CLIVAN released

CLIVAN stands for "Continuation of Lampshade's Iter Vehemens Ad Necem"

The sourceforge page is: http://sourceforge.net/projects/clivan/
The source code has been released under GPL v2 in an SVN repository.
A release has been made available, based on the revision 5 code.
The game is based on LIVAN, hence the name CLIVAN.

This work has been in progress over the last year and has undergone sporadic development, with more focussed development taking place over the last six months. The development has been getting out of hand lately, and so a decision has been made to shore up the stable parts of the code and release those parts.
So what does this mean for CLIVAN in the near future? I would love people to test it out and see if there are any major oversights that need fixing up, so the release can be stabilised.

Developments have been modest and has been restricted to a new dungeon, new jokes, familiar jokes and unfamiliar characters. Below is a list of what's new since LIVAN:

Places:
-------
- The Deep Forest - Go there for some new adventures
- Muntuo - Where dwells a peculiar character new to the game
- The Tomb of Xinroch - Spooky sounding, but sadly, reserved for future development

Faces:
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- Fruit Bat
- Fire Fox
- Mice
- Forest Men
- Levitating Hattifatteners
- Giant Eagles
- High Priestess of Scabies
- Goblin Prison Warden
- Prison guards
- A Mango grower
- Solicitus
- Insudo
- Priest of Solicitus
- Okapi
- Thin Pig
- Starved Ox
- Vampires
- Uldras
- Kabouters
- Thunderbirds
- Goblin Warlocks
- Orc Shamans
- Kobold Alchemists
- Rookie kamikaze Dwarfs
- Grenadier Dwarfs
- Ambulatory mushrooms
- Bare-hands doctors
- Noxious Orchids

Things:
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- An underground resistance group in the deep forest
- A goblin jail
- An atheist god, who art above Valpurus
- The constitution of Independent Tweraif
- Klein bottles
- Cauldrons
- Maps - these reveal locations in the worldmap
- Mango tree seedlings
- Monographs of Atheism
- Eptyron, a named axe (people complained that there was no serious artifact axe)
- Pentagonal keys
- Mangoes
- The Holy Mango of Oren Ordent (guess who this is named after )
- Wards that prevent teleportation into certain rooms
- Taiahas
- Milestones - these are used instead of staircases to get around in the deep forest
- Filthy Tunic
- Scroll of Fireballs

States:
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- Vampirism - Can drain energy with bite attacks, but stats quickly deteriorate
- Detecting - like teleportitis, but instead it comes up with the "detect material" message

Other:
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- Characters that can sweat now produce an amount of sweat proportional to endurance as: Volume = long(.05 * sqrt(GetBodyVolume() * GetAttribute(ENDURANCE) / 10));
- Added a new victory condition with a score weighting of 1x, which ties in the Forest Arc with the liberation of Tweraif.
- Repaired confdef.h by changing #define ANTITODE_LIQUID (LIQUID_ID + 9) to #define ANTIDOTE_LIQUID (LIQUID_ID + 9)
- Function Slow() now gives temp state SLOWED instead of HASTED
- Added material softening algorithm
- "SoftenedMaterial" in material configs of material.dat to facilitate the alchemist
- Added an algorithm for AI to zap wands with, based on throwing algorithm.
- Added a way to change the player's sweat material through char.h
- Added milder acid liquid VINEGAR
- Added liquid material: Liquid Horror with EFFECT_PANIC
- Added Vladimir and Ivan image by blob to IVAN_LEVEL entering screen
- Added throwing algorithm and a pick-up-items-to-throw algorithm for the AI

Warheck++

Am I correct in guessing that the "forest men" wield taiahas?
Also, hooray for NZ culture!



Assi in enegri?

Perhaps the forestmen should wield taiahas. Yep, the recent natural disasters here in NZ have been good for ivan development, with plenty of time off for programming and scripting.

I added three 'lesser' magic users based on kobolds, goblins and orcs. The goblin warlocks are able to zap wands and a couple of other characters IIRC. So yep, Al can zap as he sees fit ;)

Holy shit, this looks very impressive! Warheck++

God damn, reproducing giant ambulatory mushrooms can sure swamp a dungeon fast.

Yeah, hopefully with a bit of testing we can balance the game a bit. If it can be achieved by the script files alone, then that would be optimal. Some features may also drastically alter the game, so I'm open to the possibility of eliminating some of my implementations.

I'd really love it if Lampshade would drop in and make some suggestions about what he thinks would bring balance to the game.

Seems great, but the Dragon Tower didn't seem to work. Going up only took you to the world map.

Dragon Tower was Lampshade's creation, but I never continued with it. If anyone ever manages to find the Tomb of Xinroch, then they will be similarly disappointed. I've found the scripting to be quite time consuming, so if anyone wants to work on either of these worldmap locations (DT or ToX), then they would be very welcome. I'd be happy to lend support with regards to bug or blooper catching.

Scripting doesn't entail coding, so all you need is a nice text editor to make the changes.

Two things:
1) DT is available immediately after UT, so it should follow a similar difficulty scale as Gloomy Cave (GC)
2) ToX SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
So to script ToX, the difficulty level of that dungeon needs to be sufficiently high to challenge a player capable of surviving the Enner, and about three or four days of questing in the game. I imagined ToX to be some kind of ridiculously difficult dungeon, probably more difficult than what exists presently.

So anyone who sticks their hand up and delivers the goods, I'll put it into CLIVAN and you can be an author :D

Well if I can get my head around scripting dungeons, I might consider giving it a try.
For some reason I can work new materials, items, and NPCs into the game's script files but I just can't get my head around how the heck the dungeon.dat file works... especially when it comes to random rooms/making the dungeon appear on the world map :[

Azba: Did you look at this?

Making a totally new dungeon appear in the worldmap requires a little bit of code to instantiate it in the wordmap. The unfinished dungeons just need scripting only (and maybe a little coding to make it snazzy, but that might come later).

Scripting is tricky and time consuming, because the only feedback is to go into the game and playtest it to see if what is scripted corresponds to the intended design.

Perhaps I'll write an IVAN dungeon building cookbook explaining what goes where.

Not sure I did. I do believe the only tutorial I did was one that Holybanana wrote involving a competition, putting Sherry into New Attnam, and giving your player starting equipment, as well as another one involving creating new materials.

... You obviously didn't look at the link. That is Holybanana's script course.

I did in fact look at the link. It isn't however, the one I remember instructing one on how to give your player equipment and insert Sherry into New Attnam.

Unless that was an old thread detailing the goal and linking to the script course, which seems more likely in hindsight.

Actually, I don't feel particularly qualified to write up a cook book on dungeon scripting. I doscovered something new while trying to do so. And so the word of the day is ``BoundedRandom''.

Just try copying and pasting the Gloomy Caves plugging it into the dragon tower and making changes to that for starters. That will help you learn the what bits do what.
Once you're satisfied with your ability to manipulate the script, then you can script from scratch (still a lot of copy and paste).

While you explore, keep a paper notebook of what you're doing, and write down your ideas. Be open to the possibility it may be a long process. I spent about 6 months sourcediving and squinting at the code before I began compiling :/

Also, if you get stuck, I can help

Start by changing the grassy ground in New_Attnam to sand!

Warheck, you don't have to be allmighty to write a guide. At this point any guide will be a good thing, if you don't want to call it a guide, then go ahead and call it something else. Guidish? Notes about dungeon engineering? If it rises comments, you can learn new things too. There might not be anyone who knows more than you do about how the dungeons behave, and if there are, no-one's shared their knowledge yet. Making it easier for others to pick up from where you are now rather than having them to take the rocky road will definitely benefit our community and IVAN development greatly at some point.

Thanks for the encouragement Erno
The tricky part is where to begin with dungeon scripting? I'll read Holybanana's stuff carefully and see if I can keep it in a similar style. I'd like to know what people would like to know about dungeon engineering.

In other news, I updated CLIVAN to fix the sumo crash, I rebalanced spetums, tip swords and knight swords so they are harder to find and are made of straightforward materials. You'll also have a higher chance to find broken versions of those meleeweapons over normal ones. I switched damascus steel and adamant around, and damascus steel sits just above meteoric steel for hardness, so the iron alloy family is now a bit more linear.

So i read the book in that forest prison and forgot where I was supposed to plant the mango tree, any hints?

Cargo Liftoff.

Don't attack the slaves in the prison unless you feel like making everyone in New Attnam very angry.

Hmm. Perhaps there should have been a separate prisoner team after all. I'll see to it that this is fixed in the next release.

So it's been a very long time since you released this, but I recently started playing it again and finally raised a decent character for exploring. I took the mango sapling to the banana dropoff area, but regardless of whether I pressed Y or N, my character somehow decided against planting the thing. This may or may not be because I accidentally angered the villagers by fireballing Decos whilst those female slaves were nearby.

Also did the Ommel Blood quest, revealed the Tomb of Xinroch which was, just like you said, incomplete. Tried talking to those UTFA dudes after rescuing the prisoners, but they didn't have anything else to say.

So, is the planting of the mango sapling dependant on not angering the New Attnamese? At this rate I'll have to drag my guy down to Elpuri, which is none too heartening.

Yep, Tweraif has to be free (that is kill Decos) and the player must not be hostile to NEW_ATTNAM_TEAM;
So I guess when you fireballed the native beauties then you made yourself hostile. Precarious victory conditions.

How did your guy go down in the frog-pit?

Haven't picked it back up yet, but he's at least survived that malicious Wise Farmer so far...