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ADOM has come a long way. Since its creation I always only added stuff that in my very personal opinion would add something to the game. If the feature was one I never would have wanted, it wasn't added. Over the years I literally received thousands of suggestions, a few bad, lots of good stuff and quite a bit of great stuff. Some suggestions sounded neat, but I never wanted them in the game and was too lazy to add them, because they would have been a lot of work. Now this is changing...

I am planning to release a commercial ADOM version (as shareware) that will include a number of things requested most often by fans. Since all those things are things I never would have wanted in the game, you'll have to pay to get them. This won't affect the free version of ADOM in any way - it always will remain free, but will have some features less.

Development will occur parallely once the shareware version has been released with the differenc being that the shareware version will have some additional features.

This is how I am planning to make it work:

• The shareware version will be available for a fee of either $20 or 30 German Marks (or 15 Euro once it can be used for payment). It's your right to choose the form of payment. I'm aware that the amount of marks involved is less than the amount of Dollars. The reason for this is that I have to cash in the dollars and that I have to pay fees for that.
• Once you have registered, you will receive a personal password that you will have to use to play the game. Should pirated copies using your password show up, I'll simply and irrevocably delete the password from the list of accepted passwords for the next version and that's it. The password has the great advantage that you simply can download new versions without the need of reregistering. The passwords will only be contained in encrypted form in the binary using some one-way encrypting technique.
• If you register without providing a valid email address (for sending the password), the fee will increase by $3/3 DM/1.5 Euro to pay for the letter I have to write.

And what will you get for your money? Here's a list of planned features:

• point-based character generation
• selectable background stories
• selectable character attributes (hair color, eye color, ...)
• selectable alignment (law, balance, chaos)
• selectable star signs
• various cheat-modes (start with a wand of wishing, start without being able to die)
• recoverable save files (in other words: saving like in any other game)
• a camera function to create a "movie script" from a game (this might be moved to the normal game, because it's so damn useful for debugging)
• quest options (play the game without being able to attack in melee, without being able to use magic, without being able to wear armor, ...)
• an option to turn off corruption
• an option to turn off the need for food

Naturally all these things can be combined to truly customize the game according to your wishes. Please note that there neither will be a network mode nor graphics. Those things would require more time and ressources than I have at my disposal.

The ADOM Deluxe diary

February, 27th, 1999

Some coding has been done on ADOM Deluxe, most notably for the most challenging feature (programming-wise) that it will provide: the camera function. The camera works pretty fine right now (you can record games starting from an arbitrary point and view them later, step by step, in intervals or completely, changable during the actual replay) save for some annoying feature. The approach for the camera is to save the initial game state (PC setup, map setup, RNG setup and configuration of the game) and then just record the keys pressed by the player. When the game is replayed the initial game state is restored and then key input is simulated from the saved keys that were pressed in the original game.

This approach basically is very solid and nice but it has one major shortcoming for a game like ADOM: the game has to make sure that no changes to the state of the game environment of whatever kind are wrought upon the game outside of the actual replay (e.g. if the player changes a configuration variable for the game, interrupts replay to examine the inventory, etc.). Since ADOM never was planned for this kind of game engine handling, there are still a few spots left where global state information is kept in local variables. During normal gameplay you don't really notice that but even most minor events change the state of the RNG which in turn destroys any chance of being able to replay a game of several thousand steps.

Finding all these places is a pretty hard task (but I'm alsmost done), but fixing all of them is even harder. ADOM consists of more than 130000 lines of code and some of the state variables are used in hundreds of places. Just getting all of them saved properly requires a lot of code changing (because I want all those variables to be stored in one large structure to allow easier extension in the future).

The gist of all this is that ADOM Deluxe will require more time to be finished that I ever had envisioned. Stay tuned for another couple of months and all things will be worked out. And the camera function alone is worth the wait... believe me :-)

December, 24th, 1998

No real coding so far due to all the usual Christmas stress... thus no release. I fear that this will actually take much longer than I had hoped. Keep in touch - the late January release probably should be possible.

December, 3rd, 1998

ADOM Deluxe is getting ahead slowly. My list of improvements for the first release is complete and I'm slowly approaching the actual implementation. Hopefully the first release will be due around Christmas (if many things steal my spare time - as usual - this might become a late January release).