I'm really sorry for the delay replying to MaraDNS email

I'm really sorry for the delay replying to MaraDNS email; I just have been too busy at work and only finally got a bit of time today to reply to my personal email.

However, I did have some free time Sunday night (at home, no internet at home) to make a couple of minor updates to ObHack.

- Sam

ObHack update; MaraDNS support status

I've done a lot of little updates to ObHack:

Oblige.lua updated to about over 40,000,000 usable seed numbers instead of only 500,000 or so usable seed numbers (instead of incrementing an index and resetting the RNG every time we can't build a level because we couldn't place a stair or what not, we just don't reset the RNG)

x_heretic.lua tweaks: E6 now has ten, not three levels, in a loop. This happens to work with Deng 1.8.6, but may cause problems in other source ports. E6 is not clearly defined, and I like the loop of levels (Note: The original DOS Heretic crashes when you enter E6M5)

We now never have the firemace in levels (it's a poor weapon for anything but deathmatch, and there's issues with the firemace not appearing). I also tweaked monster.lua to allow a non-weapon to be placed as a "weapon"

E5 is now a mish-mash of themes, instead of just the very loud "garish" theme. Slight tweak to outdoor "Pharoah" theme to make it look nice (no more ugly grey-and-red; now it's a much nicer yellow-and-red)

Planner.lua improvement: If a level is too small, we take one of the quests in the level and make that quest a little longer; this stops ObHack from slowing down when a level isn't big enough.

I have also tweaked things so "puzzles" affects the maps, even at the tiny and small sizes. Deciding number of keys/switches/etc in small levels redone; fixes "no weapons" bug for small levels.

Tiny levels tweaking: Quests will not be longer than three units (this guarantees that tiny levels are smaller than small levels). Tiny levels now always have two things; either one puzzle and one goodie (weapon/item), or two goodies.

Tweaked rare: Now, in a map with "rare" outdoors, there will be no more than two quests that are outdoors

ObHack is available here

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I have answered a simple RTFM question someone asked me about MaraDNS. This leaves me five more emails to answer, which I have downloaded and will hopefully answer this week. We'll see.

ObHack and Solstice updates

I have updated Solstice; not only have a refined the bitmap rendering of the font, I have also improved the metrics of the italic version of the Solstice font. The metrics aren't perfect--getting perfect metrics is impossible without resorting to kerning--but they look better than they did before.

My update can be downloaded here

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I have also updated ObHack. Tiny and small levels now have more goodies to pick up; small levels also sometimes have both a key "quest" (find the key; open the door) and a switch "quest". Before, tiny and small levels always had one item to pick up, and small levels always had precisely one switch or key quest. Now tiny levels can have one or two items (but no switch/key quests); small levels can have up to three items.

The ObHack levels generated are not any bigger; I have tweaked things so that the tiny and small levels now have fewer "cells" (places about the size of a room) without any items or keys/switches. I have also reduced the number of non-item cells in medium sized maps a little.

It can be downloaded here

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The MaraDNS support email is piling up. I haven't answered MaraDNS email for over a week. I apologize for the delay getting back to people.

ObHack and Dillo updated

Enhas has made some tweaks to ObHack, which can be looked at and downloaded here

I swore off making updates to Dillo last week; however I changed my mind. I have cleaned up the crude utf8-to-latin1 conversion used by my version of Dillo so that it works for most latin1 characters represented in UTF-8; I have also added basic support for the names of the suits in cards (The " Clubs" symbol becomes a " C" and so on).

In addition, I have removed that annoying Bug Meter; I use Dillo for basic web surfing, and I' m not one of those people who gets a smug feeling knowing a given page has 53 or however many errors in its HTML. If you want it back, just define BUG_METER when compiling my version of Dillo.

My version of Dillo can be downloaded here (750k .tar.bz2 tarball). It works pretty well; I using it right now to post this blog.

- Sam

ObHack snapshot update

Enhas has contributed some bug fixes and other changes to ObHack, which I have just put together in to today's snapshot, available here.

Have a good weekend everyone!

- Sam

ObHack snapshot update

I did a lot of work on ObHack this weekend. Mainly, I have completely revamped the Heretic theme.

Previously, ObHack had only one there for Heretic: A castle theme. I felt kinda silly being in a castle in E2 (Hell's Maw), so I finally fixed things so Hell's Mall looks like Hell, The Domes (E3) are quite as castle-looking as E1, E4 has a very sandy, Egyptian look, and E5 has a garish surrealistic.

If only one episode is made, a theme from E1 to E4 is randomly chosen (E5 is a little far-out to have as the only theme in a game)

I have also made some changes to the pop-down menu: It's now possible to have "rare" outdoors, that isn't 100% indoors, but has less outdoors than "some" outdoors. In addition, there are two new game types: Deathmatch without exits and a menu selection for Capture the Flag (CTF).

Note that CTF isn't supported yet; selecting CTF just makes normal deathmatch maps. However, this allows someone interested in CTF to add support for CTF to ObHack's scripts.

It can be downloaded here

(Geek note: I'm seeing if it's possible to post to Blogger using Dillo)

MaraDNS snapshot update; ObHack snapshot update

Jean-Jacques Sarton has made some minor changes to improve cross-platform compatibility in today's snapshot of MaraDNS.

Enhas has made some minor revisions to today's snapshot of ObHack.

- Sam