hansjoerg.malthaner@gmx.de
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Iso-Angband 0.2.4 has been released.
Compared to the 0.2.3, this release mostly underwent finetuning and bugfixing. Particularly targetting and zooming should work more reliable now.
Iso-Angband 0.2.3 has been released.
Never say never! I think I'll try to revive the project. I've dug out the old, patched Angband 2.9.1 sources, made a few changes and I am currently trying to assemble a releaseable version again. I have some hope that I can release a new version next weekend.
I guess the next release will be considered a backstep, because the latest Iso-Tome releases have been more advanced, but I want to go for a minimalistic, easy to maintain version, and thus I threw out most of the advanced features like gradual lighting and the 9 part walls.
Final decison to stop this project. Reasons? Wrong assumptions and expectations on my side. I couldn't get from this project what I wanted and so I stopped it, in favour of my own roguelike project: H-World
PernAnband is being renamed to ToME - there had been copyright problems with the name 'Pern'. The iso-view became offical part of the tome sourcecode. Probably a new version of Iso-ToME will be released together with or shortly after the first relase of ToME itself.
I paused Simutrans development to bring Iso-PernAngband forward. Bug fixes were made, the lighting code was finally fixed and the first try of a spell/breath attack display was implemented. A zoom option was implemented to switch between the large,pretty 64x64 tiles and another set of 32x32 tiles. The scaling code which creates the 32x32 tiles from the large tile set needs some improvements, the small tiles don't look as good as they could.
Iso-PernAngband is now open source in full and with everything included. The Simugraph engine was tailored and the tailored engine also released with full sources.
Iso-Angband was nearly dead that time. I was struggling with all kind of problems with my other project, Simutrans, and had no time to anything for Iso-Angband. Probably it's a bad idea to lead two projects the same time, one will always suffer if the other is worked on.
I was very busy with my other game, Simutrans, that month. There was nearly no progress with Iso-Angband. The main-sdl.c which Greg Velichansky had created was debugged a bit but no real progress was made.
I don't remember exactly when this happened, but finally the misunderstanding between Steven and me could be solved, and the fights stopped. In addition I got help from Greg Velichansky who created a main-sdl.c which used the quite platform independent SDL library. The main-sdl.c gave a base for the Windows port of the iso-view add-on. In fact the main-sdl.c makes it possible to port the iso-view add-on to Windows, Linux, MacOS and BeOS without changing one line of code.
In the meantime I got tile sets from several people (see the thanks page for details, but none fit perfectly. But they are a great resource, even if it's lot of work to transform the images.
The iso-view add-on had been tried with vanilla Angband, ZAngband and PernAngband that time. DarkGod the PernAngband maintainer made a clear statement that he wants the iso-view as an option for PernAngband and so PernAngband became the base variant which is maintained with the iso-view add-on. PernAngband looks just great with the iso-view add-on.
This time the project was stuck a bit. I still had not managed to create a windows version, but about 4 of 5 Angband players use Windows as their favorite operating system and they still couldn't try the iso-view add-on on their systems.
In addition I had changed the interface between the iso-view add-on and Angband itself several times no. Those were total reimplementations of the interface. Due to several misunderstandings between Steven Fuerst from the ZAngband developer team and me, a lot of time and work was spend and the result just dumped afterwards. In addition the most promising graphics artist, Kierstal Set Ra left the team that time, so I felt pretty frustrated.
The iso-view was now better integrated into Angband when one of the features of the graphics engine was criticized pretty much: I planned to use, for example, just one bottle image and recolor this image for all the different colored potions. This should save lots of time because fewer images had to be painted. The recoloring trick replaced four chroma keys in a tile with four shades of one of the colors of the standard Angband color set. Despite all benefits in my opinion, the recoloring trick was disregarded by nearly everyone but me, so I gave it up.
Also around this time, a transition to 16 bit HiColor tiles was made. The 16 bit tiles allow to paint very nice, realistic images. They also allow to use scaled version of scanned photos which give very realistic images. Unfortunately there are no photos of most Angaband monsters, so this is just useful for equipment, weapons, armor and some miscellaneous stuff.
The idea to create a roguelike RPG was a long time in my head, but as I found, I had no time to do all the coding by myself. I had played Angband in 1997 and decided to use Angband as the core game engine, and just add a graphics layer on top of Angband. I played Diablo II a lot that time and was very bored of the stupid gameplay of Diablo. My idea was to create a game which gives both the fun of playing Angband and the shiny graphics Diablo offers. I decided to use Angband because it is not realtime. Painting good animations is beyond my skill and so I planned to go for static images.
I ripped the graphics engine from another game of mine, Simutrans, and attached it ti Angband. This was the birth of the iso-view add-on.
I announced the thing on rec.games.roguelike.angband and found out that a graphical view or Angband is not a winner by itself; many people like the ASCII view very much and there were many questions if the iso-view add-on would be fast enough to run on slower systems, too.
In addition the requirements to screen resolution gave tough battles. The decision to use tiles of 64x64 pixels was often criticized, but I still think it will be a valuable thing in a few years.
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By Hansjörg Malthaner, 13-Dec-2003 hansjoerg.malthaner@gmx.de |
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