v0.76 to be released shortly.

New stuff : better AI, a whole range of spells with proper balancing of damage for the more clever monsters.
All monsters up to level 10 are now in the game.
I have also moved over to the open source installer program from Nullsoft.
It's free, which is nice since it's all I can afford at the moment anyway.
Some impressive piece of programming there from that team of coders as it is extremely
efficient and produces a very compact installer executable.
Struggled for a while to customise the interface as the examples are pretty sparse and
I had to guess a lot of stuff to get things going.
Got Fallout 3 recently and I rate it much higher than Oblivion.
Thoroughly recommended for all who enjoy some post-apocalyptic nulear wasteland exploring
whilst demolishing super mutants and other nasty creatures that populate that 1950's fantasy
future world set in a ravaged Washington DC.
Heard good things about Dead Space and Far Cry 2 as well but those will have to wait a bit.

vulture's slash'em/nethack

Left4Dead week will feature one short piece on Left4Dead each day this week to celebrate the full release of the game.

The problem with the AI director is that I think the implementation works too well for zombies, and won’t be adaptable enough for anything else. The quiet, eerie moments of being unsure whether an area will be filled with mindless undead, crouched shivering in a corner, leaning helplessly against a wall or vomiting up raw chunks of flesh, or completely empty; the variation in threats from rushing hordes, against the lesser special zombies (boomer, smoker or hunter), the adrenal rush of fighting a tank or trying to creep past a witch.

Contrast this with Half-Life 2, where there is a similar variety in enemies, but all of which are pre-figured by the environment you are moving through: no mix of head crabs, combine and Ant Lions together would make as much sense. And the simplicity of the zombie AI will make it hard to have a similar flood, of say, Nazis en mass. Any more intelligence in the enemies than that which the zombies display would dilute the flood to a surge or trickle, as they found alternate routes, held back or hid within the level to wait for you. The techniques used by the ALife in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. makes more sense for the most games: where each enemy has a distinct personality and set of goals to move through large free roaming levels.

1056. Wounds start at 1039. The next 9 of what's left are, with a few plant updates, various instances of bone, leather, pearl, ivory, horn, shell, blood, fat, tallow, slime, soap and so on that need to be updated to conform to the new raw entries and code structures. There are lots of weekend days this month -- as many as possible -- so I don't have much time left until the month-end break, but I've got another few days.

OMG, the world's BEST roguelike game, Ancient Domains Of Mystery (awesome!) is available for the Mac.

Since my youth (e.g. since the mid-1990s) I have several goals concerning game development, and befo...