Category Archives: Coding

This time you’ve got me to help you…

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A few months back I received an email from Marmalade Studios. Marmalade is the system I used to give me cross platform support. I pay for a licence yearly which is still covered by the ongoing sales on the long tale of the game. Anyway, the email informed me that Marmalade were pulling out of the Tools business to focus on their own development. They laid out a timetable and final release plan for the current tools but ultimately from March 2017 they will no longer be supporting their toolset. There was an offer to purchase rights to the source code, but as a small indie, that’s not really an option.

This doesn’t affect the current releases, but what it does mean is that any chances of me producing updates in the future have almost certainly been removed. And with every new OS release, the chance of the game not working are increased.

I know I have not been prolific with updates since the release of Doomdark’s Revenge settled. There was so many things I wanted to do, but just haven’t gotten around to. The reality is two fold, as amazing as the sales of the games have been, they are obviously not enough to support me full time, and secondly, the games were written quite frantically in the end and I never regained that sense of purpose after their release; this is not just for these games but for everything that I have been doing creatively.

I’ve been trying recently to tie up another release. The main reason for this is to produce a build with the latest version of Marmalade and get it out there to properly support the latest devices. In theory a new release should keep its visibility in the App Stores for a few more years. As part of this I’ve been slowing adding a couple of features: Discovery Mode, Difficulty Modes, Rationalise the code base between DDR and LOM. etc..

So with all this in mind I have been toying with the following: Uploading the source code to GitHub and making it open-source with the objective of transferring it to another cross platform solution, Cocos2d-x for example. Or, allowing people to port the engine to any other coding languages they like, so it could be used however they like.

The current codebase is written in c++, and thus moving to Cocos2d-x makes sense, but I quite like the idea of porting to c# or swift.

Moving to open source could also allow for the tool chain to be fully developed which would allow for more work to be put into ongoing development of the games.

Anyway, I shall think on this more, but if anyone is interested in getting involved, then drop me a note…

 

 

Update for Doomdark’s Revenge released

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ddr_icon_iosI have just pushed a new version of Doomdark’s Revenge out for ALL platforms. This brings all platforms in line with each other. The previous update was only released for Android and iOS. I apologiss for the delay in getting the last two versions out, but my heart and mind has just not been in it for the last couple of months.

Hopefully this will fix the remaining issues with the gameplay, and will also be the last of the 1.3 changes. The intention is that any update to follow will include some new features.

The Windows and Mac version should be showing up on your main menu now. Android/Amazon version should be ready now, or very soon. Mac App Store and iOS version will take a week in Apple Clearance, and Blackberry version usually takes a couple of days.

The changes are..

v1.3.6
1. Fix recruitment check. Loyalty of character being approached now correctly gives +1 and when the lord is treacherous the chance of recruitment is halved – This fix should mean that treacherous lords are no harder to recruit for AI lords, which should stop lords swapping allegiance so much. They should therefore be able to focus on the task at hand.

v1.3.5
1. Morkin’s AI attribute is reset once recruited. Stops him moving and allows him to move in tunnels. Previously Morkin’s AI attribute remained set after Tarithel recruited him. This mean that he didn’t work in tunnels very well, and had a habit of wandering off at night.
2. Tarithel can no longer be recruited away. Tarithel was incorrectly being recruited by AI lords.
3. Spell of Carudrium now works correctly. Previously this was bringing ALL characters to the location of the caster, and not just the the lords loyal to the Moonprince.

If the AI characters are still not behaving like the original, I am going to have to spend a lot more time analysing why. I can’t see any reason why the logic should not play out the same as the original ( other than the difference in random numbers ). This will involved a lot of debugging. But hopefully this version should just nudge everything in the right direction.

 

I thought the War was lost and Midnight doomed.

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battle_full_linesI’ve been working my way through the outstanding bug list. One of the areas that seems to cause contention, is battles.

It causes me some problems because the original is actually pretty haphazard where battles are concerned. So I’m going to talk about the battles in a little more depth, just so that you can get an understanding as to why certain things seem to be happening.

Firstly, night processing goes like this…

1. Reset all characters at dawn
2. Give all AI characters their turn
3. Process Battles
4. Place things on map
5. Move Mists
6. Remove things from map at location’s where characters are
7. Check if characters can recruit soldiers from strongholds
8. Re-spawn armies at strongholds
9. Check for important deaths

Secondly, the interesting point here is, characters are given a chance to move BEFORE battles take place. So, if you attack a character, there is a good chance he will move and thus a battle will not take place.

To understand that a little more, let’s look at the AI turn.

The AI character must decide what to do every night. Each character will react to a number of objectives.

1. Goto Liege
2. Goto Foe
3. Goto Object
4. Goto Home
5. Do nothing

If they have a liege, and that liege’s objectives are 1 or 2, then this characters objective also become 1 or 2.

Otherwise, we pick a new objective

When picking a new objective we pick a random number between 1 and 16. If we choose 1 to 5, then these are our objective. Otherwise we continue with our current objective.

So as you can see, there is a 68% chance that we will just continue on with what were we previously doing. Which means that unless you are at a characters stronghold, and his current objective is to go home, then the likelihood, he is moving away from you.

There is only a 6% chance that the character will stay at his current location.

Personally, I am very surprised at these stats, because it makes battles bloody difficult. Unlike The Lords of Midnight where a nearby army would drop everything to attack, or an attacked army would stay until the death, in Doomdark’s Revenge, everything apart from battle seems to be of more interest.