Fame 0.9.8 released!

Fame is currently taking a big turn. A long time ago I have decided that there will be no experience points in the game. The reason for that is unknown, even to me. Perhaps I just wanted to be original. Recently I recognized that as a big mistake. Sure, you can have an RPG game without experience points and levels, why not, but you need to provide some other clue of progression for the player instead. This is insane, but I was completely unaware of this problem for nearly 15 years... Time has come to fix that. Version 0.9.8 introduces experience points.

This release, unfortunately, does not contain music. This is because of a bug found in the last minute of testing. Hopefully it will be fixed with next release.

Saved games from 0.8.4 up to 0.9.7 are still compatible with 0.9.8.

Quick summary:

• experience points
• skill-oriented quests
• redesigned Mining, Alchemy, Smithing and Founding
• new creatures
• new location (Altar of Fire)

Detailed change log:

• experience points
• skill-oriented quests for Alchemy, Smithing and Founding
• 8 new creature types
• autopickup for items
• message window (to review all messages)
• the main screen, the Character window and Bestiary now drawn entirely using characters in ASCII mode
• new special room type (inscription room)
• a small chance that a much weaker or much stronger monster will generate in the location
• picked up ammo is automatically added to the ammo slot if an equipment set is defined
• the Mining skill can now be applied to lodes surrounding the hero
• Mining consumes less energy and does considerably less damage to a pick axe
• optimized saving speed
• NPC titles
• in the Character Creation window, the unimplemented 'Appearance' attribute is always proposed at the minimum level of 2
• games to load are displayed in a table
• smithing: added messages if the hero does not have a hammer or an anvil
• item details includes total weight (for items with count > 1)
• a keyboard shortcut to access the Options window
• first key pressed during character creation deletes the default name
• [bugfix] the game no longer crashes when kicking a corpse (bug introduced in the previous version)
• [bugfix] auto-aim works also for ranged weapons, not only for spells
• [bugfix] the Smithing skill could not be invoked from the Skills window (and therefore unusable)
• [bugfix] at higher levels, the Founding skill no longer is less usable than on lower levels
• [bugfix] potential crash when talking to a group close to the edge of the location
• [bugfix] potential crash (random memory corruption) after closing the Skills window
• [bugfix] music does not mix after pressing OK in the Options window
• [bugfix] some armors no longer look like caps when worn by female characters