Alternate Reality X - Fixing zones

Now that release 0.42 of ARX is out I've started on the next set of fixes and additions. A few people had commented that some of the Dungeon map zones were displaying the wrong textures and colours so I thought I would look at fixing these. For example the areas around the Dungeon Chapel had a bright white floor and the Blink Mine area kept displayed the City mountains as a background -Interesting but not really true to the original game!

After a bit of digging I reacquintainted myself with the zones system. Basically the Dungeon designers set up a system where you could define a "zone" by specifying a pair of X and Y co-ordinates on the Dungeon map. These are used to control the colours, textures used (eg. rock walls, ice crystals in the crystal caverns), types of encounters (e.g. lots of guards around the bank vaults) and anti-magic zones.  It's an efficient system (as you only specify 4 numbers to define the area) and I might use something similar for some sections of Stone of the Citadel.This is one of the things I like about AR over other games of the time - the variety of different area styles as opposed to other games which had one set of wall graphics for the entire game.

The original Dangerous Area



The ARX Dangerous Area

Anyway I focused on the southwest area of the Dungeon map and went through every area and zone there to match them up and add any new styles and colours required. I haven't matched all the colours and areas exactly, partly because the colours in the version of Atari800Win I'm using didn't look quite right to me but also because I could spend a lot of time making every area look exactly the same and most players won't remember the exact scheme. This area of the map is now nicely tidied up and all the zones look sensible. I'll move onto other areas shortly.

Alternate Reality X - Release 0.42 now available

Release 0.42 is now available from the downloads page at www.crpgdev.com.

Let me know what you think, especially if the changes I've made to the gate stats counter speed are positive.

Alternate Reality X - Version 0.42 released soon

I'll be releasing version 0.42 shortly. This will only be a minor release but it does add a few features that people have been asking for repeatedly. 

The main changes are:

• Save and load characters in the City or Dungeon
• Updated automap that only shows explored areas
• Updated Exit / Quit behaviour and help screen
• Sell gems and jewels at the Dungeon D & P
• Some adjustments to the City Smithy such as better weapon choice for new characters and correct intervals for restocking weapons and armour
• A few more bug fixes

Please consider the save and load options as experimental in this version so I would suggest not putting lots of effort into building up a character at this stage.

Hopefully have this uploaded in the next few days.

Alternate Reality X - Updated automap and options

I'd always intended to have the automap display only those places on the map that you'd explored so I've spent some time this weekend updating the automap. As you explore each location on the map they become visible on the map making it easy to see which parts of the map you've still to explore and will avoid the problem of the player missing any potential specials objects or locations.

The updated automap showing the starting area of the Dungeon

I've also added some additional code to each of the shop locations to mark out all the cells of the map relating to that shop are appropriately coloured in (e.g. The Retreat and Grille above). It will take a while to mark out the same for all the shops, guilds etc in the City as well. I need to add this new automap information into the save game format so that save games include the areas of the automap explored so far.

I've also made some changes to fix the problem people reported about accidently quiting from the game by pressing the ESC key twice. When you now press ESC you get an options / help screen.

Further options will be added in future

If you select the Quit option you'll also be asked to confirm it with a Yes / No prompt now so hopefully no more accidental lost characters. You can currently only load your save games from the main menu.