I'd like to participate if there is a group of us willing to do it. I know Cap and Ighalli have been around since the old days so they would be the best candidates. In fact, Ighalli is probably the closest person to an original dev we have here.

Oops. I updated the notes, thanks for the heads-up

You might be able to create banding purposefully by exploiting the gradient in the m-colours, and maybe abusing some of these techniques.

Malachite and galvorn sound good to me.

And so here it is, a windows binary for IVAN 0.50.5.

It would make sense, three months since the last release and all. I'll get onto it today.

Ok, so here's the latest on this development front.

I battled the source trying to change the bone's ghost hair and eye color for two weeks, not realising that I was attempting this for a long time with uninitialized data. Sad but true.
The solution was this, which I am uneasy about, but should work as expected, as long as a bones ghost is not spawned elsewhere, which is impossible.

The main changes are:

Changed config "GHOST" gas type material colour to RGB(200, 200, 255).
Created a humanoid "bonesghost" which is a derived class of a humanoid spirit.
Game creates a bonesghost rather than a character::ghost.
Old-style nonhumanoid type ghosts can no longer be generated, but are still hanging out vestigally in the code.
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
Spirits do not pick up and equip gear and weapons.
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
Bonesghosts cannot be polymorphed.
Importantly, the bones ghost will retain the hair color, eye color, head and left/right arm bitmap positions, thereby retaining the appearance of the bone file player character.
Spirit limbs cannot be hacked off.
Spirit "touches" you, for now...

To be honest, I'm not opposed to wootz.

Awesome! This will be fun to read. I've got a copy of Zen staring at me on my bookshelf. Read it back in engineering school days. Still need to find a copy of Lila.

What about ukku steel?

You mean the series of materials proposed in this post?:


Yeah ok. So to summarize, the material trees presently go like this:

(Sulphur -> )Tin -> Copper -> Bronze -> Iron -> Steel -> Meteoric Steel -> Adamant // Sulphur doesn't seem to occur naturally in IVAN, hence ()

Arcanite -> Mithril -> Octiron

Lead -> Adamant

Silver -> Sapphire -> Diamond
Gold -> Ruby -> Diamond

Illithium
Valpurium

And the proposed trees are:

Magical: Jade -> Starmetal -> Moonsilver -> Arcanite -> Orichalcum -> Octiron //maybe use Aurichalcum, to differ slightly from other fantasy elements? Pity it's hard to spell.

Technical: (Sulphur -> )Tin -> Copper -> Bronze -> Djinn Brass -> Titanium -> Mithril

Ferrous: pig iron -> iron -> steel -> meteoric steel -> wootz steel -> adamant

Noble: Illithium, Valpurium

I don't see why not. In addition, I would do something like:

Lead -> Gold

Yup, they can be placeholders to begin with, though I feel like it's more or less complete for now. In the lists above, I feel like Mithril for example doesn't really have a fixed place yet. It's kind of magic but also quite useful and valuable. Maybe it could be a noble metal, like illithium, valpurium?

Eventually we could invent some personalities for these materials so they can be more easily distinguished. Magic materials would need truly magical properties. There is definitely an alchemy system to be conceptualized. It could be that some of the materials could be melted together to make hybrid ones, or to reach other materials on other branches?

Does anyone have any changes they would like to make to the names/order of materials?

I'd probably go:

Magical: Jade -> Starmetal -> Moonsilver -> Arcanite -> Mithril -> Octiron

Technical: (Sulphur -> )Tin -> Copper -> Bronze -> Djinn Brass -> Aurichalcum -> Titanium //since some historical sources suggest Orichalcum was a type of copper alloy

EDIT: gee, fancy colors