Hi everybody, sorry for my (vacation-)delayed reply.
> implementing certain expenses in Darghul
Yes, definitely. (You're right about Teudogar: Due to its historical/cultural focus, there wasn't much to buy, and concepts like 'rent' or 'interest' were unheard of.)
Food: There is no longer any free food available in most places (civilized societies just aren't as hospitable as barbarian ones). But this is no big deal; one silver coin will buy enough food for several days.
Shelter: Right. This reminds me of implementing the following: If you go to sleep in somebody else's house, and this homeowner isn't your friend, he could wake you up and kick you out. So you'd have the choice of sleeping in abandoned houses, or outside (not so good for your health), or in paid-for accomodation.
Tax on entry: Actually, even that's already included. The city of Unghol demands numerous fees and expensive permits and licenses from you. But maybe I should include government as a major cost factor in several cities, especially when you set up a business anywhere.
Inflation: In real life, this exists where the rulers print lots of paper money or reduce their coins' gold/silver content. This wouldn't affect your existing .916 purity gold coins. Sure, a gold rush might decrease gold's purchasing power somewhat, but not to a really significant extent. So I think a better option will be to keep your purchasing power constant but offer many (often extremely expensive) things to spend or invest your money on.
Your main running expenses will likely be magic (magical potions, magical sacrifices necessary to uphold your black magic capabilities, etc) and, most importantly, the businesses and trade structures you set up (caravan drivers/guards, clerks, shop rent, producers, perhaps also interest owed, and so on (though much of this still isn't implemented yet)).
And finally, there's much more to buy, not just special arms/armor, but also information, spells, means of production, services etc.
> release date:
Indeed, it's the worst of both worlds: First of all I decided to make an entirely new game with lots of features, and second, I have usually only a few hours per day for working on it. On top of this, I added many of the features discussed in this thread, and I also did some fundamental renovations on the Teudogar legacy code. And I definitively want to release a well-rounded, clean, and bug-free game; so I'll rather take some extra time instead of rushing it.
Unfortunately, all of this takes a lot of time. I'm really grateful for your patience.
> screenshots:
Well, here are two (not compressed; about 350k each; may take a while to load):
http://www.darghul.com/darg1001.gif
http://www.darghul.com/darg1002.gif
Since I increased the screen resolution to 1024x768, you have a very large field of vision; this is very convenient and feels much more natural than Teudogar, where your field of vision was restricted to comparatively few tiles. (The price for this is that all tiles look much smaller now than they did in Teudogar. This partly reduces your feeling of 'I'm actually in there'; but in my opinion, the wider field of view makes up for this.)
I'm still experimenting with different fonts for dialog text output (necessary since the old font is to small when displayed in this screen resolution). To me, Century Schoolbook seem easiest to read, even when projected over the game world (see screenshots). Other, more aesthetic fonts like Garamond or Times are too narrow; and Serif-less fonts like Arial or Gothic take a bit more effort to read. (Anyway I added a menu where you can select any font for text output; so this will be just the default setting.)
As you can see, the NPC sprite for female players still doesn't reflect the armor you wear; the inventory windows still need to be resized; the 'it's raining' inventory window background needs a better scan; and the small font needs to be a bit bigger. I'll upload more screenshots when these and other graphics issues are finished.
Thanks to all of you for your suggestions, comments and encouragement!
but I am certainly looking forward to it. I just got a bit worried when I spied the old Codex link to the interview and thought 'wtf!' when I read your 'old' release date plans.
