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Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos - sequel set in a single dungeon

getter77

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IIRC, this is down to wanting to juice this update up a bit extra in terms of surprises and New stuff to make for a strong(er) EA launch proper---not unlike how the last internal'ish Alpha was extra robust a short while back.
 

Darth Canoli

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I'm not quite sold yet but if they get rid of ADOM's terrible respawn and work hard on the overworld, it might turn out into a good game.

Also, a better dungeon design... Well, a better "generator" i guess as it's probably going to be randomly generated... :negative:
 

KeighnMcDeath

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For some reason that one video made me want to go logging. That level of trees just begs to be cleared. The autism reacheth towards me.
wood-man-tree-face-by-Sister72.jpg


Chopity-chop-chop.
 

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Last edited:

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Hmmm: https://www.ultimate-adom.com/index.php/2021/02/19/ultimate-adom-load-save-clarification/

ULTIMATE ADOM: LOADING & SAVING (TECHNICAL CLARIFICATION)

Load & Save is coming soon. If we hadn’t stumbled upon a serious internal bug it would have been part of the EA release. We are working on it and expect to provide ASAP.

So what happened? Why are we going to EA without such an important feature, knowing full well people usually don’t like leaving their computers running for hours?

It’s quite simple: It’s entirely our fault. The first is that we’ve been overly optimistic about our ability to get Saving and Loading into the game in a way that works instead of most often placing you into a mirror universe of the one you left when saving, where things roughly look the same but don’t, and bugs will murder, corrupt and crash you, and not in a good way. In short: The solution we thought would work didn’t quite, and we feel that the frustration of trying to load a game that would then crash around you would have been much higher than not being able to save and load at all.

Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos is still an Early Access game, and as such there are some core features missing. We have recently published a roadmap where we outline where the next big features such as Hunger and Corruption (in April), better combat options and AI (in June) or enemy spellcasters (in August) will make it into the game.

Your feedback, both positive and negative, is very valuable to us and very welcome.

In the next few days, we are focusing nearly exclusively to getting Saving and Loading into the game in a way that works for everyone. Thank you for your patience!

Here’s a technical explanation for those of you in the know or with the interest about what went wrong with our initial estimate.
Data in Ultimate ADOM is insanely complex.

This now is going to get a bit technical but I would like to explain what happened so that everything is clear and in the open: While we have 20+ years of experience doing Java development and the many years of C programming ADOM, the C# and Unity used in Ultimate ADOM brings its own challenges with it. Sometimes these are unexpected. The dangerous thing we noticed early on is that – while C# and Java look very similar on the surface – the actual ecosystems are vastly different, especially in the design approach to the programming languages and the open source ecosystem surrounding these two worlds.

My personal opinion is that both languages are fantastic to work with (and these days I even prefer C# to Java although Java has been my big love over more than 20 years [I started with Java in 1998]). But strangely both languages have areas where the design and engineering behind the languages are miles ahead of the contestant and you really wonder “how can this happen with all these brilliant people working on language design”. And Java has the far better open source ecosystem with far more advanced (and tried and tested) solutions to complex issues.

But back to our game:

Ultimate ADOM has a very complex data structure because we really try to simulate a highly detailed fantasy environment. Our goal is to implement a game engine that can scale up the complexity to insane levels, all in the name of fun. Our target is more the micro level of the game (e.g. the individual character, the items carried, the murals on walls, the slippery fluid on the ground, the genetic DNA of your hand) because we want to have crazy features often mentioned in the ramp-up of the game release like grafting (e.g. attaching a dragon head to your body giving you the ability to bite and breathe fire), animancy (e.g. animating your trusted sword and turning it into a companion that follows you through the dungeon… or doing the same with an altar or a dungeon wall) and complex elemental magic and related effects (weapons becoming damaged from hacking at walls, an extensive liquid system in order to have pools of healing liquid or rivers of confusion liquid). And so on and so forth. To be able to do this we built a system based on a technology called ECS (entity-component-system) and used that for everything in the game. For absolutely everything.

So e.g. the player character is an entity that in turn consists of a skeleton (an entity) with more than 15 individual body parts (again entities), has a race and profession (all entities) and lots of equipment (all entities, some of that attached to body parts, others in your backpack, again all entities). Items among other things are made from certain materials (defined as entities) and weapons/spells/etc. cause damage (again defined as entities). If you do a text dump (in an internal JSON-like format) of just a freshly created player character that text dump will have more than 700,000 (!) lines of text. Yes, there is a lot of redundancy in that but the nested complexity of the entities and components used to model the game world is quite astonishing (even to us). Especially as performance is pretty good with this although we yet have to do a lot of performance tuning during EA.

Is this complexity really necessary? I have pondered this question long and often and still will answer it with a resounding “yes” given our target of creating the most intricate and complex (in a fun way) roguelike ever.

So what about saving and loading?

Because we underestimated the complexity of saving and loading this huge set of data in the C# ecosystem. We had done very early prototypes in Java about three to four years ago when we first decided whether to embark on this journey and not. We used simple and plain Java serialization to test loading and saving data. And it performed splendidly. (To explain: serialization is a feature of many languages used to persist data to a hard disk or some other kind of storage and restore it from there – it usually saves you the pain of doing everything by hand at the cost of some performance). Due to the complexity of our data we very much planned to not handle everything on our own but to rely on trusted frameworks developed by other amazing engineers. And for the Java test everything worked well.

Then we checked off this issue and basically ignored it for a long while. The original plan was to have a fully implemented load & save feature by Christmas 2020 and we had set aside a week of implementing and testing it because we had managed to implement it three years earlier in half a day in Java.

Then we tried it in C# and had to learn it simply didn’t work. At all. Beyond any hope. The only inbuild C# framework we got to work is the BinaryFormatter. If you ignore for a moment that Microsoft itself says “Don’t use the BinaryFormatter – it’s a security disaster waiting to happen” (and still keeps it in the framework) it was the only framework that managed to save and load our game. But I’m up to this day not 100% sure if it truly worked because even for a freshly started game it created a save file with more than 100 megabytes of size which took more than 10 minutes to save and more than 40 (!) minutes to load.

You can imagine our shock and disbelief after not having seen any such issues with earlier Java tests. After recovering from stun and shock we frantically went through other C# serialization frameworks (https://aloiskraus.wordpress.com/2017/04/23/the-definitive-serialization-performance-guide/ has a great list and compares them for performance). And none of them worked for us. Some showed critical bugs when encountering our huge data structures, some were not correctly able to handle all private data and would have forced us to completely wreck a well-designed architecture (which would have taken weeks – at this stage Ultimate ADOM has more than 500000 lines of code and comments in more than 3900 classes) with uncertain outcome. And each framework had different requirements on how to change the architecture. So we tested about half a dozen of frameworks that required only mild changes and each and everyone failed. Some had unexplained crashes, others were much worse at performance for our case than you would have expected, etc.

At that point we already had spent more than 20 days working on nothing but this issue. 20 days that now were missing from our release plan.

So we made the final and hard decision: We are going to do loading and saving ourselves and code everything by hand. From ADOM I knew how staggering this task is because you then have to go into each and every bit of data you have and save and load every single byte in the correct order. And not forget to handle a single important task. So we knew this task also was mind-blowing. My colleague and friend Jochen Terstiege (who has more than 15 years of ADOM experience) took the brunt of the task and the rest of the team supported him as best as we could. And we managed to have a working version of load & save about nine days before release. At the cost of another 10-12 days of working on nothing but load & save, going through more than a thousand classes to implement our own algorithm.

First results were great: file size was reduced from 100 megabytes to about 5 megabytes (and there is room for optimization), saving now takes 3-5 seconds at most and loading roughly 2-3 seconds (this will increase for very late game stages because there is more data to handle) but overall the results were blazingly good.

So we dared to breathe a sigh of relief, full well knowing that this problem had caused us to lose a total of a month planned for finalizing and polishing features before release.

And then about four days before release disaster again struck: We found a serious problem that ruins save files. And we know we now had lost. No way to share this load & save feature for EA because destroying save files is even worse than not being able to save stuff.

So we made the decision to not have load & save in the EA release and struggle ahead. That is where we are standing right now and why we decided to disable it just before the launch. My 20+ years of experience as a programmer and architect and all my ADOM/JADE/Java experience I felt right in assuming that load & save wouldn’t be the huge issue it has become, but sometimes it doesn’t work out like that.

My optimistic side tells me we might have it by beginning of next week, my pessimistic side says “end of next week” but to be honest I really do not want to give a promise here because we already misjudged once. We are working on a fix and we can see it on the horizon. Now it is a matter of focus and concentration. That’s why we probably also could have communicated much better, and hope this clears up the situation!

In summary:

  • We underestimated the complexity of saving and loading.
  • We ask you to continue supporting us and a little bit more patience while we finally get this done and into your hands.
  • Please test and play the game and give us all your other feedback. ADOM was built on the creativity and support of a most wonderful community and we want to continue this tried and tested approach to deliver the most complex roguelike ever (meaning fun complexity).
And please consider that we are a tiny Indie team. At best 2.5 programmers are working on this game (plus 2.2 graphical artists and one sound/music designer). And that’s it.

I am very sure that in a couple of weeks the then current EA version will look very different from now and be a lot more complete but we can’t change the present.

That being said the team already has holed up and dooes its best to fix the load & save issue (and whatever else you report). And provide new releases ASAP. We are 150% committed to Ultimate ADOM and everyone in the team gave its best to deliver a great experience. But sometimes it’s the small stones that cause you to stumble.

Thanks for listening. I hope to be back very soon with an announcement about a release containing load & save We will keep you updated!

Thomas Biskup
 

getter77

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Saves should be landing within a day or so's update---from there they can just focus on chasing down the Roadmap items directly.
 

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https://www.ultimate-adom.com/index.php/2021/02/25/early-access-changelog-0-7-3/

EARLY ACCESS CHANGELOG 0.7.3
Please note that save games are not yet backwards compatible. If you want to continue playing an older save game, you need to play an older version of Ultimate ADOM on Steam.

The most important changes:

Powerful artifacts have made it into the hands of dungeon denizens! Starting at level 3, watch out for powerful enemies you might be better off avoiding, though the items they carry might be worth the risk.

Food will now heal you slightly if consumed.

Lots of new keyboard commands: ‘v’ to cast a spell, 1 to 0 to directly use the hotbar and single items are now picked up without opening the inventory. There’s more though!

Resting until healing, and resting until power recharge.

Better controller support.

Many UI changes like a permanently open game log you can toggle and change in the options.

Some balancing changes, turning down some weapon skills which were just scaling damage too much.

And many more! See the full release notes on Steam for all the details.

Have fun – we are looking forward to your continuing feedback!

Here are the detailed change notes:

Enhancements:

  • Content:
    • The caverns just got a lot more deadly. Starting at dungeon level 3, you may encounter powerful mini boss monsters carrying unique artifacts with them. Don’t forget that avoiding powerful enemies is a valid response! Defeating these creatures will tax your mastery of your skills.

    • Food no longer is useless. While Hunger and the full Food system (including the beloved feasting on enemy corpses to gain new abilities) will not make it into the game before March, you no longer have to rely on harvesting food items for them to benefit you. Consuming food will now provide a small health boost.
  • Keyboard controls:
    • You can now cast spells directly via ‘v’erbalising them without going through the action menu.

    • Healing until rested (or interupted) is now available by holding ‘Shift’ and either <Space> or <5> on the Numpad. Like auto-exploring, you can stop this at any time by pressing a key, clicking the mouse or the gamepad.

    • If you hold ‘Shift’ and ‘v’, your character will rest until interrupted or at full Power for more spellcasting.

    • In addition to using <Space> or <5> on the numpad to wait a turn, you can now also use ‘.’ as used by other rogue-likes.

    • If you press ‘,’ to pick up items and a single item is lying on the ground it is directly picked up without having to open the inventory.

    • The entries in the toolbar can now be activated with the hotkeys ‘1’ to ‘0’.
  • Gamepad controls:
    • The repeat delay and repeat rate can now be configured separately from the keyboard settings. In our experience the new defaults were a bit too fast for controllers.

    • You can now pick up items with the <Y> button.

    • The dead zones for some gamepad axis are now increased which should prevent getting erroneous input from other input devices that use the same axis (e.g. HOTAS setups).
  • Tooltips:
    • Item weight no longer is shown in the item tooltips because we our current inventory system is slot-based instead of weight-based right now.
  • UI:
    • The game log is now shown all the time. You can remove this in the settings or change the transparency.

    • Certain panels should no longer look weird on very wide displays.

    • The game is now allowed to render in the background (on the Windows platform), making it a true “borderless window”. E.g. if you press Alt+Tab, the start menu now opens on top of the game window instead of minimizing it.

    • The saved games list now displays which saved games are compatible with the current game version and which ones are not.

    • The default speed for animations again has been reduced to saner levels. You can still change it to whatever speed you prefer. You monster.
  • Balancing:
    • Weapon skills have been toned down somewhat, as they scaled the possible damage up too far.

    • Dworjalf is no longer the one-army dwarf he used to be. He will deal slightly less damage with his axes, and take slightly more.

    • Tisseth is now skilled in using the quarterstaff she starts with. She lost all interest in archery.
  • Misc:
    • We now create a backup of a saved game before it is overwritten. There is no automatic recovery yet.

    • You will find more armor and weapons from different materials, especially as you venture deeper into the caves.

    • Slain monsters will now take expensive items with them to their death much less often.
Important Fixes:

  • Fixed the spell buff skills for increased range and damage. Most did not quite work as expected.

  • Items on the ground are shown correctly after loading a game.

  • The “low hitpoints” warning border is now restored correctly after loading a game.

  • Encumbrance now always is correctly updated when you pick up or drop items in the inventory screen.

  • Tooltips in the inventory screen now always correctly update when equipment changes.

  • Items lying at your position now are shown directly after loading a game.

  • A lot of fixes entering new maps.

  • And lots of minor bug-fixing and fine-tuning.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth


Have a gander at our new tutorial! Many new players, especially those unfamiliar with rogue-like games, have expressed confusion of what you can do in the game, and we even noticed veterans often didn't know you can dip your weapons into potions to transfer their effects on to your enemies.

We hope our new tutorial does a much better job at explaining the game to you, and hope you enjoy today's patch at www.ultimate-adom.com/steam
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.ultimate-adom.com/index.php/2021/03/26/an-easter-orc-surprise/


AN EASTER ORC SURPRISE

Orc-Teaser.png


The orcs are coming!
This powerful war-like race becomes playable as you venture into the mysterious caves of the Drakalor Chain for the glory of your faction.

Dozens of new monsters and dungeon features!
The mostly feared ant colonies are back, as are beehives!
Additionally, some monsters will have interesting special abilities, such as teleportation, breath attacks or burrowing, and their limbs may grant you their special abilities if grafted to your body.

Quests!
To start with, at least. The major quest update is planned for the end of the Early Access, but your factions will give you guidance of what they expect you to do in the Caverns of Chaos and reward you for completing those steps.

Remapping key- and gamepad controls!
You also will be able to remap keys and gamepad controls as you wish, something that many players have requested.

And many, many more surprises, bug fixes and improvements!
Stay tuned for the full changelog hitting next week!
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth


Hello minions of ChAoS,

today's video comes without voice due to having caught a cold. While this gives me a nice smokey Chaos-applicable voice, I figured I'd rather let the Troll and Chaosknight classes speak for themselves in the preview.

Beware the awakening of chaos in the upcoming update next week - your journey will become significantly more dangerous than before, even though there is new power at your fingertips.
 

Morblot

Aberrant Member | Star Trek V Apologist
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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
What is the origin of green orcs? Warhammer?

Got curious. Looking around, this is the oldest picture of green orcs I could find, titled "The Road to Minis Tirith" from a 1975 LOTR calendar.

Did Tolkien describe orcs as green in LotR? I can't remember as it's been more than 20 years since I read it.
 

Bah

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What is the origin of green orcs? Warhammer?

Got curious. Looking around, this is the oldest picture of green orcs I could find, titled "The Road to Minis Tirith" from a 1975 LOTR calendar.

Did Tolkien describe orcs as green in LotR? I can't remember as it's been more than 20 years since I read it.

I think the only color description given is:
"Cautiously Pippin rolled over, hoping to see what would happen. His guards had gone to join in the fray. In the twilight he saw a large black Orc, probably Uglúk,"

In a letter Tolkien wrote, he said they are basically asians:

"They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

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https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1266820/view/3023583167975070144
Ultimate ADOM Early Access Update #9 (version 0.8.3) has arrived!
Dark Elves, Spanish & French Loca added, possession, wands, new skill trees, new monster and more await!
Hear ye! Hear ye! Adventurers!
Today we have released update #8 (0.8.3) for thy Ultimate ADOM Early Access!

New content:
  • Two new languages!
    • You can now play the game in French and Spanish (the latter in both a South American and a European variant).

  • Brannalbin himself has intervened and deemed magic in general too weak.
    As a result, all spells are now much more powerful.

  • A major new game mechanic: Possession.
    • Become a frog, a dragon, a worm, a rat, an ogre, a hill giant or anything else that crawls, sneaks, runs or slithers through the Caverns of Chaos. If you find the magical means to do so.

  • Possibly related to the previous point, the enigmatic Temple Of The Frog is no longer empty.
  • Dark Elves emerge from the Deependark
    to test their skills and prowess against the terrors of the Caverns of Chaos.
    • Dark Elves have access to a very special skill tree available only to them for now.

  • Originally the class was meant to be introduced much later, but as Dark Elves share a natural affinity for such things, you can now play as an
    Assassin
    and skulk in the darkness, expertly wielding poisons and the very shadows themselves as weapons.
  • Magical Wands have been implemented!
    • You can find 22 different, fully functioning wands in the dungeons below. Enjoy experimenting with them!

  • Several
    new skill trees
    make their appearance, including the
    first “secret” skill
    - skills that will only unlock when you meet a certain prerequisite of other skills.
    • Because this is the first of them and not terribly secret yet, you will unlock Assassination only after spending points in the Stealth skill.
    • Arachnomancy (15 skills and 10 spells) will allow the summoning of spiders and is only available to Dark Elves for now.
    • Assassination (14 skills) will greatly increase the damage dealt while sneaking, among other things.
    • Poisoning (11 skills) is the first foray into alchemy, creating poisonous concoctions and improving their efficency.
    • Finally, you can now become a deadly warrior wielding whips (with 23 skills), if that is your thing. We are not judging.

  • Some monsters have become slightly smarter and now band together, patrolling the dungeon and hunt for adventurers.
  • 11 new monster types have been added.


Bug Fixes:
  • Potions often didn’t work quite as intended. They should do that now, no matter if you coat your weapon, pour them out on the floor or actually drink them.
  • Giant spiders now actually work.
  • A ton of minor bug fixes.
 

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https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1266820/view/2987556908483336690

Ultimate ADOM Early Access Update #10 (version 0.9.0) has arrived!
Version 1.0 approaching in August! - New Update brings combat-enhancements, achievements, millions of new items

Hear ye! Hear ye! Adventurers!
Today we have released update #10 (0.9.0) for thy Ultimate ADOM Early Access!

But more great news for all rogue-like fans:

Together with Developer Team ADOM we have today announced an August 25, 2021, full (version 1.0) release for Ultimate ADOM - Caverns of Chaos!

But now let's deep-dive into the new major Combat-Update:

Full Changelog version 0.9.0 - Ultimate ADOM Early Access Combat Update

Community feedback-based additions and changes!
  • Powerful monsters may now carry Treasure Troves with them.
    • Defeating them and looting these troves will offer you a choice of mighty items, and also offer you the chance to sacrifice gathered gold for a new random selection of items!

  • All combat skill trees have been completely streamlined, allowing you a choice of fighting style instead of locking you into certain weapons.
    • The old combat skill system forced you early on into specializing on certain weapon types. Therefore, the old skill system has been replaced with 140 new skills, offering a longer and more interesting progression.

  • In general, combat has been spiced up a lot by making it much more challenging:
    • Being swarmed by enemies makes it more likely to be hit the more enemies attack you in the same turn. This applies for both ranged and melee combat.
    • Wielding multiple weapons now comes with a price and requires skill investment to be effective.
    • If you (or your enemy) deal at least 10 points of damage with a melee attack, they will cause a minimum of 1 point of damage even if your Protection Value is higher. This allows you to whittle down even heavily armored enemies - and it makes charging into a swarm of monsters more dangerous while wearing heavy plate.
    • Critical hits from both player characters and monsters are slightly rarer now.
    • A high chance of hitting something also increases the chance to bypass an enemy’s armor, too.
    • Armor can now be damaged or even destroyed by armor-penetrating hits.
      Make sure to carry a spare pair of pants with you, if you rely on such things!

    • Area spell damage has been slightly toned down again. While still being an excellent choice and playstyle, room-filling spells are no longer the answer to everything you might be encountering.

  • The way player characters heal has been changed.
    • You will regenerate more slowly while crawling the dungeon, thus making hunting for regeneration flux points, healing potions or food more tense.
    • At the same, time, healing while resting will become faster, the longer you remain undisturbed, making the search for rare and undisturbed spots more important.
    • Finally, healing potions are now more common, and every adventurer starts with one.

  • Achievements have been added to the game! 50 very different challenges await you.
  • While creating a custom character, the powers of races, classes and professions now are explained with much more detail.


New Content
  • Four new pesky monsters plague the early dungeon levels.
  • Tons of new prefixes and suffixes, which effectively are adding millions of new items to the game:
    • Added 18 shield prefixes and 13 shield suffixes for a total of more than 40,000 new shields that can be found.
    • Added 13 ranged weapon prefixes and 14 ranged weapon suffixes, a couple of million new ranged weapons that can be found.
    • Added 6 more armor prefixes and 2 more armor suffixes.
    • Added 2 more body wear suffixes.
    • Added 2 more melee weapon prefixes.
    • Affix-based powers have been boosted to make them more exciting. A weapon of orc-slaying now finally means actually slaying orcs while wielding it!

  • Powerful items have a special marker with different colors now, indicating their power level: blue, yellow and purple indicate that a weapon is powerful, mighty and epic respectively.
  • The format of the highscore file was updated to improve performance.
    • Important notice:
      Unfortunately, this means that your old highscores will be gone after the update. Make sure to take a screenshot of your old highscores for bragging rights!

  • We also changed the format of some other configuration files, so you may get some prompts again in the main menu (that you already answered before) and you also might need to reconfigure the statistics configuration again (if you changed it).
  • You can now earn 5 Steam trading cards.


Various bug fixes and improvements:
  • Auto-exploration has been redesigned and should now be much smarter and less prone to unexpected results.
  • Orcs and trolls now also have level-based benefits, like the other player races.
  • Wizards now receive the first four levels of literacy for free. Those starting scrolls are no longer dead paper weight!
  • The duration and severity of poison has been adjusted.
  • Dangerous monsters and similar challenges no longer should be generated directly adjacent to stairways, giving you a greater chance to bypass them without getting pummeled.
  • The dungeon no longer sports any dead ends.
  • Melee archery now works as intended.
  • Summoning monsters no longer causes a huge performance hit.
  • Summoned monsters now behave less like companions and more like the ravenous horde of beings they are supposed to be.
  • Harvesting buttons now only are offered if you really can harvest items.
  • Many items that had no effect have been removed and will no longer spawn. All armors, bracers, cloaks, gauntlets, gloves, footwear items, headgear items, necklaces, amulets, shields and tools you find have a use.
  • This includes bandages: Using them now provides some healing and stops bleeding.
  • We removed the eyewear slot.
  • Will o’wisps now actually can attack.
  • Troll Assassins will no longer start naked.
  • Many minor bug fixes.
    • Too many and too little to list here in detail.


Development-Roadmap
 

VonMiskov

Educated
Joined
Feb 20, 2021
Messages
104
Is Biskup held captive by someone and forced to endorse this? ADOM is the game that made me love roguelikes. I remember the time when Ultimate was suppose to be the set in big part of Ancardia and what I got is some spirraling crapper of a dungeon. WTF is this.
Look how they butchered my boy :negative:

And I can't even return it now. I have to live with this festering abomination in my steam library reminding me how mighty have fallen.
 

getter77

Augur
Joined
Oct 12, 2008
Messages
861
Location
GA, USA
At minimum, they needed a proper interval update to address the update to the roadmap in a forthright manner---I hope everybody's health is good and whatnot, but this is the first real moment of harrowing concern that shakes the foundations of hope for the project itself pulling such a hard swerve even with the thin assurances of all being righted in post-release support after August that sounds far too much like PR/Pub operating a Ouija board compared to core ADOM team's communiques up to now this entire time.

In theory, Ultimate is STILL supposed to get The Sprawl after the dungeon is fully wrought by and large...that graduation of scale was always the plan from the very start with it just being a question of where on the timeline. I personally never expected it until post-release even under the prior, superior content roadmap as it would be too much of a reach to manage both a mega-dungeon and a mega-world within the conceptual and time confines of Early Access outright to good ends.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Huh, we missed this from June: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1266820/view/2963913643502031016

Statement of the Creator

Original Post by the Creator of ADOM: Thomas Biskup himself:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1266820/discussions/0/3050608452021165961/

Dear community,
Our recent announcement of moving the production release date forward to end of August has raised questions and concerns. Only now we start to understand that we probably failed to communicate our strategy for Ultimate ADOM clear enough (although – after looking through older posts – we did communicate it from the very beginning).
Let me once more summarize our vision for Ultimate ADOM which basically is twofold:
  1. Our short-term goal was to create a new audience for a sequel to ADOM by addressing a more mainstream audience (people who regularly play RPGs but are not really into roguelikes). We felt that this move was an absolute necessity to be able to sustain the development of a modern graphical game worthy of a 21st century audience. Doing so requires higher investments compared to building a simpler pure ASCII based game. We always had the vision to prove that even a complex game of the nature of ADOM is mainstream-capable and can provide exciting new venues to players accustomed to such more classical RPG games out there.
  2. Our long-term goal (and this mirrors in the name prefix “Ultimate” we chose) was to build a much deeper ADOM that surpasses the original in every aspect: More stories, more complex story lines, more character options, more skills, more spells, more items, an extensive surface world and so on and so forth.
Our decision to move to production status is related to the short-term goal:
We feel that Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos is very nearly complete enough (and detailed enough) for the needs of more mainstream gamers. Already now Ultimate ADOM in many areas (though certainly not all) by far surpasses ADOM Classic/Deluxe (and for the sake of completeness I will do an extensive comparison of where Ultimate ADOM already today has far more depth than the original ADOM had… and of the areas where it still needs to grow – expect it to show up in a day or three on our blog, we’ll announce it here, too).

For sure Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos is on a certain level a much simpler game than ADOM: It’s more focused on roughly 20 levels of play, you probably can win it within 3-6 hours based on your level of experience and it still has a wide variety of options to choose from and a wide variety of surprises waiting for you. It’s not quite yet where we want it to be for prime time but close enough according to our estimate. Three areas needed improvement:
  • Melee
  • Magic
  • Overall balance, stability, performance and pacing
Comparing the player behavior from ADOM shows that Ultimate ADOM is already a much more accessible game than its predecessor. Especially new players make it deeper into the dungeons than ever before.

The plan so far has been to address melee aspects by 95% with the June release (which is out – and the game has become a lot more challenging although we still are fine-tuning some areas like critical hits by monsters), address magic with the July release and do the final tuning and polishing in August before production.

We’ll (again) slightly adjust this by focusing on performance and bugs for the next couple of weeks to prove that the game foundation is rock solid and then finish the content aspects mentioned above before production release.

I have to admit that we probably kind of fumbled communicating this vision clearly enough because the name “Ultimate…” already insinuates that the game will be better than ADOM in each and every aspect you can think of. This never has been our goal for the first step. Because neither Rome nor ADOM were built in a day. It took an extended period of time.

Which brings us to the second part of the vision – the long-term part: We do want to continue working on Ultimate ADOM for many years in order to surpass the original in every dimension. And we have a plan for that. But it takes time. So to put this very clearly:
  • We want to continue developing Ultimate ADOM for an infinite amount of time if this is sustainable by any means.
  • We want to release a lot more content updates addressing all dimensions of the game the old community craves and loves.
But we need time for that.

And to buy time we need a wider audience with different needs and requirements. Regarding the more mainstream audience we feel that the current offering is going to cater to their needs once the above-mentioned additions have been addressed before the August release.

And then it’s hopefully “to the moon”.

Our content and idea backlog is crammed full for years to come. And we’d love to do this journey together. But our vision never was to simply to ADOM once again “just with better graphics”. It’s far more extensive and we just have taken the very first step.

So once more the brief summary:
  • We cater to two audiences: more mainstream gamers and the classical community that helped make ADOM great.
  • The more mainstream community now gets their full production release in August.
  • We acknowledge, that there is still content to come and we want to assure that we will support the game post release as much as possible, but this will also be tied to how well the game performs financially after release.
  • The next two milestones are a “bug & performance release in July” and the “magic update & combat fine-tuning release” (with some cool yet unannounced surprises) for the August production release. We changed our priorities here due to your very clear feedback, which we absolutely agree with!
  • We probably should have spent a lot more time communicating this two-part vision in a clearer way. Sorry for being confusing or not transparent enough. But sitting in our rabbit hole for some reason we failed to notice this.
Hopefully this somewhat clears up the confusion, explains our thought processes. We welcome all questions and concerns and will try to be as transparent as possible.

Thanks & Axes High!

Thomas Biskup

Good luck with that.
 
Last edited:

Matador

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jun 14, 2016
Messages
1,631
Codex+ Now Streaming!
I hope they succeed. ADOM is a fantastic game, Ultimate ADOM is not very appealing to me though.
 

almondblight

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2004
Messages
2,549
The old description for ADOM II/JADE from 17 years back sounds more appealing:

  • A complete world with continents, weather patterns, settlements, dungeons and strange places, either randomly generated at the start of each game or chosen from a number of preselected worlds.
  • A quest generator for random quests. No two games ever will be the same.
  • Dungeon and world size only limited by the boundaries of Java-technology and your hardware.
  • No classes, but a detailed skill system, together with a guild system providing special benefits for guild membership.
  • All the races from ADOM and a few more (mist elves, ratlings, hill dwarves).
  • Complete freedom in what you want to do (e.g. explore dungeons, work as a caravan guardian, build your own castle, conquer cities, lead a life as a simple farmer, become a shopkeeper or whatever).
  • Hidden plots. (Has Chaos been truly defeated in ADOM or is something lurking behind the scenes and waiting?)
  • Monster inventories.
  • The ability to transform into another being.
  • A detailed system for morale values (on an Order...Balance...Chaos scale) and ethics (on a Good...Uncaring...Evil scale).
  • Platform independence due to Java-based technology.
  • Compressed save files.
 

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