful if you are searching for a specific item, or you were fleeing south and a guy comes at you and tell about about a disciple lurking there...

If players like this feature and it doesn't spam the message log too much I'll extend the feature for other kind of tips, such as buildings location (eg: "There's a groceries shop 18 tiles to the NW") or soldiers patrol.

This feature was very easy to implement thanks to the AI Percept system. The building thing will requiere a different implementation though.

End of post.

4.1 Grenades insanity

AI & Grenades
I'm done writing the AI to avoid grenades. Only Civilians and Soldiers will avoid grenades, the rest won't - including Gangs, so that's a weakness you can exploit to get rid of large groups of them.

Coding the AI for throwing grenades has to be done carefully. I don't want the NPCs to blow each other up or worse kill the player. If not done properly, hilarity could ensues. At the expense of the player.
For this reason I toned down grenade damage, they are only guaranteed kill for humans if you stand on them.

Chain Reaction
An explosive caugh in an explosion(sic) will explode(re-sic) even when not primed. Chain reaction.
That means you will be able to setup nice grenade traps.
For instance:

1. Drop unprimed grenades along a path within the blast radius of each other.
2. Bait the horde to follow your along the path.
3. Throw a grenade behind you.
4. Watch the fireworks.

You can image all sort of FUN, including giving unprimed grenades to people and then throwing a grenade next to them. You know you want to.

End of post.

4.1 Grenades

Grenades are done.
Still have to do the AI for handling them and spawn them in the game world.

Grenades...What are they?
Throwable anti-personal explosives.
You can throw them up to a certain range, the skill Strong helps you throwing farther.
You throw them at a tile, not a target.
They have a very short fuse and a blast radius. You basically have one turn to run away after throwing them.
Can't "cook" grenades sorry, but you can take them back if you are insane enough.

Grenades... How do they work?
Like this.
Equip and fire.
You can throw/lob grenades over most things, including other people.
You do not need to view the target tile, so you can usually throw farther than you can see.
They do not bounce on things though.

Grenades... Do they kill?
Yes.

I know what you are thinking and the answer is : yes, you can indirectly kill other survivors with that :)
The blast is blocked by stuff, so you can image tactics like opening a door, throwing the grenade in a packed room and closing the door, if done properly the door will absord the damage of the blast.

Grenades... Do they destroy things too?
Yes, but only breakable objects. They are not for demolition (C4 will come later) and not very good for breaking resistant objects. They are meant to kill people.

Grenades... I like them!
Me too.

End of post.

Fffffuuuuuu

I thought I'd share one of of those "Ffffuuuuu" moments.

You know the feeling...
I can't go down the stairs either, I know who lurks there...

The game was an excuse to test all the advisor hints and the hospital in a real game context. Plus a couple of other stuff.

Died a few turns later. Fun.

End of post.

Player videos aar & 4.1

LET'S PLAY
PlumpHelmetPunk is making Rogue Survivor gameplay videos.
He has also tons of videos for fun little games.
PlumpHelmetPunk youtube channel

4.1
Not much to report. Still doing the advisor hints. There are 26 hints now covering the basics and there is a few more to add to cover fortification and leadership. It's hard to explain enough to get the player started without turning the hint system into a manual-bis.

The Hospital is completed. Lots of healing goodies there, but it could be a deathtrap if you're too late or unprepared.

I still have to:

• add the first "throwable bomb" weapons : dynamite/grenades and/or molotovs.
• add the new ally.
• expand the plot a bit, with something happening "down there" once you have done the achievement.
• the "build stuff" order.
• fix the remaining bugs/glitches.
• minor things.

End of post.

Alpha 4.1 : Advisor hints.

A nice new feature to help clueless new players who don't know the basic controls.
I also noticed that a significant number of players seems to ignore the existance of some features (using exits, pushing objects...)

ADVISOR HINTS
You can enable an Advisor (on by default).
The Advisor will monitor your situation and provide appropriate hints.
When the Advisor has a hint available, a little annoying popup appears and prompt the player to go read the hint. You can ignore it and keep playing, but because it's kinda intrusive you'll want to read it ;)
The hints are fired from the most basic ones (eg: how to move) to more complex ones (eg: how to fire a weapon), so it won't tell you the more advanced stuff until you have read all the simpler ones.

For example, as soon as you start a new game the Advisor wants to tell you how to move:

Later on the Advisor has a suspicious fetish for items and doors:

(missing H in Shelf)

I'll add enough hints to hopefully make the basic controls and gameplay clear.
Roguelike/RS veterans can safely disable the Advisor option.

CODING
Nothing special, but it's been quite a long time I didn't show some coding stuff so let's talk about the implementation.
Thanks to the way I've done the engine (go me!) and the wonderful world of C# lambdas, it was very easy and quick to implement.
For instance, to check if it's time to trigger the "Look! You can open a door" hint I just write a line like this:
                    return map.HasAnyAdjacentInMap(pos, (pt) =>
                        {
                            DoorWindow door = map.GetMapObjectAt(pt) as DoorWindow;
                            if (door == null)
                                return false;
                            return m_Rules.IsOpenableFor(m_Player, door);
                        });
(thanks for messing the formatting, Mr Blogger)

Then I just maintain a table of hints that were already fired, to ignore those.
The Advisor state is stored in the Session object, so it is saved with the game.

End of post.

Players Wiki & 4.1

PLAYERS WIKI
A group of Rogue Survivors has started a Wiki.
http://roguesurvivor.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
I'll add a link on the blog for great justice!

4.1
Reduced save and load time by 20-30% by:
- changing all byte and short types to int (!).
- changing some of Session class fields to Arrays instead of Dictionaries where appropriate (so it doesn't waste memory).
- customizing Map class serialization to save only primary fields and reconstruct auxiliary fields at deserialization.
Fixing bugs and glitches.
Started the Hospital.

End of post.