If there were vague fears for the future itching in the depths of men’s minds…

Posted on March 24, 2023 by Rorthron

The following is the list of outstanding items that are currently on my feature list. The intention is to add all of these over the next few releases. They all have a varying level of difficulty to implement and some will be quick wins. I’m not going to commit to an order or when as much will depend on me being on a roll or not, but I will place a marker against the ones I original intended for the Summer Solstice release. If you would like to discuss the items in any more detail, please feel free to following the links to my GitHub page for each item.

panel_select, panel_think – Add Next/Previous buttons for Desktop – Summer Solstice

panel_select and panel_think need an additional Next/Previous buttons for moving through the pages. The mobile pager is not always obvious.

Option – Don’t swap after successful approach – Summer Solstice

Give the option to stop the auto switch to the newly recruited lord after an approach. Maybe this could be Enable / Disable / Ask with default being Enabled.

Option – Auto Seek – Summer Solstice

Add option to auto seek when entering a location. Doomdark’s Revenge already does this as seek is not a player action. Maybe it could be?

Option – Auto Approach – Summer Solstice

Add an option to auto approach when entering a location in LoM or when trying to move in to a location DDR.

Game Difficulty – LOM/DDR – battle algorithms

Adjust battle algorithms to give Doomguard more success. This would be a difficulty option.

Game Difficulty – LOM – Armies

Add more armies tracking Luxor, Morkin in LoM. This would be a difficulty option.

Game Difficulty – LOM – IceFear / Moonring

The ice fear is calculated based on Morkin’s distance from the Ice Crown and the distance from the warm glow of luxor. The ice fear is then fed in to other calculations.

increase the falling rate of Invigorated/tired, bold/afraid, + effect on + distance to Moon ring. This would be a difficulty option.

LOM: Campaign for Novel

Create a campaign that would mirror changes made for the Novel.

Lord of Silence
Tarithel the Fey
Utarg changing sides
Tunnel to the Tower of Doom

LOM: Gameplay Rule – Varied start positions

Allow various different start positions for the lords. Needs some thought to whom this should affect.

LOM: Gameplay Rule – Replenish Cup of Dreams

LoM – Locations that have a Cup of Dreams have the ability to respawn after x amount of time. This could be altered by the difficulty mode. Other ‘things’ could also be respawned. This would not be dissimilar to how DDR works.

DDR: Gameplay Rule – Armies continue to fight after attacking.

Currently in Doomdark’s Revenge AI Lords have the habit of leaving a fight. This option would make them act like LoM and stay until death or other lords leave. Another potential option would be for them to leave if they consider they are losing… Could also be linked to difficulty.

DDR: Gameplay Rule – Armies attack when near an enemy

Currently AI lords have the habit of not attacking enemies that are close by, unlike LoM. This feature would make them act more like LoM. Could also be linked to difficulty.

DDR: Gameplay Rule – Adjust lord death rules – Summer Solstice

In Doomdark’s Revenge the death rules for Lords should be tweaked to be more like LoM, meaning that can’t die until their army is wiped out. And not if attacking a critter with an army.

panel_map: Add Pinch and Zoom

Add Pinch and Zoom to map for Mobile
Add Shift and Mouse move for Desktop

Add guide and novella to embedded browser

Rather than open in a external browser, open the novella and guide in a embedded browser.

In the forest, the trees grew tall and shady and bright flowers carpeted the floor

Posted on January 7, 2016 by Rorthron

I finally got round to spending some time converting some Citadel data. On of the issues that I had was that I have the map data in LBM image format. It’s obviously not a great format for the terrain data, but this was given to me by the original programmer and I’m not sure how they were processed for the final game. The other issue is the difference in game styles. This data is for a 3d free roaming map and some of the maps are different sizes. The region map are 128×128, however I can’t believe that the citadel could be played out as a 2d landscaping game, without seriously playing with the time taken to move. Therefore, I decided to make the Citadel map 256×256, this is in keeping with the map that Mike drew up for Eye of the Moon, and therefore as the Bloodmarch was originally going to be the setting for EotM it seems fitting to go with the same size.

Last year I did some work on transferring The Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge maps into Tiled. I figured that if I could create a tool chain from that, I could possibly edit the maps for future campaign updates to the games. I did all the work on converting to Tiled and coming up with data formats, but never did any work on the toolchain to get the data back into the game. This is something I still need to do.

With that in mind, I produced a draft Tiled version of the Citadel map which you can download to take a look at. It has layers for Realms and Regions, and then individual layers for each terrain type. The Citadel map was very sparsely populated compared to LoM and DDR, and although the current terrain types account for 19 different terrain, which is actually three more than both LoM and DDR, these terrain really are base landscape terrain. Land, Water, Trees, Mountains, Swamps, etc…. it is lacking anything remotely of interest. There are no Liths, Villages, Hits, etc…

If a game is going to come of the Citadel, this is something that is going to need to be rectified.

LoM and DDR pretty much share the following landscape terrain types: Mountain, Forest, Downs, Lake, Frozen Wastes, Plains, and Hills.

LoM adds: Citadel, Henge, Tower, Village, Keep, Snow Hall, Ruin, Lith, and Cavern, while DDR adds: Gate, Temple, Pit, Palace, Fortress, Hall, Hut, Tower, City, Fountain, and Stones.

The Citadel has landscape types of: Mountains, Craggy Mountains, Forest, Hills, Plains, Land, Valley, Lakeland, Swamp, River, Sea, Bay, Lake, Foothills, Isle, and Downs, and adds: Castle.

As you can see, there isn’t a great deal of variety in those none landscape terrains. Citadel, City, and Castle pretty much replace each other, as do keep and fortress. I seem to recall that Maranor is the Dark Citadel, but I am not aware of any cities.

So, apart from Snow Hall, I see no reason why the additional LoM and DDR terrain types could not be used within a Citadel scenario.

The question then becomes, should there be any new terrains?

My first process is to make sure the Tiled map all holds together. I needs a little tidying up which will need to be a visual process. I’m not sure if there were problems with the original, but I noticed things like trees in the sea. I never got that far in the game, so I don’t know if there were indeed trees in shallow water on the coast line, but a few things like that should probably be ironed out.

At this stage I would like to get some Terrain graphics so that I could drop the map into the engine, and start walking around. There are some issues here, as The Citadel introduces water in a way that LoM and DDR didn’t, so there will need to be engine changes to handle that.

Once a clean version of the map is available, the next stage would be to hand populate the map with the other terrain types. I don’t see this being a quick exercise because I think a lot of thought will need to go into this process.

Only at that stage, will I be anywhere near thinking about an ACTUAL game. There is a lot of underlying work do consider with how the game should work, how the AI in the original works etc. Without help this will also be a lengthy process.

So basically, don’t hold your breath, but slowly slowly catchy monkey…

We must not think that any task is hopeless…

Posted on December 10, 2015 by Rorthron

It’s been mentioned to me recently that it would be nice to have modding functionality for The Lords of Midnight. Opening the engine up was something I always wanted to do but I’m not sure to what level this needs to happen. Therefore if there is anyone out there who would be interested in modding LOM or using the engine, drop me an email, and we can discuss what approach to follow to make this happen.