Java-based Ancient Domains Engine © Copyright 1998-2010 by Thomas Biskup. All Rights Reserved.

JADE is slowly taking shape!

Wow, it's been more than two years since the last update - but I told you JADE would be years in the making. Things have changed quite a bit. ADOM 1.0.0 is out, ADOM 1.0.1 is in the work and last weekend I felt the urge to restart actual work on JADE /beside just thinking about everything). I rewrote the basic JADE code for the third time from the scratch but this time I'm really convionced that the basic approach is the right mixture between complexity, flexibility and elegance.

Many things I thought about would have provided the game with ultimate flexibility - e.g. considering body parts as items, so that you could hack off body parts of monsters, pick them up and graft them on your body, etc. Grizzly stuff and very tempting... but in the end there was a lot of such stuff which would have made the game much too complicated - starting with the interface (e.g. how to handle items worn on the respective body part while it was removed) and ending with all the various implications (size implications, etc.). Finally I have convinced myself that too much complexity in such detail areas can't be the way to go. Which resolved many problems...

One major such area was the screen display part... in the previous version of the JADE sources I tried to provide a mixture of predefined UI stuff and a lot of openness so that various modes of display could be plugged in. But I soon noticed that all my decisions might inhibit the ability to provide different user interfaces for JADE. Thus I finally decided to change my approach: JADE now utilizes a very basic UI interface class. The implementation of a specific UI has to follow only very general rules and can otherwise be handled as the developer wants.

And what's the benefit of this... well, I'm going to provide a working ASCII-based UI and if someone else out there feels the need for some other interface, he can easily build it without having to change the basic game. Here are some interfaces I'd love to see:

• A 3D interface inspired by the various art pieces in the gallery. That IMHO would be the coolest game interface any roguelike game ever had... just imagine that: 3D letters moving around in a 3D maze - I love the idea :-))
• A tile-based interface like in the early Ultimas.
• Maybe even a tile-based interface like in more modern games... though I have some doubts that the basic map structure will allow for such detailed maps.

And the other result? A working basic ASCII interface and thus some screenshots. Display speed still needs some tweaking (right now a complete screen redraw takes between 30ms and 170ms depending on the zoom level on my 1GHz Pentium which is slow, but it's Java :-^ ). Well, here are the screenshots (and I'm hoping for the JDK 1.4 which presumably brings with it some major speedups in the Graphics 2D engine):

	A snapshot of the splash screen displayed while JADE starts. This also provides a glimpse of how the new JADE logo will look once I get around to redesign the JADE part of the site. It has a neat progress bar and overall I'm very happy with how the desing worked out.
	The standard map display for JADE. Here you can see a part of the world. Right now all the message areas are still missing but I'd first like to get the display stuff completed.
	The JADE map display offers a variety of zoom levels (right now 14) so you can easily display an overview map of all the areas you have explored. This is an example of such an overview map.
	Due to the flexible zoom levels you also can easily zoom into the map if your eyesight is not very well or you are playing late at night. This is a just-for-fun example of a zoomed in view into the game.