DeadCold

[The Wicked Flea]

Whatever happened to the rewrite of DeadCold that was supposed to happen?  GearHead 1 & 2 are fun and all, but what about DeadCold?  That was what I really enjoyed the most, and I had hoped it would get a second draft, but I've heard nothing since I noticed the announcement got posted on the DeadCold site a long, long time ago.

[JohnnyDmonic]

You know, I never did play DeadCold.  I should go check that out.  As I recall it's a more traditional roguelike, but with a sci-fi theme, right?

[The Wicked Flea]

I'd say yeah, but I'm not sure what you mean by "a more traditional roguelike".  It's more a dungeoun crawl in a scifi universe with psykers and soldiers checking out a necrology station gone wrong.  That said, there is a story, just not one that is NPC driven.  I was hoping for a rewrite because it would make it really interesting.

Watch out for your first major encounter with sentry bots; their armor is insane for the early game.

[Frumple]

Huh... that is a pretty good question, though I personally prefer GH1&2 over it... if only for the distinct shortage of giant robots in the roguelike world.  Still, there's also a distinct lack of sci-fi goodness, so...

I was confused for a few seconds, though... there's another ~cold (Frozen depths?) named roguelike out there too... totally different world and everything to it, though.

[The Wicked Flea]

Well actually, there are a few large robots if you stumble into them.  You just aren't likely to return.  I've looked at the source many times, and there are two heavy duty monstertypes that are robotic ones--one with seventy-five armor points and two hundred fifty hitpoints.

Good luck there.

Like I said, I was hoping for the rewrite.  If you glance at the page and see what he talked about, the rewrite of most the guts of the game would vastly improve it.  But since that was five years ago and nothing else since I have little hope for that.  Which is why I'm trying to ask Joe if he ever intends to get back to it at this point.

[JohnnyDmonic]

Hmm, I'm at my level just managing scripting, so actual coding is a bit beyond me, but I like the sound of what he was talking about in terms of changing the character leveling system.  Sounds interesting.  Personally though, I'm in favor of big sprawling levels.  I can see where it's easier to create focus with a smaller level though.

[The Wicked Flea]

Well, give a random level generator a go with a huge set of dimensions and you'll understand the potential problem. The level, just one module, can go on and on and on.  Because in the first module you're only trying to do two specific things--get the keycard and diary, and raid a security storage area--if they're placed out there it can be really hard to find.  That said a good bit of the atmosphere comes from the sense of monstrousness of the station, and the fact that the monsters are literally everywhere in that hugeness.

Overall I think the level generator needs to be improved and give clues as to which areas are important within a map.  This way you know something about where to go, rather than explore a 500x500 map.

[Erathoniel]

It was at the old GearHead site. Somewhere.

[Erathoniel]

YAY! Link here:
http://www.geocities.com/pyrrho12/programming/dead cold.html

I know you probably know where it is, but it helps speed up newbies to finding it.

[Joseph Hewitt]

Someone, I think Tung Nguyen, updated the DeadCold source to work with the current version of Free Pascal. The older version has a number of problems. Unfortunately, I lost what seems to be my only copy of the source when my hard drive died, and I can't find any of the correspondence I had with him about it (if it was someone other than Tung who did the conversion, sorry for forgetting your correct identity).

I still want to revisit DeadCold, but I don't think it's realistically possible at any time in the near future.

[The Wicked Flea]

Well, drat.  If it is Tung Nguyen, then he's dead now and that sure puts a ringer on it.

If I happen to update the sources, what is publicly available at your geocities site anyway, to the current FPC 2.2.0 version would that make it more realistically possible?  I'm a longtime (10 years now) hobbyist Pascal programmer of Delphi origins, and I've done conversion/update/recreation of a lot of various functions before.

[Erathoniel]

Tung Nguyen died? I never heard that. I just noticed he didn't post anymore.

[The Wicked Flea]

I didn't know who he was so I Googled him; that's how I learned: http://tracypress.com/content/view/5727/2/

[Joseph Hewitt]

Well, the Tung Nguyen who has contributed to GearHead lives in Australia, that Tung Nguyen was a seargent in the US army, so I'm going to guess that they're not the same person. Of course it's entirely possible that the Tung we know is dead as well- at least his blog is.

Updating the sources would be a good thing, but given how ugly they are it might be just as quick to start over from scratch and just cherry pick bits out of the original.

[The Wicked Flea]

Oh, heh, my mistake.  I doubt they're the same person as well now, since Aussies don't usually serve in the US Army.

Anyhow; I'm willing to contribute to a DeadCold revival, whenever it happens to be on your plate.