Over two years have passed since I started to develop a small little program where an @ could be moved on the screen. After lots of unfinished versions with lots of bugs and problems, and after a break of nearly one year, I again accelerated the development process, which resulted in the 0.3 tree in early 2008.To celebrate the 2nd birthday of my project, I decided to give the next »big« release the version number 1.0, because the version improves again many things and makes everything more stable and polished.
Now, I am happy to announce the release of LambdaRogue 1.0.
Binaries for Windows and Linux, as well as the source
Soundtrack (new; the old soundtrack is incompatible to 1.0)
Most Important Changes
The 1.0 release includes both player visible changes and bug fixes, but also some important invisible changes which make the game more stable and less memory consumpting. I removed LOTS of range check problems and fixed several memory leaks. I cleaned up the source and removed now obsolete functions and variables. I reduced the size of save games from 8 MB (12 on Win) to 800 KB (1 MB on Win).Instead of the Bresenham LOS I used in the 0.3 releases, we now use recursive shadowcasting. I want to thank Dave Moore (from KharneRL) for explaining this to me; it's great to have artifactless LOS and even FOV in the game.
While all former released allowed configuring the interface by editing the configuration file, you now can do this ingame by simply selecting the proper options. Edit your keybindings and switch between mouse or non-mouse-mode without leaving the game.
Besides these and many minor interface- and visual-changes, the game itself has some new features, too. The number of dungeon levels, for example, has been doubled, so there are (again) 20 dungeon levels to explore. These levels contain new treasure, new quests and new enemies – and enemies have many new special abilities (and often more than one at a time). Every dungeon level has a name. The wilderness has been replaced by a small »temple level«, which issimilar to Angband's town level.
Balancing has been improved. Now every character combination should be able to kill at least rats and antbees (while caveworms still are hard for non-combat characters). Magical characters can now train spells they already know by studying the same type of crystal several times.The complete changelog is available in one of the archives.
Finally ...
... LambdaRogue is now considered "postcard ware" (yes, I know I've stolen this from ADOM). If you like the game or at least want me to continue developing it, send me a postcard. The address can be found in the ingame help files.
Earlier / Later / Permanent Link
Dave Moore, 03.08.2008, 22:17
yay!
Excellent, I look forward to trying this out, and seeing the results of your FOV implementation. 1.0 is a big step in any RL, so congratulations again.
Snut, 05.08.2008, 19:24
Congratulations!
Nicely done on the release and anniversary. Will be trying this out tonight, and looking at the LoS implementation with great interest...
Mario Donick, 05.08.2008, 19:33
Hehe, hopefully I implemented it correctly; it is basically this one on RogueBasin. I don't see any errors or artifacts, but one does never know 
Curseman, 07.08.2008, 05:51
The game looks interesting, and I think it presents itself well for a roguelike. I think the biggest problem is the somewhat unwieldy and inconsistent interface.
For instance, making the escape key get the player out of any menu, rather than needing to press escape, right click, hit escape or enter based on which menu the player is in.
The second problem with the interface is needing a button press to continue in unnecessary places, such as after (I)dentifying a tile on the map, or when the game informs you that your chant has failed.
The third interface issue I see is the use of the mouse. The inclusion of mouse control is great as an option, but a lot of roguelike players are used to be able to do anything with the keyboard. Perhaps it would be best to have both a keyboard and a mouse method of using as many game functionalities as possible?
With that said, I like the clean way the game presents itself, the visual effects I've seen seem nice, and despite the unintuitive interface, the game does allow keybinding, and helpfully informs the player of any context sensitive options they have.
Congratulations on the big release, and I apologize if this is the wrong place to post this feedback.
Mario Donick, 07.08.2008, 09:41
Thanks for this feedback
Hello Curseman,
as this is the devblog, this is exactly the right place for feedback.
Most of the time you have the choice between more than one of these keys. Simple messages, for example, go away by pressing SPACE (the standard roguelike way), but mouse-users can right-click, and people who use the NumPad can also press Enter. ESC is used to exit more complex menus and dialogs (i.e. everything where the player can do something; not just read a text).
The keyconfig menu and the option menu are special cases. Here ENTER explicitly confirms any changes while ESC discards them.
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