Next set of features…

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dragon_redI have identified the new features that will be in the next version.

Next version should bring Android, iOS, Playbook, and BB10 all into sync.

 

 

The features are…

1. Change Swipe up on look screen for showing map to be two finger swipe.
2. Add two finger swipe down on map screen to return to look.
3. Save game Meta Data for identifying stories – “Day 5 – Luxor – Tower of the Moon”
4. Option – Auto Unhide on move, or prompt
5. Option – Auto fight critters on move, or prompt
6. Option – Show movement indicator, On/Off
7. Hold down on main screen for compass, and then choose direction to look.
8. Tweak button sizes for small devices
9. Fix undo storage!
10. Tighten hit box on shield.
11. Fix stray line on certain images ( Android )
12. Fix Select screen shields being under Look Icon.
13. Option – Screen Transitions off

44 thoughts on “Next set of features…”

  1. Looking good. 🙂

    This is extremely minor, but what about including the sun, as in the Commodore 64 version of the original? That version used the original Speccy graphics, but added the sun, which rose up in the east, and circled as hours went by (never going too high, since it’s winter), finally setting in the west. Both in the morning and in the evening it looked red/orange, otherwise it was yellow.

    It’s a cosmetic thing, but I think it improved the atmosphere somewhat (much like Doomdark’s Revenge improved it by adding a different colour for the morning).

  2. The sun and moon would work nicely together as a subliminal timekeeper- how long left in the day for the character under control and how many days have passed since you started.

  3. I’ve had a little time to play and found a few issues on the latest Android version:
    1. Characters don’t flee when they lose their army (I.e lose), they just stay fighting till they die.
    2. If Luxor dies, all your characters (except Morkin) don’t just get lost from control, they vanish from the map! This is particularly problematic for any of Doomdarks armies who were battling said armies, as they end up locked in perpetual battle with an invisible opponent they can’t hurt.
    3. Doomdark’s armies appear to march right over unhidden characters with no army if they aren’t specifically heading for them.
    4. You can’t fight animals at night any more (perhaps this one is deliberate?)

    • Thanks, I’ll work through these. But…
      1. Checked the code, and I did implement it. I will test to make sure the code is being triggered correctly.
      2. They should disappear off the the discovery map, but a quick check makes me think you are correct. They are not being picked up during battle.
      3. Considering #2, this is possible correct.
      4. That is correct, it is as per the original.

      • Actually, in the original you *can* fight animals at night -I just checked 😉

        This is significant because in the original you cant fight animals if Doomdark has an army on the same square. So if you end a character on a square with animals at night and don’t kill the animals but hide, and Doomdark then puts an army on top of you during the night (e.g. because they are following your character), then in the morning you you are locked permanently to that square because you cant move without fighting the animals and you cant fight the animals because of Doomdark’s army. This was an annoying trap to get Luxor into, so it was always wise to fight animals at night and then hide, just in case.

        However… in this Android version, my testing shows you *can* fight animals even if Doomdark has an army on the same square, so you don’t get locked to the square in this scenario. Therefore it probably doesn’t matter if you fix this or not…

    • Fixed 1.
      Can’t replicate 3. Move any character toward lith of Ashimar where there is an army at the start. Or move over to blood to engage the armies there earlier. Anyway, just stand in front of them and you will get attacked.

      • Put Corleth at the square south-east of the Lith of Ashimar; put Luxor at the square southeast of Corleth, and hit night. In the morning Doomdark’s army will have gone right over Corleth and attacked Luxor…

        • Ok, I’ll test that. A quick look at the code shows that they should stop for corleth. The look a full 360 around them for anything “interesting” and move into that location rather than do anything else. When in an interesting location, they will stay there until it’s not interesting… However something must be changing the behaviour.

        • Fixed. This was a problem. The doomguard were too interested in the locations in the distance and not the ones in front of their eyes.

      • Actually, it’s not Lothoril, it’s something to do with Morkin. When Morkin is on the same square, even though the ice fear gets much colder, Lothoril gets hugely braver. Perhaps Morkin’s special ice fear effect is spilling over in some way?

        • Yes, Morkin’s Ice Fear does spill over, in that any lord in his location gets his ice fear. However, the problem was more fundamental than that… negative numbers in positive variables… fixed now.

  5. I’m suspicious about the relative killing power of warriors vs riders. I’m finding that warriors are killing more than riders for the same sized army, but it should be the other way round.

      • Ack, weird post. Anyway, I have lots of detailed passing to do over the weekend, heh!

        I’m finding that characters and armies are not getting tired in battle like they used to – e.g. still very invigorated after 5 days of battle.

        Also, a typo “Doomdark has an army of none warriors and one thousand riders”

    • Having spent the morning looking through the code of the original battle algorithm, I’m very suspicious as to whether I’ve translated it correctly or not!
      Need to get home and sit down with pen and paper!

  6. 7. If Luxor is killed during the night, in the morning you still remain in control of the character you had selected, at least until you try to select someone else. I think this is true to the original, but really you should get shunted to control of Morkin.

  7. A few more things 🙂

    8. If you have multiple battles in the same domain, it no longer repeats “the bloody sword of battle” for each one. This is a bit of a pain as you can tell if there have been multiple attacks in the same domain.
    9. If you have won a battle the previous night and start a new battle elsewhere, the previous battle outcome becomes “the battle continues”.
    10. There don’t appear to be any of Doomdarks armies protecting the northern keeps. There used to be 1200 warrior armies on every keep north of Kor -Either they wandered off or they were never there?

      • Actually, it’s not that the armies aren’t there (me jumping to the wrong conclusion!), it’s that they often don’t attack you if you are adjacent to them. It might be related to the bug you’ve already fixed, but some of the armies in those keeps just wouldn’t be tempted out to fight next door at any cost. I couldn’t see any particular pattern to it; for example, sitting on the plains square that’s east and south of the two adjacent keeps in Grarg tempted the army from the north but not the west…

        • That would make sense. The only way to tempt them out would to have a lord stood on a non plains location up to 3 squares away. The new fix will solve this. BTW: I’ll email you tonight so you can test the new version if you want?

          • I’m not going to have much time now till the weekend – lost too many evenings last week to LoM! Aah, happy days, heh 🙂 . Would love to test any fixed version; I have a file manager but my Nexus 7 is not rooted, so not sure I can access the save-games. Currently the only one I have is the day Ushgarak fell anyway, lol.

  8. 11. You are no longer warned that a character is “utterly tired and cannot continue” which is one level above “utterly tired” – the text stays on just “utterly tired” but doesn’t let you move, even though you can usually still move on utterly tired in LoM (but not DDR).
    12. There is a slight variation in the level of the Ice Fear from the original. When you have captured every stronghold except Ushgarak in the original, the Ice Fear would be “utterly mild” near Luxor if Morkin was at the Tower of Doom. Now it never gets below “very mild” under any circumstances. Perhaps this is deliberate? The phrase “utterly mild” always sounded a bit odd to me anyway…

    • 11 – noted. I’ll look into this.
      12 – nothing deliberate. I suspect there could just be a small variation which causes rounding issues. If I send you the debug version you can email me a save game. Unless you know how to get them off your device….

    • I’ve tested the ice fear calcs, and they are spot on.

      The variables are

      morkin_distance_from_tower_of_doom or 127 if he is dead
      lord_distance_from_luxor or 127 is he is dead

      Distance is calculated as ASB(dx)+ABS(dy)

      lost_keeps = number_of_keeps_controlled_by_doomguard*2
      lost_citadels = number_of_citadels_controlled_by_doomguard*5

      if you are morkin or with morkin then it’s

      ( 511 – (morkin_distance_from_tower_of_doom*4) ) / 64

      otherwise

      ( morkin_distance_from_tower_of_doom + lord_distance_from_luxor + 48 + lost_keeps + lost_citadels) / 64

      So if morkin is alive and at the tower, and you are stood with luxor, and have re-taken all the strongholds. Then you get 48/64.
      Which obviously gives you 0 and ‘utterly’. To get 1 and ‘very’, you have a wiggle of 16. Ushgarak has cost you 5. So there is 11 points up for grabs somewhere…

      • “Distance is calculated as ASB(dx)+ABS(dy)”
        ummm – sorry is that a typo? Surely not directly carried over from the program, otherwise an error message might have cropped up? The formula looks OK to me otherwise. Just something I wondered if anyone else had noted: Luxor can’t seem to find/pick up either Wolfslayer of Dragonslayer swords – even though other Lords find them at the same locations. Coulda sworn he could collect either in previous LOM versions? Cheers.

        • yes that’s a typo. That’s not lifted directly from the code because the code is more table driven. For example the *2 *5 for the strongholds is stored against each stronghold, which means I could change The Citadel of Dawn to be +127 to mean that losing it would have a larger affect on the Ice Fear. Allowing me to give weight to every stronghold. However, I’ve followed it through to make sure it is doing exactly the above.

  9. Seconding Mark’s observations that Lords remain on a square after their army is completely routed overnight – rather than be kicked off to a random adjoining square. Also +1 to his observation of mutliple battles in a given region reported only once in the overnight bulletin, not like ye olde “…brings sword of death to Blood… and of Blood… and of Blood… and of Dodrak…” etc. Multiple calls is a better gauge of the battle scenario, I think – and it also tightens the sphincters a little more, too. I note too that if you have moved into a square with a troll/wolf/skulkrin hazard, you can just skip the inconvenience by attacking the army in the next-adjacent square. Don’t recall that being permitted in the previous versions. I do remember single Lords previously being able to attack an army and then immediately hide on that square with no problem, which seemed a little strange – haven’t checked for that behaviour here.

    • In fact in the original you could combine the two behaviours at the end of your post to travel further and avoid wild animals if you needed to: if you end at night on animals and Doomdark is around you can then attack the army ahead and then hide immediately after attacking! This would allow you to move 9 squares! I considered this a bug, lol. Perhaps Chris might include options to disable by choice some of these original “bugs”.

      • Thanks Chris for offering to re-include that pet peeve as an option – but if you are going to keep it authentic, you have to have lengthy/irregular pauses between each battle calculation, with the sound fx of a data cassette softly crawling and creaking away… kidding 🙂 Thanks Mark for that extra tip on single Lord travels too – an original oversight I wasn’t aware of. The only ones I recall “dawning” on me are the time-traveling issues when recruiting a new Lord or when finding the Cup of Dreams. Other difficulty-level possibilities perhaps, Chris? Perhaps the Cup could give the finder one night’s equivalent travel – but now I’m overcomplicating things and moving into non-Singleton territory…

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