New beginnings
Right now we are preparing our Great Move ™ from our rented appartment to our own house. Packing things always brings a lot of memories up for me and this time it’s no different. Since this is the Great Move ™ – maybe the final one in our lives (we wouldn’t mind 😉 ) – a lot of memories come back.
While many memorabilia bring back great memories of my life so far I also have discovered quite a lot of stuff related to my hobbies, mostly currently buried under work. But this will definitely change as owning our own house will bring a lot more stability to our private life since we now are building something to last.
This leads to quite a few things I really need to get underway some time soon, the most important ones besides having a life again being:
- Working with Jochen on iADOM (ADOM for the iPad). Jochen already has finished some great preparatory work and it should be possible to finish an initial version before Christmas.
- Picking up JADE again. Although it’s slowly becoming Duke Nukem of the roguelike gaming genre I know that it will be released some day – but once more not this year. Finding the house, restoring it, packing and unpacking just take up too much of this year to finish a viable first version. Sorry once more – I know I’m the source of criticism, cynism and bitter disappointment especially as far as JADE goes… and also for ADOM. But there is only one life to live and priorities keep shifting – sometimes intentionally, at other times unintentionally. At least I still believe in the mission 😉
- Providing content to the RPG Museum I have been planning for more than 10 years. I own www.rpg-museum.net for a long time but never did anything to it. Packing all the RPGs gathered in our appartment just once more showed to me how many of them I own. I wouldn’t be overly surprised if I possess the largest private RPG collection in the world. There must be a lot more than 400 RPG systems I own (probably a lot more – I will count them while unpacking) – and that doesn’t take into account all the supplements, editions, etc. And only print & paper RPGs. Many ultra rare things among them like a mint Starfaring from the highly limited first print run. Good thing that we have an alarm system and a good insurance ;-). The plan here is to build a blog and a Wiki around RPG-Museum.net – the blog containing my personal thoughts and feelings about games, how I procured them and what fascinated me about them and the Wiki containing hard facts, photos, links to reviews and websites, etc. I might even use our open source project OpenSAGA to program the site for that myself since it probably would take less than a weekend given the power features coming up in OpenSAGA 1.5.0 (use the nightly builds to try OpenSAGA if you are curious – the latest nightly builds are so much cooler and more powerful than the last version 1.1.0 that you would be comparing laser rifles to stone clubs).
- Continuing work on Hexer & Helden. The rules are shaping up greatly but I lacked the vigor to publish the next bexta release before the Great Move ™. Sorry for that but currently there is barely time to breathe…
And I finally want to have a life again… the past three to four months (it actually feels much longer than that) have been entirely filled up with working, preparing for the move, coordinating the craftsmen at our new home and seeing to it that our money doesn’t run out too soon 😉 What an adventure. Seeing friends again, going once more to movies and just having fun will be… well, fun 🙂
Thanks for reading this. I probably will be gone for at least two weeks since we are moving this week and the telecommunications company offered to again connect our phone and our Internet flatrate by December, 1st (no joke). So much for a standard activity (which I would believe it should be – but it seems to be very complicated). I will show up again as soon as we are settled.
See ya!
Arttu on September 19th, 2010
Good luck and take your time! Sounds like you are a lot more productive than I ever will, so I can’t blame you for postponing Jade. It will also be interesting to see how you manage to get iAdom to be playable on iPad.
And good luck with the Great Move, I know you will need it! 😀
getter77 on September 19th, 2010
Congrats on the move and good luck on all the doings!
Andrew B. on September 19th, 2010
Don’t beat yourself up over JADE’s “schedule”. Until people are paying for it you’re under no obligation 😉
Meantime, my suggestion for writing the game is to keep it really simple. Start-off single-threaded. Don’t get sucked into details that aren’t your core competency (which is the game system). Leverage third-party libraries for things that aren’t central to what you want to be working on.
Some suggestions from my searches and experience:
Serialization: Google’s Protocol Buffers
Logging: Log4J
Dependency Injection: Guice
Tile game-engine: http://slick.cokeandcode.com/
Rupert Gilliand on September 20th, 2010
Whenever JADE arrives, however long it takes, I’ll be here to eagerly receive it!
Best of luck with the move and so forth; as always, Real Life comes first!
emilus on September 22nd, 2010
Yes adom depends heavily on keyboard… I was wondering how Thomas will implement game inferface… In normal adom to survive you had to memorize hotkeys and stuff to play at decent level and speed… It’s still one of the hardest and longest game ever.
adom without keyboard… ehh lets see how it will turn.
Botched on September 23rd, 2010
Life always takes precedent over hobbies. Don’t worry about not doing much on jade, the community here seems content to wait. Remember even duke nukem forever isn’t completely dead yet, in fact it sounds like we’ll see it soon (not holding my breath though). Good luck to you!
James on September 30th, 2010
Good luck with the move… do people still send postcards to the old address [e) embark upon the postcard quest]?
Chris on October 3rd, 2010
Does this mean that the people attempting the postcard quest are bound to fail? Unless the mail gets forwarded to your new address 😉
Thomas_Biskup on October 23rd, 2010
No, the postcard quest still works. All cards are forwarded to me and none get lost. And yes, I still receive quite a number of cards… this week a few from Russia and Poland. Keep’em coming 🙂
The next release of ADOM will include a new address for the postcard quest though in order to ensure that the postcard quest can be completed for at least 30 years to come 😉
noob on November 6th, 2010
hey man. did you recieve a postcard from dutch adress that was signed by swedish, polish and dutch guy?
on first side there was this sweet landscape with a few cute houses near the coast!
noob on November 6th, 2010
oh, we sent it like two years ago too 🙂
freynir on November 7th, 2010
Congratulation the new house. I hope that reembarkment was finished, so do you will get started the job over the J.A.D.E.
PS. can you free the source code for A.D.O.M.- i hate it’s MS_WIN version, because they don’t use console, but with the source-code it’s possible to trasfer it to the PDCurses -like xHack, Crawl and much other r-likes. That will be full support for console.
PS- sorry for my engrish- it’s not very frequently used language in mine country &-)
Revim on November 10th, 2010
Good luck with your move and your life. I don’t see JADE as vaporware just yet though =) Hopefully I’ll complete the postcard quest before you finish JADE. I got as far as filling out a postcard and having all the stamps and such attached but it has just sat in one of my packs (I know this because I saw it earlier today, only recognisable by the fact I don’t carry around landscape photographs.)
I hope you can get back to having fun soon; work sucks.
K33pC00L on November 15th, 2010
JADE, ADOM, 400+ RPG Systems…
But the RL is the only real RPG that we’re all playin… With one life ;P
Good luck and an Orb of unlimited energy 2 u ;P
Greetz
KC
Stringburka on November 29th, 2010
We’ll just be glad acid traps aren’t as common in this RPG.
The graphics are really nice, though I find the quest a little fuzzy.
Socord on November 28th, 2010
haha, oh ma
Socord on November 28th, 2010
haha, oh man. I remember when me and my friend were like in middle school and we discussed adom and how hard it was, we honestly belived it couldn’t be beaten. But now, years later I finally finished with a regural chaos gate ending, honestly never felt more proud on an accomplishment in a game before. There probably never will be a game as epic and challenging as adom, and I truly wish we will get our hands on Jade and I still believe we will. But what I wanted to say was, that we have waited a long time and can wait some more. Take your time and good luck with your life 🙂 .