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).

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

I have revisited my originally flawed implementation of A* and made some changes to it to reduce memory footprint. The original design was a lazy quick hack. Now I am happy to say that the memory usage has been reduced by a factor of 2/3. The reason why I favor memory footprint over speed is because the in-dev WoT as it is (with my configuration) requires 35MB to run, including all the overhead of the Java VM. I don’t want to add any extra fat to that. Normal creature movement uses ~3% of my (1.4 GHz) CPU cycle. So that should be as good as it can get. Besides, the memory saving will become even more significant when the pathfinding algorithms (A*, Dijkstra) are used on bigger maps; so the little loss on CPU cycles is not too bad.

The basic framework for sound has been implemented. I’m a bit too tired to test it out now, so I will probably do it tomorrow or later in the week.

by Atholas

By Kostatus

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

As far as pathfinding goes, there is very little left to do. Most of the AI basic movement features I have wanted are implemented, and the ones that I have in mind are gonig to get implemented soon. Thanks to Kostatus and our new co-developer, there isn’t so much tension in rolling out releases. So, I am left with a lot of time to pursue new ideas and polish the existing ones.

AI movement is affected by a lot of factors, and (shrotest-)pathfinding is only one of them. So just movement AI alone, there is much left to do. I am going to start implementing AI features that Kostatus and I wish to see in the mid-Feb release (I will temporarily codename it Rockie), in particular the next feature I will implement is sound-driven movement. We don’t have enough infrastructure as yet to implement the other AI I have planned, so I will leave them out for now. I will most likely have to reassign some of the basic attack codes to Kostatus ot implement myself a bit later.

by Atholas

By Kostatus

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

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

By Kostatus