Geocties now has an hourly limit of 4.2MB. Say if a release is 700KB that a maximum of 6 per hour, excluding browsing. Which is generally not bad overall. But what when a release comes up there is usualy a much higher numbe of people visiting than usual, and hence higher browsing and downloading in a shorter period of time. Then the 4.2MB might be a pain.

Could just wait and see, but it’s probably time to go to change host anyway, shouldn’t keep using “kostatus” in the address for the game.

Tripod is the best alternative I see, but while Geocities works out to be bout 3GB bandwidth p/m (though with the evil hourly limit), Tripod is 1GB p/m (but without the evil limit).

I propose we change the name. Several reasons.

1. The “woods” theme hasn’t been used very much, and I don’t think it will be anytime soon, if ever.
2. “Woods of Torbin” is a bit too long of a name for people to type into an address bar. Having http://www.geocities.com/woodsoftorbin/ is a bit silly, so the acronym wot is used, but this acronym is too common. Googling for it would give you millions of result and no sign of our game anywhere near the top. Even googling for “WoT game” would give you something else - The Wheel of Time.
3. Using “WoT” in the URL is too ambiguous (not to mention them being taken most of the time), using “kostatus” as I do now is a bit silly.
4. Adding “RL” for Roguelike at the end of the name would not make sense in this issue. WoTRL? YUK!

So as much I have gotten used to and attached the name Woods of Torbin and WoT, I think we will need a change.

I haven’t thought up a definite replacement yet, it’s hard. But here are a few proposals (I am not too warmed up to either one actually):

• Torbin
• TorbinRL
• Kostellas (Kostatus+Atholas=Kostellas, a bit ridiculous though… And sort of like naming a city “Stalingrad” after yourself)
• Something in a foreign language typed up in English. I like Papaki’s name.

By Kostatus

A roguelike trailer: http://fin.broodwar.com/dbd-alpha.avi

By Kostatus

Some draft goals that we need to complete before the next release:

1. Melee and Ranged fighting fully implemented.
2. Save games and persistent levels.
3. Fully implemented inventory handling system.
4. A town map, and maybe even a world map.
5. Support for “simple graphics” which includes the ASCII tiles.
6. Food and hunger (at least for the PC)
7. Character selection (”birth”)
8. Some way to win the game.
9. At least a demo-level body part damage system.
10. At least a demo-level shop system (shop assistant goes to back of store-room)

More to be added later!

By Kostatus

Latest Java docs are now available for browsing at http://wot.00pro.com/docs/.

By Kostatus

Before I post anything further, I fixed the bug mentioned in the last post. I for some reason started writing some pretty crazy debugging messages. Here is one:

DEBUG: Summer rain. Summer pain. Summer rains when Summer faints.
When Summer ends and life gets tough, drink some vodka, take some puff.

This was inspired by the previous one:

How I love thee when thee crash, oh summer love

One of the WoT developer is a Russian, hence the reference to vodka :-p Just to poke some fun at him.

by Atholas

The A* as it stands is rather bug-free and is working pretty well on all the tests I have done on it. I ended up using a TreeMap, and 2 HashMap for A* for the fastest operation. The testing revealed some pitfalls in the creature generation code, so it was quality time spent. I have notified Kostatus about this bug, and might fix it myself. This turned out to be a pretty small bug, so no big deal there.

When I am confident enough to commit the code, I will start on working on Melee. Kostatus has been working on status display, items and some other stuff. I might redirect the Melee part to Kostatus and work on some new features for the creatures (which I won’t make any further announcement about — a surprise for those who will play the release due to debut soon), depending on how fast Kostatus can get some basic item working.

I am a little unhappy about our new developer not making any commits yet. I hope that it is only laziness rather than crisis that is dragging him behind… but since Kostatus and I have picked up the speed on development (so much that the documentation for my part of the code constantly get outdated), this shouldn’t cause any trouble for the mid-Feb release. I must go update the documentation soon.

Watch this space.

By Atholas

• All the features of the (unreleased) 0.0.3
• Random World Map
• Random town maps
• Basic conversations with NPCs
• Sound-driven AI for some creatures
• Highscores

By Kostatus

All the basic behaviors of the Creature class we have planned are now in place. The class should be virtually bug-free as it stands, but I will need to check some of the areas where equipping and removing an item is involved, as I recall some miscommunicating between Kostatus and I. But whether or not this is bug-free, we have the basis for building the other features for WoT. In the process of completing Creature class, I have made some major changes to the BodyParts class. In fact, I had made numerous changes to the layout of the packages because of the Creature class. I hope that no more big changes is necessary, so that we can start to concentrate on implementing features rather than infrastructures.

With the exams coming to an end (Kostatus is still having his) the pace of development should start to pick up very quickly. Although it has not been officially announced, we do have a third developer on the team to take care of some of the GUI stuff. While he has not not committed any codes yet, I look forward to him relieving Kostatus of his GUI work, so that both Kostatus and I can take care of other stuff and pushes the development along.

I began to develop some visions for what I want to see in the future of WoT, but right now, what is important is to restore WoT back to its old “glory”. The current in-house demo of WoT looks much nicer than the old WoT, and the dungeon/room generated is more varied. What we really need to do next is to tidy up the codes (my portion of the code base is quite messy because of the big changes), and get the other small details ironed out. Hopefully our new developer will be able to create items for us, so that we don’t have to work on the tedious job. Before the summer ends, we should be able to get WoT up to, or even surppress, the last 0.0.3 code bsae.

My current goal for the project is to get WoT back to and beyond its 0.0.3 predecessor before mid February in 2006.

As for now, I am going to take care of the melee attack code once Kostatus and I start discussing the future plans for features. Looks like it is going to be a really busy summer.

by Atholas

Yay! That was a nightmare to implement.

Using Björn Bergström’s recursive shadowcasting algorithm which can be found here.
It gives very good looking results especially for large sight ranges (as you can see in a demo app that can also be found on his site). And it is reasonably fast, but… not easy to implemen right even though the principals are pretty straightfoward.

So yes, it’s done, finally! Next step would have been the status bars and/or melee, but someone hasn’t completed the required class(es) for that, so now I need to think of something new to do. Probably nothing significant till those classes arrive from Atholas.