the thing i hate in literally all games is pet/ally management. that's why i'm playing IVAN without pets (and never finished it . pets sux. they often do what you don't want them to do, and vice versa. they run away. they cannot equip things from their inventory (fixable, but i'm too lazy for that . that is, pets is annoyance, and i am really sad that you literally need pets to beat the game. ok, you prolly can kill Elpuri solo, but the further you go…

and the worst thing with pets is that i don't know how to fix them. direct control is even more boring. adding more pet options is still not flexible enough, and basically becomes a scripting with unusable UI.

this might look like a small problem (or even not a problem at all for other people), but for me it is so important that i refuse getting pets at all. (yes, i immediately selling scolls of taming and lyres, as i have no use for them.) and i desperately need a solution… but i don't know how that soultion should look. sigh.

more changes to team system. the shopkeeper will not directly attack shop perpetrators, there are guards for that. the shopkeeper will intervene only if there are no guards around (or all guards are dead). shop guards are in their own teams now, and they guard the shopkeeper (there is a new property for this); the shopkeeper is their leader while alive.

that is, if some monster will kill the shopkeeper, the guards will loot the shop (because there is no shop master anymore). that's how hired guard acts, i believe.

internally the engine is able to create new teams on the fly, so it is theoretically possible to implement proper monster infighting, for example.

oops. due to some oversights, Petrus will not summon guardian angels. also, becoming a high priest will not make Attnam friendly. fixed (i hope). and destroying walls of guarded rooms never provoked hostility of the guards.

splitted "char.cpp" and "game.cpp" to several independent compilation units. "char.cpp" is ~500 kb. not good. especially with my bad coolers: recompiling it each time makes my CPU super-hot. sigh.

added health bar to NPCs. the idea is that IRL we can usually see the condition of our enemies, so hp bar gives a rough approximation of that. i'm not totally happy with it, but cannot think out something better for now. it is turned off by default.

tbh, i wanted it mostly to make the fight with Jenny less boring. because you hit her, and hit, and hit, and hit, and… nothing changes, but then BOOM! she's dead. for me, this is way bigger immersion breaker than hp bars. also, it is fun to see how often you miss that pesky hedgehog, for example. of course, the log tells this, but let's be honest: nobody reads the log!

finally made Coat of Arms to work almost the way i wanted. it adds imaginary second set of arms, so you have two arm attacks for the price of one. yes, this is quite OP item — but that's the idea. but believe me, it is not OP in comparison with Maybe Blade! with high Wis Maybe Blade simply instakills anythig. no, don't look at the sources, there is no such weapon. Maybe Blade is a planned perk for a planned quest.

i'm always updating the first post here. the most recent binaries are always attached to the first post. repo update is less frequent, because i'm often forget to do it.

p.s.: "600316" is the "year, month, day" number, so you can look at the build number and see when it was uploaded.

thank you! please, note that there is a bug with loading bones (i keep forgetting about it). if the game crashes on entering a level, it is prolly it. simply restart the game and load the save again — it should be rolled back to the last valid save (usually autosave).

also, i haet breaking bones and saves with each new public build, sorry. but alas… to make saves more reliable i need to completely replace save/load system: use some kind of tagged structured container instead of flat files. i am planning to do it someday… but i don't know when. i am making small changes to help saves to survive database changes, though. not much, but at least something.


p.s.: if you have only one save, "start game" will simply load it. yes, there is no "official" way to start several games. not an oversight. go move that save file somewhere if you want to do that.

build 600316 released!
brief changelog:

* merged "take" and "put" actions for containers (use Tab to switch between take & put lists).
* it is now possible to buy a strong-box from a smith.
* it is now possible to add notes to inventory items (press '!').
* monsters will eat up to satiated state, not to bloated (except dogs, dogs are stupid).
* eating will prompt on satiated level, and then on overfed. because you need quite a fast reaction to stop eating on satiated, and last time i checked IVAN wasn't an arcade game.
* fixed bug with "w" and "W" commands: refusing to wield unusable weapon won't restore previous wielded weapon.
* better pray UI: aligned text, added info about diety relation to the player.
* Merka and his guards should attack monsters which attack the player.
* Attnam will not immediately turn hostile when you attack somebody. it now works more logically: attacking citizens will alert guards, killing some guards will alert temple guards, and so on.
* better handling of Petrus' wives #3 and #7. (imprisoned one may join, she won't leave Attnam without another one, etc.)
* it is now possible to turn on minimap on position questions.
* removed "no vomit in wilderness when poisoned" cheat. sorry.
* varios fixes, big and small.

added scary animated bat to the start menu (as a cursor). homage to ZX Spectrum "Phantomas" game.

also, i see no reason to keep the internal gfx buffer representation as 16-bit color bitmap. so i started the work to use 24-bit (actually, 32-bit) gfx buffer instead. yes, this will double RAM required for GFX, and RAM bandwidth, but 'cmon! today we can afford rendering 800x600 screen in 32 bit color mode.

also, this will eliminate all direct color manipulations from the source, so switching to another color representation (back to 16, for example) would be much easier.