Fame 0.8.7 released!

You probably noticed that there's not much content in Fame. I've spent some time thinking about the reason(s) and here's my conclusion: better tools are needed! The existing ones, especially the built-in location editor (the only tool available publicly, by the way) aren't very good and it's quite painful to create anything sensible using them. Thus I decided to improve the editor...

After nearly one month spent on this work I must say that the editor is a considerably better tool now. However, I wasn't able to improve the game itself. There are no new features this time, only some bugfixes (including a critical one) and one important change related to the skill system.

To the date, activities like cooking, mining, reading books etc. took a lot of time. That was a real pain in the ass, because players don't like to wait. What is more, they really, really HATE if it turns out that the waiting was fruitless - because their hero got hungry or attacked by something. Summing up, waiting for a skill-related activity to complete was annoying, rendering those skills useless.

I have fixed that. Now you'll only wait several turns (i.e. several seconds of game time - and real time as well). Of course, this little change completely destroys the balance in game (if there was any balance before...), but I hope I'll be able to restore it in future versions, adding new features.

Saved games from 0.8.4 up to 0.8.6 are still compatible with 0.8.7.

Quick overview:

• editor improvements
• skills are significantly less time-consuming

Detailed change log:

• time amount required for certain activities (mainly skill-related, like cooking, mining, searching for traps etc.) has been significantly reduced
• resting is much faster now (screen not refreshed as often as before)
• auto-selecting first item in the Quest Log when Tab is pressed
• editor improvements:
• recent file list
• undo / redo
• toolbar
• status bar
• button to quickly launch a new game
• displaying whether the location has been modified
• displaying file name
• easier access to special object properties (Enter key)
• objects with properties are highlighted on mouse over
• target information for portals more clear
• moving portals by drag and drop
• [bugfix] the game no longer crashes when a monster follows the hero to another location
• [bugfix] hero's chance to hit is calculated properly
• [bugfix] hero's picture is no longer obscured by another picture when wielding a bow (the bug was hardly visible unless the hero was a woman)
• [bugfix] it is no longer impossible to put a bow back into hero's hand when the other hand already holds arrows
• [bugfix] quitting the editor no longer causes the Hall of Fame to appear

Enjoy playing! (...and perhaps making maps)