Your donations keep RPGWatch running!
Box Art

Dungeons of Dredmor - Update, Impressions

by Dhruin, 2011-07-16 02:01:22

There's an update on Dredmor blog that says a new patch is up on Steam after they fixed an audio bug that was producing some crashes. Next week they will start on some UI improvements, such as scaling at high resolutions:

We’ve put up another build which has a fixed audio driver, and resolves a few other little issues. We have tried to make this backwards compatible with previous save files, but one of the things we added in this patch was also backwards load/save compatibility… so we’re going to have to work out the kinks here a little. If you make a *new* save that crashes and can’t load it, or you still get a random crash (we know about one descending, then ascending stairs, which we have seen a bit – but it might also be the audio thing, so we’re just going to wait and see… also what are you doing going back *up* the dungeon anyway?), send us an e-mail, preferably with a save game or crash dump, and we’ll get on it.

That said, so far everybody who was having crashes has reported that this build has cleared it up. Whew.

(Profound thanks to Ryan C. “icculus” Gordon, who debugged the first audio crash, then confirmed that the second audio crash was, in fact, “something that has just never been triggered in the past eight or so years in SDL_mixer.” We have now broken SDL_mixer about eight times and aren’t allowed to keep breaking it any more.)

I don’t know when the next patch will be up – probably not until some time next week – but we are going to try to start resolving some of the UI Clunkers people have reported (getting the keyboard/mouse movement a little more consistent, adding UI scaling, etc.) I would also like to turn on the Mod Browser and Weekly Challenges, but getting the core game running well is the top priority for all of us.

Meanwhile, RPS has some brief impressions:

You can sort-of disable permadeath, which entails asking the game to let you load old saves, but while that’s a route to achieving more I know full well I’d only feel like I was cheating. The thrill of a good roguelike is narrowly avoiding death and, when death comes, going out in spectacular/pathetic fashion. So, for me Dredmor is a game about dying – that’s something I’m more than comfortable with, it’s just that I’m dying very quickly at the moment.

Part of that is, I suspect, because I’m trying to do to much. There’s a huge skill tree in there, massively customisable in order to create your own bespoke class, as well the inevitable megaton of loot. There’s also crafting and teleporting and traps and stealing and sneaking and… well, pretty much every RPG feature you care to name, bar talking to the monsters. So I’m getting a bit too distracted by trying to build a new mace or working out how to summon a moustache golem than I am on simply surviving. Which has the added pain of meaning that when I die, I lose a ton of cool stuff I’ve built an unlocked. Sigh.

Information about

Dungeons of Dredmor

SP/MP: Single-player
Setting: Fantasy
Genre: Roguelike
Platform: PC
Release: Released


Details