Posts from ·jpeg·
Sunday, February 16th, 2014 16:47
After a long time of waiting, finally here they are: the results of last year’s Stonesoup survey. Ideally, this would have been out exactly a year ago. We hope the tables and charts are still of interest to some of you.
Below we give an extremely abridged report. For an in-depth treatment, read the full report (pdf, 37 pages).
There have been 5735 meaningful replies, arriving between 16/02/2012 and 29/12/2012, a period which included the 0.10 and 0.11 releases and tournaments.
The average participant is male (92%), 24 years old, and lives in the USA (46%). He strongly prefers the Tiles version (76%) because he feels that tiles are less confusing and easier to understand than ASCII glyphs. He is playing Crawl offline (72%) and would like to use the online game if it was as same comfortable.
The average Crawler has started playing Crawl within the last three years (74%), and hasn’t won the game (76%) or even found a rune yet (66%), but has made it as deep as the Orcish Mines and Lair. He doesn’t use spoilers or only in moderation to read up on the most deadly of enemies. He’s quite likely to have played Diablo for a while (57%) and may also have tried NetHack (63%) or Dwarf Fortress’ adventure mode (51%) at some point, but otherwise has little experience with roguelikes or comparable games. The survey was his first interaction with the devteam in any shape or form (85%).
Among the 1224 participants who did snatch a win, some have achieved additional feats of even greater difficulty: 430 won allruners, 375 have won more than five games, 197 have completed Ziggurats and 72 obtained streaks of at least three wins in succession.
About 15% of all participants consider themselves thoroughly spoiled by the time they won their first character whereas 36% consider themselves completely or mostly unspoiled, at least when it comes to monster properties. This has actually informed on-going Crawl development, as 0.13 will disclose monster spells to players, something that was regarded as the most pertinent spoily monster information.
Sunday, April 17th, 2011 14:53
If you’ve been following the Stonesoup development, you might have noticed the recent shift of activity from longterm development to shortterm bugfixing, as well as a switch of trunk to version 0.9; the reason being the release of 0.8 that is currently slated for April 24.
The recent changes include the incorporation of the unicode branch, which fixes a number of issues with non-ASCII path names etc., bringing Ashenzari up to speed, and the aforementioned gazillions of bug fixes. In a concerted effort of several developers, we’ve managed to close 100+ bug reports on our bug tracker over the last couple of weeks, which is quite a feat, let me tell you. Of course, we wouldn’t have been able to do that if they hadn’t been reported in the first place. So, here’s a large thank you to our diligent reporters! :)
What follows is the list of changes in the 0.8 pre-release branch currently available on CDO (a206725), meaning they’ll be included in the stable release.
More: Read the rest of this entry…
Thursday, March 3rd, 2011 11:10
Currently, the guys at Oulu University (Finland) are running a usability project involving DCSS like they already did last year. We got a truckload of detailed feedback and great ideas the last time around, so I’m eager to see what they find this time. In preparation of this project (well, I’d been meaning to do it anyway, but this way there was a deadline), I overhauled the tutorial — once again.
You see, one of the first things I did when I started coding for Stonesoup was to create an in-game tutorial with situational triggers. Last year’s UP team created a new tutorial from scratch, so the old one was renamed to Hints mode. The idea was to use a fixed map with fixed puzzles and explanations. We had been planning to do something like that anyway, so we were glad when someone took up the task.
More: Read the rest of this entry…
Saturday, February 12th, 2011 22:55
With several months delay, here is the 0.7.2 bug fix release. You’ve probably all switched to trunk by now, but just in case you haven’t, 0.7.2 fixes a couple of nasty crash bugs.
As always, you can find source code and binaries on our Downloads page. Unfortunately, we cannot currently provide Mac binaries.
The changelog is a bit rough around the edges, so here’s a more detailed list:
- Fix crashes on entering new levels with restart_after_game = true.
- Fix crash with off-level map viewing.
- Fix a crash when Jiyva worshippers spawn jellies for non-monster-damage.
- Fix crash when trying to throw a quivered dancing weapon.
- Fix problems with Unicode locales other than en_US.UTF-8.
- Fix near-uselessness on ARM.
- Fix save corruption for too long player names.
- Don’t trap teleporting merfolk in a couple of temples.
- Disallow targeting passwall at self.
- Fix stat boosting armour not losing bonus when melding.
- Fix weapon acquirement not considering some rare weapons.
- Disable Trowel card in portal vaults, labyrinths, Pan and the Abyss.
- A variety of other bug fixes.
Hopefully, 0.8 won’t be long in coming now, either.
As always, have fun playing!
Saturday, January 8th, 2011 22:18
A week into the new year, and still no playtesting post? That’s completely unacceptable!
You already know about the big Armour unnerfing, and also about the the new skill menu, so what else is new?
Well, for one, there have been so many updates to the Zot Defence minigame that, this time around, I had to put them into a subheading of their own. We’ve got a truckload of new tiles. Lots of crash bugs introduced, and even more resolved. Oh, and the noise propagation has been changed to produce pretty pictures. Well, that and to make it less likely to wake up monsters behind several layers of walls.
More: Read the rest of this entry…
Sunday, December 5th, 2010 00:00
On returning from yet another break at Crawl development, one of the first things I always do is try to find out what I’ve missed. Now this would have been much easier if there had been any recent Playtesting blog posts, but unfortunately this was not to be. Then again, since I’m already rummaging through the commit log, I might as well share my findings. You guys love to read these lists, right?
So here’s the gargantuan listing of what’s been going on in 0.8 development. Enjoy!
More: Read the rest of this entry…
Monday, November 29th, 2010 09:52
You guys have commented previously that you’d like a dedicated free Crawl forum. A few days ago, djnrempel was kind enough to set one up at http://dungeoncrawlstonesoup.freeforums.org.
This is really new, so there may be kinks to be ironed out. If you have any ideas for improvement, you can also speak up on the corresponding Mantis thread.
Have fun discussing all things Crawlific and more!
Update: Due various reasons the forum has moved.
Sunday, April 4th, 2010 20:39
Lately, I’ve been quoting from last year’s survey results left, right and centre, and seeing how we still don’t have a nicely linkable version online, I guess it’s high time to change that.
More: Read the rest of this entry…
Sunday, February 21st, 2010 23:55
Shoals development from a Tiles perspective
As you might or might not know, the overall Shoals development happened with the speed of a glacier. First started during the development of 0.3.x, the beginning of the Shoals implementation, then codenamed Islands, roughly coincided with Enne Walker’s integration of tiles into Stone Soup. To me, it thus makes perfect sense to have a look at the relationship between Tiles and Shoals development.
More: Read the rest of this entry…
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 19:00
I never knew Crawl had a DS port: information and download. There’s even a Wii port for Stonesoup! (Yes, really!)
Thursday, January 15th, 2009 19:00
Friday, August 1st, 2008 19:00
Stone Soup 0.4.3 is out, mainly to fix a bad Tiles bug.
Yes, I know this makes four releases in three weeks – it’s not something to be proud of. At least we’re fast in fixing the bugs. :)
In other news, the first Crawl Stone Soup tournament has begun and will continue throughout August. To join you have to register on CAO or CDO, both reachable via ssh. For a guide on how to use ssh and play online, click here.
Once you’ve got an account you can use it to play Crawl online and compete against other players in a number of different categories.
Good luck everybody!
Sunday, July 27th, 2008 19:00
This upcoming August a highly exciting event will take place: the first tournament involving Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup will be hosted on CAO and CDO. Experienced as well as new players will have a chance of winning in one of the many categories. You can even form “clans” and play as a team!
For more information click here.
In other news, Stone Soup now has a FreeBSD port.
Sunday, November 4th, 2007 19:00
Stone Soup 0.3.1 tiles source and Windows binary are available on the download page! Thank you, Enne!
Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 19:00
Stone Soup 0.3.1 is out with fixes for two critical bugs.
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 20:00
Enne Walker has been working on a graphical tile port of Stone Soup. You can find sources and Windows binaries there. Tiles are not (yet) part of the official Stone Soup builds.
