Summary of conversation with Thomas
Malte Helmert
as discussed recently, I have sent an e-mail to Thomas to discuss
various issues important to the ADOM community. Since e-mail is not the
most efficient mode of communication for this purpose, I suggested
discussing the matters over the phone, to which Thomas agreed. The
conversation circled around three main topics:
1. The Future of ADOM
2. The Bug Database
3. Reverse Engineering
I will now provide a topic by topic summary.
1. The Future of ADOM
The good news first: ADOM is not dead!
At the moment, Thomas has only very limited time, but a new release is
definitely planned. Rumours that no new features will be added to ADOM
are unfounded, although the next version will likely only have minor
additions and mostly focus on fixing bugs. Thomas is reluctant to
announce anything definite because in the past it has turned out to be
nearly impossible to predict such things, but a new release should
likely emerge around this summer.
To dispel some other rumours, this new release will *not* be a final
release of ADOM. Thomas told me that even now, after two years without
an update, there are about 10000-15000 downloads per month on
www.adom.de, and this is sufficient reason to continue working on the
game. However, in the future Thomas would like to devote more of his
development time to JADE -- JADE development is fun, while ADOM
development is hard work due to the way the source code has developed
into a writhing mass of programming chaos over time.
Therefore, it is likely that after the next release, there will be a
change in procedure. In order to allow Thomas to focus on JADE, he plans
to change the development model of ADOM. Instead of the current one-man
system, he would like to turn into an effort by a small, closed group (a
kind of DevTeam, if you will) of maybe 4-5 people under his supervision.
Thomas will make all decisions regarding which features will or will not
be added to ADOM, but actual implementation, bug fixes and the like will
be delegated. ADOM will *not* go Open Source -- more regarding this
under the third topic.
With ADOM moving to a group development model, changes are also planned
for www.adom.de. Ideas include adding a Wiki, overhauling the bug
tracking system and turning the "Ancient Scroll of Mystery" into a real
blog with comment features. An often requested feature which is *not*
planned is a forum -- Thomas prefers good old newsgroups [and if a
personal comment is allowed here, I agree :-)]. However, all this
requires work that would detract from actual development, so it is not
clear if, when and how all this can be turned into practice. Do not hold
your breath.
2. The Bug Database
Again, the good news first: You can help with the bug database!
I have brought the discussions we had about the bug database to Thomas'
attention. I also mentioned that some people are no longer willing to
add bugs to the database because they do not think it is any useful. In
other words, something should be done.
I have recommended closing the bug and RFE databases for new submissions
for the near future, and to gather resources for consolidating the bug
list. Thomas has basically agreed to this procedure. Some time soon, he
will send me a text version of the bug and RFE databases. He asked me to
select some trustworthy people to go through the database and bring the
wealth of information into some useful shape. At this time, the best
process for this has not been decided, although some ideas have been
discussed. In any case, this is something to worry about once we get
rolling.
So, if you consider yourself trustworthy, go ahead and volunteer right
now! Both newsgroup postings and e-mails are fine. Please understand
that it might be the case that not everybody will be able to contribute
because we must strike a balance between the bug-weeding effort for
everybody involved and the communication effort. Once most of the
weeding out has been done, there will certainly be a public phase when
everybody can contribute, but for the bulk of the work, it is better not
to get bogged down in lengthy group discussions.
While the database is being consolidated, the submission features at
www.adom.de will be disabled so that we are not aiming at a moving target.
3. Reverse Engineering
Regarding this topic, Thomas stated his opinion very clearly: He does
not want people to disassemble ADOM for any purpose. He had already
planned to revised the ADOM license so that his opinion on this issue
will become very clear to everybody. He also briefly discussed the legal
aspects of this, mentioning the effort involved in international
lawsuits. So much for the summary, now for some details.
Most significantly, Thomas expressed his contempt for patches that
change the rules of the game. Patches that fix bugs might be acceptable,
but the line must be drawn very clearly. Of the existing patches, only
the one that fixes the ingot crash bug can be considered a bug fix. He
is considering making it publicly available on the ADOM web site before
the problem can be properly fixed with the new ADOM relase and asks
Vladimir to send it to him.
In addition to patches, he does not like programs that can be used for
cheating, and he has already implemented new countermeasures into ADOM
to detect if the state of the game has been tampered with. He said that
even though all protection can be cracked, it will take the cracker more
time to circumvent the protective measures than it took him to implement
them, and he hopes that they will eventually tire of such efforts.
Finally, Thomas is also very much against disassembling the executable
to discover game mechanics and secrets. He referred to the section in
readme.1st where it is stated that the good effect of ADOM staying
closed source is "that ADOM will remain the most challenging and
mysterious of all roguelike games, simply because you just can't take a
look into the sources and find all the secrets right away once a new
version is released".
That's it. I could comment on some of the issues, but want to keep the
summary and personal opinion separate, so I'll contribute to the
discussion later.
Malte
xhoch3
Definitely more than I hoped for. I still voulunteer to help with the bug
list.
I think there should be a single person reading through all the summarized
bug reports before posting them in order to eliminate doubles and maintain
roughly the same style. And it's a good idea to have any lengthy
discussion after compiling the list.
--
Five is a sufficiently close approximation to infinity.
-- Robert Firth
koctyxa
> I think there should be a single person reading through all the summarized
> bug reports before posting them in order to eliminate doubles and maintain
> roughly the same style. And it's a good idea to have any lengthy
> discussion after compiling the list.
What about using sth like mantis bug tracker?
koctyxa
koctyxa
> 3. Reverse Engineering
>
> Most significantly, Thomas expressed his contempt for patches that
> change the rules of the game. Patches that fix bugs might be acceptable,
> but the line must be drawn very clearly. Of the existing patches, only
> the one that fixes the ingot crash bug can be considered a bug fix.
So what about adom-sage's colouring messages? I won't drop it!
koctyxa
--
gałęzie nagich drzew uśmiechają się zalotnie
Vladimir Panteleev
> Most significantly, Thomas expressed his contempt for patches that
> change the rules of the game. Patches that fix bugs might be acceptable,
> but the line must be drawn very clearly. Of the existing patches, only
> the one that fixes the ingot crash bug can be considered a bug fix. He
> is considering making it publicly available on the ADOM web site before
> the problem can be properly fixed with the new ADOM relase and asks
> Vladimir to send it to him.
Shortly after posting the patch to the newsgroup, Thomas e-mailed me
asking for more details on how he could fix the bug. I replied,
providing as much detail as possible, however never got a confirmation.
How can I send it to him and be sure he gets it?
Also, the patch was always accessible at ToGu's page at
http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~houeland/adom/ .
> In addition to patches, he does not like programs that can be used for
> cheating, and he has already implemented new countermeasures into ADOM
> to detect if the state of the game has been tampered with. He said that
> even though all protection can be cracked, it will take the cracker more
> time to circumvent the protective measures than it took him to implement
> them, and he hopes that they will eventually tire of such efforts.
If I remove all cheating features from AdomBot, as well as all
complements such as the MonsterDex both from the web-site and AdomBot
package, and leave out only sounds and demo recording, will that
correspond to his wishes?
Also, you mentioned he despises using reverse engineering to find out
internal game details. What about accessing the game memory? I was
planning for the next AdomBot version to make reading and writing to
ADOM's memory possible with scripts. Or should I remove the scripting
feature altogether from AdomBot?
> So, if you consider yourself trustworthy, go ahead and volunteer right
> now! Both newsgroup postings and e-mails are fine. Please understand
> that it might be the case that not everybody will be able to contribute
> because we must strike a balance between the bug-weeding effort for
> everybody involved and the communication effort. Once most of the
> weeding out has been done, there will certainly be a public phase when
> everybody can contribute, but for the bulk of the work, it is better not
> to get bogged down in lengthy group discussions.
If you consider me worthy enough, count me in.
--
This space intentionally left blank
Vladimir Panteleev
> On 2005-01-31, Malte Helmert <hel...@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:
>
>> 3. Reverse Engineering
>>
>> Most significantly, Thomas expressed his contempt for patches that
>> change the rules of the game. Patches that fix bugs might be acceptable,
>> but the line must be drawn very clearly. Of the existing patches, only
>> the one that fixes the ingot crash bug can be considered a bug fix.
>
> So what about adom-sage's colouring messages? I won't drop it!
Adom-Sage is not a patch. It is simply a program that runs the Linux
version of ADOM, and intercepts its calls to system functions to change
their behavior. I don't think that reverse-engineering was used to write
it.
Malte Helmert
> Shortly after posting the patch to the newsgroup, Thomas e-mailed me
> asking for more details on how he could fix the bug. I replied,
> providing as much detail as possible, however never got a confirmation.
It might have got lost in the noise, or even hit a spam barrier. Thomas
said that one of his e-mail providers used a fairly unreliable spam filter.
> How can I send it to him and be sure he gets it?
I guess we need to establish a sure communication channel for important
issues -- this would be one of them. I guess we will need to think about
this anyway when we have a look at the bugs.
>>In addition to patches, he does not like programs that can be used for
>>cheating, and he has already implemented new countermeasures into ADOM
>>to detect if the state of the game has been tampered with. He said that
>>even though all protection can be cracked, it will take the cracker more
>>time to circumvent the protective measures than it took him to implement
>>them, and he hopes that they will eventually tire of such efforts.
>
> If I remove all cheating features from AdomBot, as well as all
> complements such as the MonsterDex both from the web-site and AdomBot
> package, and leave out only sounds and demo recording, will that
> correspond to his wishes?
I guess that only Thomas can answer these questions. He said that he might
watch this thread in r.g.r.adom, so maybe this is a way of getting into
contact.
> Also, you mentioned he despises using reverse engineering to find out
> internal game details. What about accessing the game memory? I was
> planning for the next AdomBot version to make reading and writing to
> ADOM's memory possible with scripts. Or should I remove the scripting
> feature altogether from AdomBot?
Without looking at the code, you cannot really do much interesting stuff
for scripts with game memory, can you?
>>So, if you consider yourself trustworthy, go ahead and volunteer right
>>now!
>
> If you consider me worthy enough, count me in.
Great! Can you contact me by e-mail?
Malte
Malte Helmert
That was one of the options Thomas and I were considering. However, most
bug-tracking software are tailored towards open-source group development
and less suited for mostly closed-source projects with a single
developer, or very few developers. Thus I am not convinced that they are
the ideal solution.
In any case, let us not put the cart before the horse. The first step
should be going through those bugs and filtering out duplicates and rubbish.
Malte
Malte Helmert
> On 2005-01-31, Malte Helmert <hel...@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:
>
>
>>3. Reverse Engineering
>>
>>Most significantly, Thomas expressed his contempt for patches that
>>change the rules of the game. Patches that fix bugs might be acceptable,
>>but the line must be drawn very clearly. Of the existing patches, only
>>the one that fixes the ingot crash bug can be considered a bug fix.
>
> So what about adom-sage's colouring messages? I won't drop it!
As far as I remember, ADOM Sage is merely an input/output filter is
neither a patched version of ADOM nor based on disassembly. You might
want to check with Joshua to be sure.
Malte
Vladimir Panteleev
> Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>
>> Also, you mentioned he despises using reverse engineering to find out
>> internal game details. What about accessing the game memory? I was
>> planning for the next AdomBot version to make reading and writing to
>> ADOM's memory possible with scripts. Or should I remove the scripting
>> feature altogether from AdomBot?
>
> Without looking at the code, you cannot really do much interesting stuff
> for scripts with game memory, can you?
Actually, it is possible to locate the address of a certain variable in
memory by searching and sieving results. For example, if you wish to
find the address of the variable holding your PC's HP, you search for
all integer values containing the number of your hit points. Then you
modify the value in-game (get hurt or heal up), and search among the
results of the previous search. Repeat until the correct address is
found.
There are numerous programs that have a specialized interface for such
an "universal" cheating method, such as TSearch, GenTrain and ArtMoney.
However, with the new cheating protection you mentioned I believe this
method won't work (if Thomas meant the same system I have in mind).
Before starting to disassemble ADOM, I relied on such memory hacking to
find required information. AdomBot 1 and 2, which only featured the bot
and the demo recorder, was written before I had access to the game
internals.
Malte Helmert
> On Mon, 31 Jan 2005 17:51:56 +0100, Malte Helmert wrote:
>
>>Without looking at the code, you cannot really do much interesting stuff
>>for scripts with game memory, can you?
>
> Actually, it is possible to locate the address of a certain variable in
> memory by searching and sieving results. For example, if you wish to
> find the address of the variable holding your PC's HP, you search for
> all integer values containing the number of your hit points. Then you
> modify the value in-game (get hurt or heal up), and search among the
> results of the previous search. Repeat until the correct address is
> found.
>
> There are numerous programs that have a specialized interface for such
> an "universal" cheating method, such as TSearch, GenTrain and ArtMoney.
I know about that techique. I mentioned that in the original draft of my
posting, but removed it because it seems primarily useful for cheating,
not for scripting.
I don't see how it could be used for actual scripting; can it?
Malte
Vladimir Panteleev
> Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> There are numerous programs that have a specialized interface for such
>> an "universal" cheating method, such as TSearch, GenTrain and ArtMoney.
>
> I know about that techique. I mentioned that in the original draft of my
> posting, but removed it because it seems primarily useful for cheating,
> not for scripting.
>
> I don't see how it could be used for actual scripting; can it?
Once you know the address, you can do with the value at that address
whatever you want. If you're smart enough, you can find the address of
the dungeon map (with the help of wands of digging, door/trap creation),
and then use those addresses in a script, which can be potentially used
for cheating (peek on the whole level map). And so on.
And generally, a game bot, like the one in 1, 2 and early 3.x versions,
is close to cheating. It can be used to exploit such things as the WDL
<spoily> bomb, or scum for items in the ID.
xhoch3
I do think we need some means of cheating. Without reverse engineering it
will already be quite hard to detect game mechanics (and thus bugs), but
without any cheating it's nearly impossible. Eg: You will never get the
needed quantities of an item to do a sufficent statistical research. And
even save-scumming is cheating, so it'd be quite hard to explore eg
late-game monsters/effects. We don't need to mess around with editing the
RAM (I guess Thomas wouldn't like it anyway), but to keep at least the
scripting bit would be nice.
But it is a fact that without reverse engineering we would not know about
certain bugs. We couldn't be sure whether falling at least once when
entering the rift is a bug. Now I don't want to support reverse
engineering, it's illegal after all, that's just something to think about.
Though I hope we will be able to ask these planned other adom developers
if we discover a possible bug.
--
"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a
vacuum."
-- Arthur C. Clarke
anxious triffid
news:opslhmsj...@linux.local:
>
> I do think we need some means of cheating.
Why? It is possible to beat the game without doing so, and I believe some
have even done so without resorting to spoilers. Cheating at ADOM is like
cheating at Solitaire.
Marcus
> Dear group,
>
> To dispel some other rumours, this new release will *not* be a final
> release of ADOM. Thomas told me that even now, after two years without
> an update, there are about 10000-15000 downloads per month on
> www.adom.de, and this is sufficient reason to continue working on the
> game. However, in the future Thomas would like to devote more of his
> development time to JADE -- JADE development is fun, while ADOM
> development is hard work due to the way the source code has developed
> into a writhing mass of programming chaos over time.
Cool! Now tell him to fix his donation link :P I was all set and ready to
send him some money around Xmas, and it took me to a german donation page.
I'm not donating in a language I can't read. I mailed him about it and
recieved no response...
> Therefore, it is likely that after the next release, there will be a
> change in procedure. In order to allow Thomas to focus on JADE, he
> plans to change the development model of ADOM. Instead of the current
> one-man system, he would like to turn into an effort by a small,
> closed group (a kind of DevTeam, if you will) of maybe 4-5 people
> under his supervision. Thomas will make all decisions regarding which
> features will or will not be added to ADOM, but actual
> implementation, bug fixes and the like will be delegated. ADOM will
> *not* go Open Source -- more regarding this
> under the third topic.
This is very good news.
> With ADOM moving to a group development model, changes are also
> planned for www.adom.de. Ideas include adding a Wiki, overhauling the
> bug tracking system and turning the "Ancient Scroll of Mystery" into
> a real blog with comment features. An often requested feature which
> is *not* planned is a forum -- Thomas prefers good old newsgroups
> [and if a personal comment is allowed here, I agree :-)]. However,
> all this requires work that would detract from actual development, so
> it is not clear if, when and how all this can be turned into
> practice. Do not hold your breath.
This strikes me as counter-intuitive with his third point below. If he
doesn't want any reverse engineering/cheating/etc, but he does want a wiki
that tracks bugs and wants a team of devs, how exactly are people supposed
to locate obscure stuff? Some things are simply not apparent, and some
recent bugs only turned up after code diving turned up anamolies. Adom lacks
Nethack's Explore/Wizard mode, and if he doesn't want people hacking away at
it, it needs some other method of experimentation. Indeed, a similar feature
was mentioned long, long ago in concert with Adom Deluxe.
>
> 2. The Bug Database
>
> Again, the good news first: You can help with the bug database!
[snip]
All good news
>
> 3. Reverse Engineering
[snip]
> Finally, Thomas is also very much against disassembling the executable
> to discover game mechanics and secrets. He referred to the section in
> readme.1st where it is stated that the good effect of ADOM staying
> closed source is "that ADOM will remain the most challenging and
> mysterious of all roguelike games, simply because you just can't take
> a look into the sources and find all the secrets right away once a new
> version is released".
This is his right and perogative, but that cat is already out of the bag.
People *will* get the information they want, one way or another. I'd rather
he simply included an in-game mechanism to achieve the same, if he doesn't
want people hacking away at the executable. In most (all?) cases, it isn't
malicious. It's simply curious fans. And without some method of testing
extreme/odd cases, some bugs will never become apparent.
> That's it. I could comment on some of the issues, but want to keep the
> summary and personal opinion separate, so I'll contribute to the
> discussion later.
>
> Malte
Thanks for talking with him, good to hear this stuff from the source.
Malte Helmert
> Malte Helmert wrote:
>
> Cool! Now tell him to fix his donation link :P I was all set and ready to
> send him some money around Xmas, and it took me to a german donation page.
> I'm not donating in a language I can't read. I mailed him about it and
> recieved no response...
I'd guess that's PayPal trying to be clever with referer headers (which
come from a German webpage). However, they are also clever in other
regards: Click on the link, click on the "Land" selection (which is
German for "country") and pick "USA". Do you see English text now?
>>With ADOM moving to a group development model, changes are also
>>planned for www.adom.de. Ideas include adding a Wiki, overhauling the
>>bug tracking system and turning the "Ancient Scroll of Mystery" into
>>a real blog with comment features. An often requested feature which
>>is *not* planned is a forum -- Thomas prefers good old newsgroups
>>[and if a personal comment is allowed here, I agree :-)]. However,
>>all this requires work that would detract from actual development, so
>>it is not clear if, when and how all this can be turned into
>>practice. Do not hold your breath.
>
> This strikes me as counter-intuitive with his third point below. If he
> doesn't want any reverse engineering/cheating/etc, but he does want a wiki
> that tracks bugs and wants a team of devs, how exactly are people supposed
> to locate obscure stuff? Some things are simply not apparent, and some
> recent bugs only turned up after code diving turned up anamolies.
Yes, because code diving has become a recent sport. Many of these bugs
have lived happily for ten years or so, and nobody complained about
them. Even now, I see a lot more people complaining about obvious bugs
than things like the Rift or Unicorn problem.
In other words, bugs that cannot be detected by normal play aren't
really very severe. Thomas's opinion on ADOM's source code remaining
private (for some shade of "private") won't change. I certainly won't
discuss this, otherwise I'd be violating the FAQ that I should be
posting later today. ;-)
The idea with the DevTeam is that a small and trustworthy group would
get access to the code, while it would remain a "secret" to the ADOM
community as large. Two advantages:
1. No ADOM variants. There are several people out there who have
announced variants in case ADOM's source code ever gets
released, no matter what the license.
2. Some secrets remain.
Of course, which of these you consider an "advantage" depends on your
personal taste. My personal taste is that I'm very happy about 1. and am
mostly indifferent about 2. I like both open-source and closed-source
roguelikes. For the former, I like diving at the source to find out how
stuff works; for the latter, I like experimenting with stuff in-game and
finding out new things every now and then. However, whether or not you
should close the source of your game is not an arbitrary decision: Open
source works better for games which emphasizes the strategy aspect,
closed source works better for games which emphasizes the story aspect.
I am quite happy that ADOM is closed and Crawl is open; not sure I'd
still play either if it were the other way around.
But I am already talking about this topic too much. I guess the only
reasonable thing to say is "This is Thomas' decision. Like it or don't,
he's the one who is deciding."
> Adom lacks Nethack's Explore/Wizard mode, and if he doesn't want people
> hacking away at it, it needs some other method of experimentation.
> Indeed, a similar feature was mentioned long, long ago in concert with
> Adom Deluxe.
Thomas also said (in passing) that one of the reasons ADOM Deluxe didn't
fly was that he really couldn't be bothered to implement those cheating
features because he dislikes them so much. I still don't see why such a
feature would be required though. Can you give some examples?
Note that ADOM did have "Wizard Mode"-like features in some private
beta-test releases; that's a scenario where it makes more sense to me.
But why would they need to be part of "standard" ADOM?
[On Thomas being against reverse engineering]
> This is his right and perogative, but that cat is already out of the bag.
> People *will* get the information they want, one way or another. I'd rather
> he simply included an in-game mechanism to achieve the same, if he doesn't
> want people hacking away at the executable. In most (all?) cases, it isn't
> malicious. It's simply curious fans. And without some method of
> testing extreme/odd cases, some bugs will never become apparent.
Again, I can live with that. Personally, I would prefer the old
situation where some of those bugs would remain undetected, but ADOM was
more mysterious. I agree that the cat is out of the bag. However, if the
cat doesn't shit around in this newsgroup and other places where
"regular" ADOM people meet, it doesn't detract from my personal ADOM
experience. For example, while I don't understand the attitude of those
people from the cheatinginadom Yahoo group, they don't bother me and
thus I don't care.
Malte
mad...@dsr.kvl.dk
First and foremost I would have liked to offer a more
thorough response. Alas time only permits me to give brief
comments. Hope it will suffice.
> 1. The Future of ADOM
>
> The good news first: ADOM is not dead!
>
Most excellent news. ADOM itself will never die as long as
there are dedicated players. With a dedicated creator such
as Thomas the prospects are even better.
[SNIP]
> Therefore, it is likely that after the next release,
> there will be a change in procedure. In order to allow
> Thomas to focus on JADE, he plans to change the
> development model of ADOM. Instead of the current
> one-man system, he would like to turn into an effort by
> a small, closed group (a kind of DevTeam, if you will)
> of maybe 4-5 people under his supervision. Thomas will
> make all decisions regarding which features will or will
> not be added to ADOM, but actual implementation, bug
> fixes and the like will be delegated. ADOM will *not* go
> Open Source -- more regarding this under the third
> topic.
>
The M stands for mystery and the game should continue to
be that. I support the idea of a closed dev team.
[SNIP]
I will gladly volunteer as trustworthy. However I have
subjective opinions that will most likely colour my views
on priority. I have used my own subjective order of
imporantance prior in the original bug list thread. I
presume this is why it is imperative that there is a team
of bug sorters - to minimize personal impact on the matter
and asure every entry recieves equal attention.
Also I cannot promise much of my time. Sadly I can be
really busy at times.
I will boil this down to a simple comment. Good. Not that
I hate the idea of disecting the game and discover new
secrets. Heavens, it's a personal sport of mine to do so.
However decreasing (or even better eliminating)
code-diving will make the job more interesting and fun. It
will also eliminate the Piper syndrome where you
eventually feel there are no significant breakthroughs
left and you loose interest in the game.
Arturus Magi
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 15:34:02 +0000 (UTC)
> So what about adom-sage's colouring messages? I won't drop it!
I seem to recall a previous statement that he didn't mind AdomSage, since it
just intercepts system calls to the display and keyboard. No internal workings
are revealed that aren't already common knowledge.
ADoMBot, on the other hand, is in a somewhat more questionable state of
affairs, even though it's primary purpose is as an automaton, not a cheat
device.
Juho-Mikko Pellinen
*snip*
> But it is a fact that without reverse engineering we would not know
> about certain bugs. We couldn't be sure whether falling at least once
> when entering the rift is a bug. Now I don't want to support reverse
> engineering, it's illegal after all, that's just something to think
> about. Though I hope we will be able to ask these planned other adom
> developers if we discover a possible bug.
IIRC reverse engineering for educational purposes (not commercial of any
kind) is legal in EU. At least it was few years back, when I checked on
things like that. As long as no-one makes money with information gained
from reverse engineering (not meaning in-game money) it is legal.
-JM
Marcus
> Marcus wrote:
>> Malte Helmert wrote:
> In other words, bugs that cannot be detected by normal play aren't
> really very severe. Thomas's opinion on ADOM's source code remaining
> private (for some shade of "private") won't change. I certainly won't
> discuss this, otherwise I'd be violating the FAQ that I should be
> posting later today. ;-)
>
> The idea with the DevTeam is that a small and trustworthy group would
> get access to the code, while it would remain a "secret" to the ADOM
> community as large. Two advantages:
I like this personally, for a few reasons. Not least of which being more
frequent patches and updates :)
> 1. No ADOM variants. There are several people out there who have
> announced variants in case ADOM's source code ever gets
> released, no matter what the license.
Angband has become variant hell, imneho. I left shortly after Ben Harrison
completed the revamp of the codebase, and since then, it has absolutely
exploded into variants. The group looks like alphabet soup, and development
is going in a dozen directions.
> 2. Some secrets remain.
Meh. Some of the stuff that I've seen revealed in this group since I came
back has been stuff that I *never* would have noticed during normal play.
eg, the room messages are simply too obscure vs their effects. Does this
matter? Only in the sense that interesting decisions cannot be made off
features that are not understood - even partially. A lot of Adom's features
fall into this category. I've never been a fan of obfuscation as a method of
game design, but that's just personal preference.
> Of course, which of these you consider an "advantage" depends on your
> personal taste. My personal taste is that I'm very happy about 1. and
> am mostly indifferent about 2. I like both open-source and
> closed-source roguelikes. For the former, I like diving at the source
> to find out how stuff works; for the latter, I like experimenting
> with stuff in-game and finding out new things every now and then.
> However, whether or not you should close the source of your game is
> not an arbitrary decision: Open source works better for games which
> emphasizes the strategy aspect, closed source works better for games
> which emphasizes the story aspect. I am quite happy that ADOM is
> closed and Crawl is open; not sure I'd still play either if it were
> the other way around.
I think the 'story' aspect of roguelikes is a joke, Adom included. A good
context and framework for the world is excellent (the chaos conflict is well
represented in Adom), but it is done only partly through a setup and theme
established in the world - it is largely done through the game mechanics. In
this case, corruption, the 90 (180, 270 more unnoticed bugs) day limits, the
multiple endings, etc. It is somewhat neater that without access to the
source, people had to struggle to discover the ultra endings, but once that
information is revealed, it is revealed for all time for the people that
care to check. For the people that *don't* care to check, open/closed
hacked/not hacked cheated/not cheated makes _absolutely no difference_. They
wouldn't have bothered anyway. For the people that *do*, trying to keep some
'mystery' around the game just winds up hiding stuff that might otherwise be
interesting, funny, useful, or play a part in your tactical and strategic
play, and the bigger bits _still_ wind up revealed via dutiful players.
> But I am already talking about this topic too much. I guess the only
> reasonable thing to say is "This is Thomas' decision. Like it or
> don't, he's the one who is deciding."
Ayup.
>> Adom lacks Nethack's Explore/Wizard mode, and if he doesn't want
>> people
> > hacking away at it, it needs some other method of experimentation.
> > Indeed, a similar feature was mentioned long, long ago in concert
> with > Adom Deluxe.
>
> Thomas also said (in passing) that one of the reasons ADOM Deluxe
> didn't fly was that he really couldn't be bothered to implement those
> cheating features because he dislikes them so much. I still don't see
> why such a feature would be required though. Can you give some
> examples?
Playing with items, playing with monsters, playing with strange situations,
messing with dungeon layouts, fooling around with skills, spells, tools,
weapons, etcetc. It's a good comprimise between source diving and checking a
spoiler (which may or may not exist) to test certain behavior. This also
allows easy generation of user created spoilers on different aspects of the
game.
I personally don't care about it, but since he explicitly does not want
people hacking at the game, I can see potential for a lot of bad blood
showing up when people post links to this or that file, spoiler, etc, that
isn't legal or approved. Seems sort of silly. It *will* happen (it already
has, a lot of what has been discussed in the group recently is full stop
unauthorized, going by what Thomas has said). Much of the information in the
Guidebook is now 'tainted' in this manner as well.
> Note that ADOM did have "Wizard Mode"-like features in some private
> beta-test releases; that's a scenario where it makes more sense to me.
> But why would they need to be part of "standard" ADOM?
Why should only the beta testers have access to testing tools? Trying to
prevent player cheating is a waste of time. Those who want to, will.
> [On Thomas being against reverse engineering]
>
>> This is his right and perogative, but that cat is already out of the
>> bag. People *will* get the information they want, one way or
>> another. I'd rather he simply included an in-game mechanism to
>> achieve the same, if he doesn't want people hacking away at the
>> executable. In most (all?) cases, it isn't
> > malicious. It's simply curious fans. And without some method of
> > testing extreme/odd cases, some bugs will never become apparent.
>
> Again, I can live with that. Personally, I would prefer the old
> situation where some of those bugs would remain undetected, but ADOM
> was more mysterious. I agree that the cat is out of the bag. However,
> if the cat doesn't shit around in this newsgroup and other places
> where "regular" ADOM people meet, it doesn't detract from my personal
> ADOM experience. For example, while I don't understand the attitude
> of those people from the cheatinginadom Yahoo group, they don't
> bother me and thus I don't care.
>
> Malte
Mysterious doesn't do much for me. Fun, well balanced and bug free does ;)
xhoch3
I don't think it is allowed in Germany. And it's certainly not allowed in
this case since Thomas explicitly said it is not. There could be a
'loophole' for fixing bugs, but that's not all too certain either. And I
don't agree that 'educational' is the same as 'not commercial'.
--
There can be no twisted thought without a twisted molecule.
-- R. W. Gerard
xhoch3
You snipped the parts where I explained what use cheating has. For me
scripting is just another form of cheating and lot's of information in the
guidebook was obtained this way (eg information about amuletts of order).
If you believe that ADOM is closed source, because everybody should
explore the game by playing then even the guidebook itself is some kind of
cheat. If you don't want information about game mechanics that's fine, but
there are lot's of others who want to.
--
It's not reality or how you perceive things that's important -- it's what
you're taking for it...
Malte Helmert
> Mysterious doesn't do much for me. Fun, well balanced and
> bug free does ;)
From this and your other comments, I'd say that you should also try out
some other roguelikes, which fit your philosophy well. Which ones have
you tried?
Malte
Malte Helmert
> anxious triffid <anxious...@INFEAROFSPAMfserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> Why? It is possible to beat the game without doing so, and I believe some
>> have even done so without resorting to spoilers. Cheating at ADOM is like
>> cheating at Solitaire.
>
> You snipped the parts where I explained what use cheating has. For me
> scripting is just another form of cheating and lot's of information in
> the guidebook was obtained this way (eg information about amuletts of
> order).
Yes, gathering that information required save scumming. However, in my
opinion, there is a significant difference between black box testing and
white box testing.
> If you believe that ADOM is closed source, because everybody
> should explore the game by playing then even the guidebook itself is
> some kind of cheat. If you don't want information about game mechanics
> that's fine, but there are lot's of others who want to.
I think that Thomas enjoys it if the community finds out something by
trying and playing and posts it for everyone; I think that's one of the
reasons he wanted to have an official ADOM wiki. The distinction is not
between "I should discover it personally" and "The group should discover
it". The distinction is between discovering it by playing or by looking
at the code.
Malte
Marcus
Angband (V, O, Pern/Tome, Z, various others to a lesser degree), Nethack
(just finished my first two ascensions this month), Slash'Em, Crawl, Doom,
and a bunch of other miscellaneous and/or lesser known ones. I like
different aspects about each (and naturally, am annoyed by different aspects
as well ;)
xhoch3
> xhoch3 wrote:
>
>> anxious triffid <anxious...@INFEAROFSPAMfserve.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> Why? It is possible to beat the game without doing so, and I believe
>>> some
>>> have even done so without resorting to spoilers. Cheating at ADOM is
>>> like
>>> cheating at Solitaire.
>> You snipped the parts where I explained what use cheating has. For me
>> scripting is just another form of cheating and lot's of information in
>> the guidebook was obtained this way (eg information about amuletts of
>> order).
>
> Yes, gathering that information required save scumming. However, in my
> opinion, there is a significant difference between black box testing and
> white box testing.
>
I never meant cheating by editing the RAM or disassembling adom. I just
wanted to keep adombot's ability to automize game actions which is some
kind of cheating in my opinion. And it is still black box testing. It's
just not possible to get the needed quantities of eg scrolls of balance
while playing yourself to ever validate how much effect the amulett of
order has.
>> If you believe that ADOM is closed source, because everybody
>> should explore the game by playing then even the guidebook itself is
>> some kind of cheat. If you don't want information about game mechanics
>> that's fine, but there are lot's of others who want to.
>
> I think that Thomas enjoys it if the community finds out something by
> trying and playing and posts it for everyone; I think that's one of the
> reasons he wanted to have an official ADOM wiki. The distinction is not
> between "I should discover it personally" and "The group should discover
> it". The distinction is between discovering it by playing or by looking
> at the code.
>
That's perfect with me. I just wanted to give an example how broad the
meaning of the word cheating can be, so if you say cheating is evil, you'd
have to say what sort of cheating you actually mean.
--
rgra bug list: http://adombugs.100free.com/
Malte Helmert
No; whether or not it is allowed has nothing to do with money
whatsoever. There are some exceptions for educational use in
universities and the like, but even in those cases, you would never be
allowed to pass the information on to outsiders, like posting it on the
newsgroup or putting it on the web. Even passing it on to other
researchers is out of limits. Trust me on this; I work as a researcher
and know about this from personal experience.
Besides, I have read the law text. I don't want to start another
discussion with people who haven't. ;-)
Malte
Erik Piper
[Malte: What other games have you tried? It may be another roguelike has that
which ADOM is missing for you.]
> Angband (V, O, Pern/Tome, Z, various others to a lesser degree), Nethack
> (just finished my first two ascensions this month), Slash'Em, Crawl, Doom,
> and a bunch of other miscellaneous and/or lesser known ones. I like
> different aspects about each (and naturally, am annoyed by different aspects
> as well ;)
<advocacy>Darshan's (so-called) Travel Patch, and especially recent
improvements to it, have made Crawl quite a different game than it was at the
time when 4.00b26 was released roughly two years ago. You might want to take
a new look at it. Travelling and inventory management have become much, much
less annoying.</advocacy>
Erik
Marcus
Ah, that'd be the version I play ;) In fact...
http://crawlj.sourceforge.jp/down_e.html
That one frequently, which is a modification of Darshan's patch with a
really nice set of tiles included. I generally always prefer ascii, but
Crawl works quite well with these tiles.
Malte Helmert
> bork bork bork Marcus bork 1:42:02 PM bork 2/1/2005 bork bork:
>
> [Malte: What other games have you tried? It may be another roguelike has that
> which ADOM is missing for you.]
I'd advocate writing this as "Malte wrote:" or some such. I first
understood this as a question directed at me. :-)
>>Angband (V, O, Pern/Tome, Z, various others to a lesser degree), Nethack
>>(just finished my first two ascensions this month), Slash'Em, Crawl, Doom,
>>and a bunch of other miscellaneous and/or lesser known ones. I like
>>different aspects about each (and naturally, am annoyed by different aspects
>>as well ;)
>
> <advocacy>Darshan's (so-called) Travel Patch, and especially recent
> improvements to it, have made Crawl quite a different game than it was at the
> time when 4.00b26 was released roughly two years ago. You might want to take
> a new look at it. Travelling and inventory management have become much, much
> less annoying.</advocacy>
When I first tried Crawl, I was repelled by the bad user interface and
general ugliness, but once you've got used to it, it's a truly great
game. I enjoy it a lot even without Darsham's patches.
Another roguelike game I'd recommend giving a good try is GearHead. I
don't know zilch about anime and mecha, but still I think this is a
thoroughly enjoyable game with many great ideas.
Malte
Malte Helmert
> Malte Helmert <hel...@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:
>
> I never meant cheating by editing the RAM or disassembling adom. I just
> wanted to keep adombot's ability to automize game actions which is some
> kind of cheating in my opinion. And it is still black box testing. It's
> just not possible to get the needed quantities of eg scrolls of balance
> while playing yourself to ever validate how much effect the amulett of
> order has.
I'm not sure if that's a good example, since that was done without ADOMBot.
>> I think that Thomas enjoys it if the community finds out something by
>> trying and playing and posts it for everyone; I think that's one of
>> the reasons he wanted to have an official ADOM wiki. The distinction
>> is not between "I should discover it personally" and "The group
>> should discover it". The distinction is between discovering it by
>> playing or by looking at the code.
>>
> That's perfect with me. I just wanted to give an example how broad the
> meaning of the word cheating can be, so if you say cheating is evil,
> you'd have to say what sort of cheating you actually mean.
Do you mean the general "you" (like "one")? Because I never said that
"cheating is evil". You were replying to anxious triffid, not to me
(although I don't think he said that either).
Unless I am misrepresenting other people's opinion, *you* are the one
who persistently argues that these things are cheating. What statement
that anyone has made do you disagree with?
Malte
Erik Piper
> Erik Piper wrote:
> > bork bork bork Marcus bork 1:42:02 PM bork 2/1/2005 bork bork:
> >
> > [Malte: What other games have you tried? It may be another roguelike has
> > that which ADOM is missing for you.]
>
> I'd advocate writing this as "Malte wrote:" or some such. I first
> understood this as a question directed at me. :-)
I use the "Person:" approach a lot, but it tends to work better when multiple
people are quoted or when I'm quoting the person I'm replying to. Sorry.
[...]
> When I first tried Crawl, I was repelled by the bad user interface and
> general ugliness, but once you've got used to it, it's a truly great game.
> I enjoy it a lot even without Darsham's patches.
Situations like these are, I guess, why the phrase "YMMV" was born. Great
though it is, and even though I could always handle the ugliness, my early
attempts to get into Crawl crashed into the interface troubles like into a
brick wall. Far worse for me than even the "there's a jackal pack by my
starting position" problem, which is something I got used to (partly by
finding solutions and partly by just counting these as a small and acceptable
waste of time).
YMMV. :-)
Erik
xhoch3
> xhoch3 wrote:
>>> I think that Thomas enjoys it if the community finds out something by
>>> trying and playing and posts it for everyone; I think that's one of
>>> the reasons he wanted to have an official ADOM wiki. The distinction
>>> is not between "I should discover it personally" and "The group
>>> should discover it". The distinction is between discovering it by
>>> playing or by looking at the code.
>>>
>> That's perfect with me. I just wanted to give an example how broad the
>> meaning of the word cheating can be, so if you say cheating is evil,
>> you'd have to say what sort of cheating you actually mean.
>
> Do you mean the general "you" (like "one")? Because I never said that
> "cheating is evil". You were replying to anxious triffid, not to me
> (although I don't think he said that either).
Yep. I meant 'one'. I thought that was obvious since nobody said 'cheating
is evil', sorry for any misunderstanding.
>
> Unless I am misrepresenting other people's opinion, *you* are the one
> who persistently argues that these things are cheating. What statement
> that anyone has made do you disagree with?
>
Yeah, I do think these things are cheating! To use adombots automation
function is cheating for me. Just as save-scumming is cheating for me. And
the quote I am referring to is:
anxious triffid wrote
> xhoch3 <xho...@safe-mail.net> wrote in
>> I do think we need some means of cheating.
>Why? It is possible to beat the game without doing so, and I believe some
> have even done so without resorting to spoilers. Cheating at ADOM is like
> cheating at Solitaire.
Then I said we need some means to cheat *IF* we want to find out game
mechanics and that you *COULD* consider the guidebook as cheating, I never
said I think so. Sorry for any misunderstanding.
Now I'll just shut up.
--
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. There might be a law
against it by that time.
Malte Helmert
> bork bork bork Malte Helmert bork 3:14:45 PM bork 2/1/2005 bork bork:
>
>>Erik Piper wrote:
>>
>>>[Malte: What other games have you tried? It may be another roguelike has
>>>that which ADOM is missing for you.]
>>
>>I'd advocate writing this as "Malte wrote:" or some such. I first
>>understood this as a question directed at me. :-)
>
> I use the "Person:" approach a lot, but it tends to work better when multiple
> people are quoted or when I'm quoting the person I'm replying to. Sorry.
I think it's only problematic if the first thing after the colon is a
question. :-)
Malte
Vladimir Panteleev
> Malte Helmert <hel...@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:
>
>> I think that Thomas enjoys it if the community finds out something by
>> trying and playing and posts it for everyone; I think that's one of the
>> reasons he wanted to have an official ADOM wiki. The distinction is not
>> between "I should discover it personally" and "The group should discover
>> it". The distinction is between discovering it by playing or by looking
>> at the code.
>>
>
> That's perfect with me. I just wanted to give an example how broad the
> meaning of the word cheating can be, so if you say cheating is evil, you'd
> have to say what sort of cheating you actually mean.
Here's a quote from "Cracking Adom CRC" by Jumping Spider.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Whenever a group of people gather on a given topic for any length of
time, a culture emerges. Usually the nature of a democratic forum
prevents the culture from adopting extreme positions, even though many
of the members of that community may have such strong feelings. By and
large, the Adom community is no different. One position that has been
championed to the extreme, however, is a disdain for cheating, hacking,
scumming or abusing the game in any way. People who engage in such
activity are publicly and forcefully scorned in the Adom community.
I could go on about how this has affected the Adom community for both
good and ill, but I won't. Personally, I like the Adom community just
fine the way it is.
But let's get one thing straight: I am an outsider to that community. I
cheat. I cheat a lot. I don't play games for the challenge of playing
them; I play to relax. Personally, games that are difficult or
challenging are not the way I like to spend my time. I am by profession
a programmer who happens to have an enjoyable, rewarding, high-stress
job where I am frustrated and challenged every day with the pressures of
the software community. When I get home, I like to do something
different.
For me, the perfect way to blow off some stress is to load up Quake,
stick in a Gravity Kills CD, crank it to max, switch to God Mode, and
slaughter everything in the game with nothing but the hatchet. For me,
*that's* entertainment."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Now, a few words from me.
I believe the moral aspect of cheating is something very personal.
Cheating is very normal for some people. Sometimes, when playing the
game becomes hard and losing becomes extremely annoying, the player
usually either drops the game, or looks for methods to cheat. And if he
likes the game, at some point playing with cheats becomes boring, and,
now more experienced, the player can return to playing the game honestly
again.
Remember those who save-scummed. We all do it just for a while, until we
feel we are ready to play the game For Real. If save-scumming were
somehow made impossible, I doubt that would add to ADOM's popularity.
And save-scumming is just a variation of cheating.
Although I understand Thomas wants people to play his game fair and
square, I think he should concentrate on concealing those secrets we
"code-divers" so easily find, as well as the numerous bugs and other
stuff.
Note: I feel loosely connected to my language skills today. What I wrote
above might not represent my actual opinion.
Malte Helmert
> Now, a few words from me.
>
> I believe the moral aspect of cheating is something very personal.
Agreed, at least as long as public highscores etc. are not involved, and
as long as it *stays* personal. For example, everybody is entitled to
their own personal political opinions, but I would prefer them not to
discuss them in this newsgroup.
> Cheating is very normal for some people. Sometimes, when playing the
> game becomes hard and losing becomes extremely annoying, the player
> usually either drops the game, or looks for methods to cheat. And if he
> likes the game, at some point playing with cheats becomes boring, and,
> now more experienced, the player can return to playing the game honestly
> again.
Again, agreed, although some people have stated here in the past that
the mere *opportunity* for cheating has changed the game for them so
much that they don't enjoy it any more. Kind of a variation of the Piper
syndrome. ;-)
> Remember those who save-scummed. We all do it just for a while, until we
> feel we are ready to play the game For Real. If save-scumming were
> somehow made impossible, I doubt that would add to ADOM's popularity.
> And save-scumming is just a variation of cheating.
Agreed.
> Although I understand Thomas wants people to play his game fair and
> square, I think he should concentrate on concealing those secrets we
> "code-divers" so easily find, as well as the numerous bugs and other
> stuff.
I partially disagree here. I don't think he should concentrate on
concealing stuff; I think that's mostly wasted time. It would be much
preferable if there were some code that would make concealing stuff
unnecessary. Maybe I am too idealistic, but I prefer a world where locks
aren't needed to one where locks are so strong that nobody can break
them. Especially if fashioning those locks keeps somebody from
contributing to the society more usefully.
> Note: I feel loosely connected to my language skills today. What I wrote
> above might not represent my actual opinion.
My take on this is: Everybody should mind their own business as far as
private things like cheating are concerned, but it should not play a
large part in the "official" ADOM communities. I am not sure I correctly
understood everything you said, but it seems to me you are saying
something similar. Am I understanding you correctly?
Malte
Przemyslaw Brojewski
> It's
> just not possible to get the needed quantities of eg scrolls of balance
Unless you become an archmage :) Play more, dissassemble less.
brojek.
Vladimir Panteleev
>> Although I understand Thomas wants people to play his game fair and
>> square, I think he should concentrate on concealing those secrets we
>> "code-divers" so easily find, as well as the numerous bugs and other
>> stuff.
>
> I partially disagree here. I don't think he should concentrate on
> concealing stuff; I think that's mostly wasted time. It would be much
> preferable if there were some code that would make concealing stuff
> unnecessary. Maybe I am too idealistic, but I prefer a world where locks
> aren't needed to one where locks are so strong that nobody can break
> them. Especially if fashioning those locks keeps somebody from
> contributing to the society more usefully.
Alas, there will always be curious people who will take my place at
hacking the binaries. Cheating and reverse-engineering are two
different, but somewhat similar problems. However, it's much easier to
protect your data from being modified than from being read.
Actually, I didn't mean to emphasize the problem of reverse-engineering
in what I said above.
>> Note: I feel loosely connected to my language skills today. What I wrote
>> above might not represent my actual opinion.
>
> My take on this is: Everybody should mind their own business as far as
> private things like cheating are concerned, but it should not play a
> large part in the "official" ADOM communities. I am not sure I correctly
> understood everything you said, but it seems to me you are saying
> something similar. Am I understanding you correctly?
Yes, that too, but my point would be that I don't think he should be
categorically against cheating. At the age I started to play ADOM, the
only way for me to learn the rules of the game was to cheat. Some time
after, that got boring, and I had a few save-scummed wins. I quit
save-scumming only last year.
My point is, I doubt that anti-cheat protection will add to the game's
overall popularity.
> Again, agreed, although some people have stated here in the past that
> the mere *opportunity* for cheating has changed the game for them so
> much that they don't enjoy it any more.
That's because they always cheat. Some people cheat in games just
because they can, not because they can't play the game without cheating.
Some people won't play a game if they can't cheat in it, but if they
can, they just fly through the game with all cheats enabled. I think
it's obvious that this will spoil their game experience.
Perhaps we should make a poll: "If you were absolutely new to ADOM,
would you like the game to have anti-cheat protection?"
Erik Piper
> Perhaps we should make a poll: "If you were absolutely new to ADOM,
> would you like the game to have anti-cheat protection?"
I'll bite.
No.
Yesterday I wanted to find out if a strategy I had in my mind for taking on a
certain task in another roguelike was a waste of time or worth executing.
Because I could source-dive, I could find that out, and today I can go on to
enjoy the experience of actually implementing the strategy. I consider that
as adding to the fun of the game, not subtracting from it.
(Of course, when I was absolutely new to ADOM, the concept of source-diving
scared me and it took me about 3 years from my first recent stab at
roguelikes to my first source-diving, so maybe the correct answer above is
"yes," who knows?)
Erik
ToGu
> 1. The Future of ADOM
>
> The good news first: ADOM is not dead!
>
> change in procedure. In order to allow Thomas to focus on JADE, he plans
> to change the development model of ADOM. Instead of the current one-man
> system, he would like to turn into an effort by a small, closed group (a
> kind of DevTeam, if you will) of maybe 4-5 people under his supervision.
> Thomas will make all decisions regarding which features will or will not
> be added to ADOM, but actual implementation, bug fixes and the like will
> be delegated. ADOM will *not* go Open Source -- more regarding this
> under the third topic.
This sounds great! :)
I personally think this is exactly what ADOM needs now that Thomas doesn't
"like" the code much anymore (and still doesn't want to let everyone see it).
> 3. Reverse Engineering
>
> Regarding this topic, Thomas stated his opinion very clearly: He does
> not want people to disassemble ADOM for any purpose. He had already
> planned to revised the ADOM license so that his opinion on this issue
> will become very clear to everybody. He also briefly discussed the legal
> aspects of this, mentioning the effort involved in international
> lawsuits.
>
> Most significantly, Thomas expressed his contempt for patches that
> change the rules of the game.
If he's so strongly opposed to it (even considering lawsuits), I'm rather
surprised that he's never answered any of my emails, or tried to contact me. I'd
think he'd want to, seeing how (I believe) I was the first to try mapping out
how the game works through a full disassembly. Same about patches, stopping mine
would only require answering my email.
> Finally, Thomas is also very much against disassembling the executable
> to discover game mechanics and secrets. He referred to the section in
> readme.1st where it is stated that the good effect of ADOM staying
> closed source is "that ADOM will remain the most challenging and
> mysterious of all roguelike games, simply because you just can't take a
> look into the sources and find all the secrets right away once a new
> version is released".
I don't recall any important "mysteries" being solved from disassembling.
Some questions have been answered definitely etc, but I simply can't think of
any major "discovery" that had not already been postulated. Now I may very well
be wrong, and what's "major" or not is subjective, but I still believe all of
the "mysteries" were solved a long time ago.
The part about "once a new version is released" is in any case moot - there
hasn't been any new content for a very very long time.
- Tor Gunnar Houeland
matija
> Some people cheat in games just because they can, not because they
> can't play the game without cheating. Some people won't play a game
> if they can't cheat in it, but if they can, they just fly through the
> game with all cheats enabled. I think it's obvious that this will
> spoil their game experience.
don't forget that a number of games also cheat. for example,
i played NFS:U a few months ago and simply got stuck on
a particular point in the game. i just couldn't win some
races, even though i drove very good and tried 30-40 times
over the course of a week. then i found out that the game
engine was _designed_ to cheat! rot13 spoiler:
gur snfgre lbh tb, gur snfgre gur pbzchgre-pbagebyyrq pnef tb,
ohg gurve fcrrq vapernfr vf abg yvarne naq gurl raq hc n ybg
snfgre guna lbhefrys - vg jbhyq gnxr *cresrpg* qevivat gb jva,
naq gung'f obeqreyvar vzcbffvoyr. fb, v whfg ercynprq zl
yriry guerr nppryrengvba/gbc fcrrq tvmzbf jvgu yriry bar fghss
jurarire v tbg fghpx, naq v fgnegrq jvaavat ntnva. cyhf,
vg jnf npghnyyl zber rawblnoyr naq yrff fgerffshy qevivat ng
n fybjre fcrrq.
--
there is a cheer. the gnomes have learned a new way to say hooray. [-shpongle]
address is scrambled - remove the superfluous "x" marks to reply
Malte Helmert
> Malte Helmert wrote:
>
>> 3. Reverse Engineering
>>
>> Most significantly, Thomas expressed his contempt for patches that
>> change the rules of the game.
>
> If he's so strongly opposed to it (even considering lawsuits), I'm
> rather surprised that he's never answered any of my emails, or tried to
> contact me. I'd think he'd want to, seeing how (I believe) I was the
> first to try mapping out how the game works through a full disassembly.
> Same about patches, stopping mine would only require answering my email.
I guess that keeping on top of ADOM e-mail can be challenging. I
remember reading or hearing that he sometimes receives several hundred
ADOM-related emails per week. Probably when you see that you can't catch
up there is a point where you delete everything to get a clean slate.
Only one possible reason; after all the ways of the Creator are
ineffable and all that. ;-)
>> Finally, Thomas is also very much against disassembling the executable
>> to discover game mechanics and secrets. He referred to the section in
>> readme.1st where it is stated that the good effect of ADOM staying
>> closed source is "that ADOM will remain the most challenging and
>> mysterious of all roguelike games, simply because you just can't take a
>> look into the sources and find all the secrets right away once a new
>> version is released".
> I don't recall any important "mysteries" being solved from disassembling.
Good; if nothing important is discovered by it, surely there isn't much
point in disassembling and we need not argue about Thomas' view on this. ;-)
> Some questions have been answered definitely etc, but I simply can't
> think of any major "discovery" that had not already been postulated. Now
> I may very well be wrong, and what's "major" or not is subjective, but I
> still believe all of the "mysteries" were solved a long time ago.
>
> The part about "once a new version is released" is in any case moot -
> there hasn't been any new content for a very very long time.
You are applying the quote to pure story content exclusively, but I'm
not sure that's how it was meant.
Talents are a recent [1] additions, and the way some talents work
exactly (consider Treasure Hunter) was a hotly debated topic before
information from the executable were provided. Many room effects have
also been mostly mysterious until recently. Same for some birth messages.
Regarding story content, consider the (once) open questions surrounding
the scroll of omnipotence or the weird tome.
Malte
[1] In the sense of: introduced in recent versions. Of course recent
versions are already quite old, but that's another issue.
Twinge
> bork bork bork Vladimir Panteleev bork 3:04:47 PM bork 2/2/2005 bork bork:
>
>
>
>> Perhaps we should make a poll: "If you were absolutely new to ADOM,
>> would you like the game to have anti-cheat protection?"
No. If I didn't have the ability to save-scum when I first started
played, I believe I would've gotten frustrated enough to give up on the
game completely before actually making it anywhere. ADOM just has such a
massive learning curve; I actually recommend new players save-scum at
first just to ease the frustration a bit.
Lapak
> > bork bork bork Vladimir Panteleev
ADOM,
> >> would you like the game to have anti-cheat protection?"
>
> No. If I didn't have the ability to save-scum when I first started
> played, I believe I would've gotten frustrated enough to give up on
the
> game completely before actually making it anywhere. ADOM just has
such a
> massive learning curve; I actually recommend new players save-scum at
> first just to ease the frustration a bit.
For contrast: I didn't ever save-scum. For me, it would have taken away
all the fun of those early victories: saving the carpenter, rescuing
the puppy, finding the dwarves for the first time. Somewhat perversely,
I might not have stayed with the game very long if it had save/load
functionality built in; the very frustration of losing after making
another character level / dungeon level / etc. over my last run was
what drove me to continue.
That said, it's no skin off of my nose if others feel the need to
cheat. As long as it doesn't intrude on my enjoyment of the game, it
doesn't bother me. So no, I don't think the game should have iron-clad
anti-cheat protection. For those like me, we're self-policing; for
those like Twinge, they have the flexibility they want.
I have to admit I fall in Thomas' camp with regards to
reverse-engineering and source-diving, though.
(This post was made with Google Groups, for which I apologize. I don't
currently post often enough to have bothered configuring a proper news
client. I'm hoping it attributes the quoted material properly and wraps
the lines correctly; if it doesn't, let me know and I will install a
client regardless.)
Malte Helmert
I think somebody introduced a strawman here. Nobody was talking about
features that prevent save-scumming anywhere; even though Thomas doesn't
like it, he doesn't try to actively prevent it either. The "anti-cheat"
measures he was talking about are about hex-editing save files and
memory locations and things like that. So if nobody argues for it, why
argue against it?
That being said, I did save-scum initially for the first few roguelikes
I played, but never for the ones I started later, and I got success much
faster with the ones where I never save-scummed. For example, I got a
Crawl winner rather quickly, but never really got anywhere in Nethack.
Of course there can be other reasons for that.
I'm not saying save-scumming should be made difficult -- that's a
personal decision -- I'm just saying that it is not necessarily a good
way to get proficient in a game.
Malte
Josh Kelley
> As far as I remember, ADOM Sage is merely an input/output filter is
> neither a patched version of ADOM nor based on disassembly. You might
> want to check with Joshua to be sure.
ADOM Sage technically does more than just input/output filtering, but
that's only because it's much easier to read and alter the messages that
ADOM generates while they're being formatted internally rather than when
they're output to screen. For all practical purposes, ADOM Sage just
alters input and output.
I think that I did a little bit of disassembly to help debug ADOM Sage,
and I used disassembly to find out how to work around a bug in ADOM
1.1.0, but otherwise I used no patches or disassembly. Thomas mentioned
ADOM Sage in a newsgroup posting around the time ADOM 1.1.0 was released
and didn't object to it, so I'm pretty sure he's okay with it.
*sigh* I've been saying for over a year now that I need to finish up
the next version of ADOM Sage and release it. Hopefully sometime soon...
--
Josh Kelley
ADOM Sage - frontend for ADOM - http://www.jbc.edu/~josh/adom-sage
Christian Pohl
>
> Ah, that'd be the version I play ;) In fact...
>
> http://crawlj.sourceforge.jp/down_e.html
>
> That one frequently, which is a modification of Darshan's patch with a
> really nice set of tiles included. I generally always prefer ascii, but
> Crawl works quite well with these tiles.
>
>
Thanks for dropping another interesting roguelike my way :-)
I didn't try Crawl yet, but this version seems a lot of fun (although I
die approx. every 1000 turns :-)))
Christian "BlackFurredBeast" Pohl
Christian Pohl
>
> don't forget that a number of games also cheat. for example,
> i played NFS:U a few months ago and simply got stuck on
> a particular point in the game. i just couldn't win some
> races, even though i drove very good and tried 30-40 times
> over the course of a week. then i found out that the game
> engine was _designed_ to cheat! rot13 spoiler:
<rant>NFS:U (and many other EA games) are a design lesseon in BAD AI. I
had the absolutely same problem, same game. What good is a difficulty
switch when even on the easiest level the AI cars seem to have triple
your speed and insane sk1llz0rz??? Oh well.</rant>
Sorry 'bout that
Christian "BlackFurredBeast" Pohl
Christian Pohl
<snip>
> Perhaps we should make a poll: "If you were absolutely new to ADOM,
> would you like the game to have anti-cheat protection?"
>
As long as it doesn't involve a save-scum blocker, I couldn't care less.
I'm not regularly save-scumming anymore, but my first deeper stabs into
the game wouldn't been possible without savescumming. But if Thomas
wants to discourage from item-hexing or stat-boosting, I say let him go
for it. IMHO roguelikes' biggest selling point is the random element,
and with "deep cheating" like item, stat or character editing (however
helpful it may be in bug searching), the game loses a lot.
Vladimir Panteleev
> Twinge wrote:
>
>> Erik Piper wrote:
>>
>>> bork bork bork Vladimir Panteleev bork 3:04:47 PM bork 2/2/2005 bork
>>> bork:
>>>
>>>> Perhaps we should make a poll: "If you were absolutely new to ADOM,
>>>> would you like the game to have anti-cheat protection?"
>>
>> No. If I didn't have the ability to save-scum when I first started
>> played, I believe I would've gotten frustrated enough to give up on the
>> game completely before actually making it anywhere. ADOM just has such a
>> massive learning curve; I actually recommend new players save-scum at
>> first just to ease the frustration a bit.
>
> I think somebody introduced a strawman here. Nobody was talking about
> features that prevent save-scumming anywhere; even though Thomas doesn't
> like it, he doesn't try to actively prevent it either. The "anti-cheat"
> measures he was talking about are about hex-editing save files and
> memory locations and things like that.
I should have explicitly noted that save-scumming is out of the
question. Probably the one reason Thomas won't fight save-scumming is
because it's impossible to prevent it, unless either the game will store
information in a global system location (which would be OS-dependent,
and still easy to detect) or if the game would have to connect to the
Internet. I doubt either will be implemented, giving that ADOM is a
cross-platform game.
> So if nobody argues for it, why argue against it?
Yes, guess this was a pretty much empty discussion after all. My bad for
wasting everybody's time :(
Malte Helmert
> On Thu, 03 Feb 2005 02:35:33 +0100, Malte Helmert wrote:
>
>>I think somebody introduced a strawman here. Nobody was talking about
>>features that prevent save-scumming anywhere; even though Thomas doesn't
>>like it, he doesn't try to actively prevent it either. The "anti-cheat"
>>measures he was talking about are about hex-editing save files and
>>memory locations and things like that.
>
> I should have explicitly noted that save-scumming is out of the
> question. Probably the one reason Thomas won't fight save-scumming is
> because it's impossible to prevent it, unless either the game will store
> information in a global system location (which would be OS-dependent,
> and still easy to detect) or if the game would have to connect to the
> Internet. I doubt either will be implemented, giving that ADOM is a
> cross-platform game.
There are some simple measures against save-scumming though, like not
allowing a reload if the same character (as evidenced by the adom.cnt
file contents upon creation of the character, for instance) is already
in the high score. Some roguelike I played actually implemented this,
although I don't recall which one it was. Of course this and all other
simple measures against save-scumming can be circumvented by copying the
entire ADOM installation rather than just the .svg file. I guess it is
still somewhat effective way to get honest scores on a multi-user system
with a shared highscore list.
Personally, from the little discussion we had on this topic, I don't
think that the technical difficulty is Thomas's only reason not to try
to do anything against save-scumming. Unlike hex-editing and the like,
save-scumming is a mass phenomenon. It's not limited to ADOM either, and
many people enjoy playing the game this way. I think that Thomas's
attitude on this is something like "live and let live". As you said,
probably everybody save-scummed in some game some time.
Malte
Marcus
> Marcus wrote:
>
[crawl discussion]
>>
>> http://crawlj.sourceforge.jp/down_e.html
>>
> Thanks for dropping another interesting roguelike my way :-)
> I didn't try Crawl yet, but this version seems a lot of fun (although
> I die approx. every 1000 turns :-)))
>
> Christian "BlackFurredBeast" Pohl
Haha, it's a brutally difficult game, but pretty entertaining. The
distinction between ac/ev, the spellcasting variety, the insane number of
classes and races, and the interesting skill system all make it pretty fun.
Not sure if it was apparent, but it has travel built in - hit x (or X? -
can't remember, my keys are remapped) and then > < (or another symbol) and
then a . and you can zip instantly to a staircase. Handy in Crawl's big
strangely shaped dungeons.
Christian Pohl
<on Crawl>
> Haha, it's a brutally difficult game, but pretty entertaining. The
> distinction between ac/ev, the spellcasting variety, the insane number of
> classes and races, and the interesting skill system all make it pretty fun.
> Not sure if it was apparent, but it has travel built in - hit x (or X? -
> can't remember, my keys are remapped) and then > < (or another symbol) and
> then a . and you can zip instantly to a staircase. Handy in Crawl's big
> strangely shaped dungeons.
>
Is there any "first steps" hint collection around? I'm not after
outright spoilers, more like gentle hints which get me off the ground a
little? So far, my most successful characters are Dwarven Fighters
axe-cleaving everything to bits, but I'd like to play something
spell-casty too. Too bad that my caster charas die almost instantly :-))
Help would be much appreciated
Christian "BlackFurredBeast" Pohl
frobnoid
> Personally, from the little discussion we had on this topic, I don't
> think that the technical difficulty is Thomas's only reason not to try
> to do anything against save-scumming. Unlike hex-editing and the like,
> save-scumming is a mass phenomenon. It's not limited to ADOM either, and
> many people enjoy playing the game this way. I think that Thomas's
> attitude on this is something like "live and let live". As you said,
> probably everybody save-scummed in some game some time.
Someone (Vladimir?) said, earlier in this thread, that its easier for
Thomas to build in safeguards against savefile editting than it is for
players to break those safeguards.
As you've alluded, savescumming is exactly the opposite if you have
control over the machine on which you're running. Its far easier (trivial
in fact, on Linux) to circumvent anything Thomas could do in that regard
than it is for him to implement...
matija
> <rant>NFS:U (and many other EA games) are a design lesseon in BAD AI. I
> had the absolutely same problem, same game. What good is a difficulty
> switch when even on the easiest level the AI cars seem to have triple
> your speed and insane sk1llz0rz??? Oh well.</rant>
don't forget sid meier's civilization, all three versions.
nothing beats scouting enemy territory and spotting instant
roadification all around their cities in just one turn,
without any workers in sight. i liked the game until i saw
this - then i created 99-move advanced armors, and nukes
that build in one turn, available only to my civ. ahh,
the joy of pumping 200 nukes all around the world...
Malte Helmert
The checks I was talking about would be about ten lines of code, and
present in (some) other roguelikes. Since he has not implemented them,
I'd say that he does not consider preventing save-scumming important.
Malte
Stephen White
> Christian Pohl, completely geschtonkenflapped, wrote:
>
>><rant>NFS:U (and many other EA games) are a design lesseon in BAD AI. I
>>had the absolutely same problem, same game. What good is a difficulty
>>switch when even on the easiest level the AI cars seem to have triple
>>your speed and insane sk1llz0rz??? Oh well.</rant>
>
> don't forget sid meier's civilization, all three versions.
> nothing beats scouting enemy territory and spotting instant
> roadification all around their cities in just one turn,
> without any workers in sight. i liked the game until i saw
> this - then i created 99-move advanced armors, and nukes
> that build in one turn, available only to my civ. ahh,
> the joy of pumping 200 nukes all around the world...
You should check out Freeciv. IIRC, the computer doesn't cheat at all
on the lower difficulty levels, or if it does the docs tell you exactly
how. I know it cheats on the harder difficulty levels by being able to
set it's tax/science/luxury rates to whatever it likes, ignoring the
usual government type restrictions (e.g. nothing over 60% on Despotism).
Jukka Kuusisto
[Crawl]
>Is there any "first steps" hint collection around? I'm not after
>outright spoilers, more like gentle hints which get me off the ground a
>little?
There are some hints (and also spoilers) at
<http://www.swallowtail.org/crawl/hints.shtml>.
-Jukka
--
Jukka Kuusisto
Erik Piper
As for starting a spellcaster, remembering the words of wisdom from the
Swallowtail to the effect that "when SP=0, HP=0 soon after" is half the
battle. Rest up to full SP after every encounter. Another important thing is
to learn how to pillar-dance; fortunately, this is only needed in the
beginning, and only sometimes. Learning to shake a monster that's only your
tail is important too. (Hint: stair scum, take advantage of slow weapon
speeds for things like giant clubs, and learn how to "lose a monster in
traffic" by getting a second, weaker monster on your tail, and then going
upstairs adjacent to THAT monster instead of the Ogre or whatever.)
I've often thought about writing a "first steps" guide, but never gotten
around to it.
If you should happen to be using a Windows system, and you like the thought
of casting spells using macros, I suggest you use Windows PowerPro. You can
find instructions on setting it up here:
http://crawl.webpark.pl/function_keys.html
(Personally I use a mild variation, where F1 is tied to "Dyga", that is,
dissect one corpse and get all, but this takes some care to use right, as if
there's no corpse, it'll move you 1 space NW and attempt the pickup there,
and if there are multiple corpses it'll place the 2nd and later ones in your
backpack. Still, I find it handy.)
Unfortunately, some domain vampire has swallowed up the domain where Windows
PowerPro was hosted (it apparently was never very successful), but if you
send me an e-mail, I can mail you the installer. AFAIU it's freeware or open
source (and my apologies if I'm wrong).
Crawl has its own macro system, but I've never had much luck with it, and it
can't access the function keys anyway.
Erik
Erik Piper
> Haha, it's a brutally difficult game, but pretty entertaining. The
> distinction between ac/ev, the spellcasting variety, the insane number of
> classes and races, and the interesting skill system all make it pretty fun.
> Not sure if it was apparent, but it has travel built in - hit x (or X? -
> can't remember, my keys are remapped) and then > < (or another symbol) and
> then a . and you can zip instantly to a staircase. Handy in Crawl's big
> strangely shaped dungeons.
These things are only in the Darshan-patched variant of the game (though I
couldn't imagine playing any other version anyway).
Malte Helmert
Also, for Crawl-related questions, check out the newsgroup
rec.games.roguelike.misc. Most current discussions in the group are
about DoomRL, but in "normal" times, 80-90% of the posts are about
Crawl. Lots of expertise there.
Malte
Malte Helmert
> bork bork bork Christian Pohl bork 3:28:36 AM bork 2/4/2005 bork bork:
>
>>Is there any "first steps" hint collection around? I'm not after outright
>>spoilers, more like gentle hints which get me off the ground a little? So
>>far, my most successful characters are Dwarven Fighters axe-cleaving
>>everything to bits, but I'd like to play something spell-casty too. Too bad
>>that my caster charas die almost instantly :-))
>>
>
> As for starting a spellcaster, remembering the words of wisdom from the
> Swallowtail to the effect that "when SP=0, HP=0 soon after" is half the
> battle. Rest up to full SP after every encounter. Another important thing is
> to learn how to pillar-dance; fortunately, this is only needed in the
> beginning, and only sometimes. Learning to shake a monster that's only your
> tail is important too. (Hint: stair scum, take advantage of slow weapon
> speeds for things like giant clubs, and learn how to "lose a monster in
> traffic" by getting a second, weaker monster on your tail, and then going
> upstairs adjacent to THAT monster instead of the Ogre or whatever.)
Agreed on all accounts. In a perfect world, some Crawler would create an
annotated video showing and explaining some of these techniques -- they
are pretty essential.
Malte
Christian Pohl
<snip AI rants>
>
> You should check out Freeciv. IIRC, the computer doesn't cheat at all
> on the lower difficulty levels, or if it does the docs tell you exactly
> how. I know it cheats on the harder difficulty levels by being able to
> set it's tax/science/luxury rates to whatever it likes, ignoring the
> usual government type restrictions (e.g. nothing over 60% on Despotism).
That's nice to read. I'm playing Civ III on a regular basis and are
quite sick about the bunny-esque expansion politics the AI employs
(settle everywhere, as long as there's enough room). I'll check out
Freeciv now. :-)
frobnoid
> frobnoid wrote:
>> Someone (Vladimir?) said, earlier in this thread, that its easier for
>> Thomas to build in safeguards against savefile editting than it is for
>> players to break those safeguards.
>> As you've alluded, savescumming is exactly the opposite if you have
>> control over the machine on which you're running. Its far easier (trivial
>> in fact, on Linux) to circumvent anything Thomas could do in that regard
>> than it is for him to implement...
>
> The checks I was talking about would be about ten lines of code, and
> present in (some) other roguelikes. Since he has not implemented them,
> I'd say that he does not consider preventing save-scumming important.
And take seconds to render useless via a loopback filesystem.
I agree with you, however, that if he cared about savescumming Thomas
would implement a simple mechanism that would still be very effective
against the vast majority of players without sufficient technical skill
and/or motivation to work around it.
matija
> quite sick about the bunny-esque expansion politics the AI employs
> (settle everywhere, as long as there's enough room). I'll check out
> Freeciv now. :-)
i just downloaded it. dear god, this is perhaps one of the
worst games i've ever seen :) i'll get 2.0 beta later and see
if it's better; i mean, the gameplay looks good, but the user
interface and its usability, jeez... reminds me of windows 3.x
fifteen years ago...
Arturus Magi
Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 23:17:24 +0100
>but the user
> interface and its usability, jeez... reminds me of windows 3.x
> fifteen years ago...
That's what happens when you port most X programs to Windows. It looks better
under gtk, but the Windows port doesn't use it.
Stephen White
> Christian Pohl, completely geschtonkenflapped, wrote:
>
>>That's nice to read. I'm playing Civ III on a regular basis and are
>>quite sick about the bunny-esque expansion politics the AI employs
>>(settle everywhere, as long as there's enough room). I'll check out
>>Freeciv now. :-)
>
> i just downloaded it. dear god, this is perhaps one of the
> worst games i've ever seen :) i'll get 2.0 beta later and see
> if it's better; i mean, the gameplay looks good, but the user
> interface and its usability, jeez... reminds me of windows 3.x
> fifteen years ago...
Yes, it is still rather work-in-progress. They have made great strides
with the interface in recent versions though, moving to SDL. And personally,
I always preferred the square, top down style tiles of Civ 1 and 2 instead
of Civ III, so I switch to an apppropriate tileset.
matija
[on freeciv]
>> but the user interface and its usability, jeez... reminds me of
>> windows 3.x fifteen years ago...
>
> That's what happens when you port most X programs to Windows.
> It looks better under gtk, but the Windows port doesn't use it.
there's a gtk2 port, but i sure as hell ain't gonna use that.
besides, the whole usability-functionality aspect is flawed,
and i *mean* flawed. this is a lesson on how _not_ to make
games, unfortunately :(
frobnoid
>
> [on freeciv]
> there's a gtk2 port, but i sure as hell ain't gonna use that.
> besides, the whole usability-functionality aspect is flawed,
> and i *mean* flawed. this is a lesson on how _not_ to make
> games, unfortunately :(
Why not? I've used a bunch of GTK2 apps under windows (although not
freeciv) and have been nothing but satisfied (with the apps, not the OS :))
Chaos Master
I've found that some GTK apps under Windows (e.g. The GIMP, gEDA) are
slower than if they were "native" (i.e. no GTK) Windows applications...
But this may be because my CPU speed (300MHz) and RAM (64MB).
[]s
--
Chaos Master®, posting from Canoas, Brazil - 29.55° S / 51.11° W / GMT-
2h / 15m
"He [Babya] is like the Energizer Bunny of hopeless newsgroup
posting....or should that be Energizer bBunny"
- "ceed" on alt.comp.freeware, 24/1/2005
(to some groups: Yes, I use Windows and MS Office. So what?)
Erik Piper
[A few key survival techniques in Crawl in brief, especially for spellcasters]
> annotated video showing and explaining some of these techniques -- they are
> pretty essential.
>
> Malte
In a perfect world, there would be a freeware or open source program with
comprehensible help that could create these demos, preferably in a form that
can be viewed by users on all platforms. Then I'd volunteer in a jiffy. :-)
Erik
Vladimir Panteleev
I *could* expand AdomBot 2.1's demo recorder to a separate program so it
could "record" the screen of any DOS program under Win NT/2K/XP, and
then write a cross-platform demo player... does Crawl have a DOS port?
Malte Helmert
I think so, yes. In any case, it should not be too difficult to get it
to compile under DOS, although personally I've only compiled it for
Win32 console, if I recall correctly.
Malte
Erik Piper
> On 7 Feb 2005 09:49:45 GMT, Erik Piper wrote:
>
> > bork bork bork Malte Helmert bork 6:08:42 PM bork 2/4/2005 bork bork:
> >
> > [A few key survival techniques in Crawl in brief, especially for
> > spellcasters]
> >
> >> annotated video showing and explaining some of these techniques -- they
> are >> pretty essential.
> >>
> >> Malte
> >
> > In a perfect world, there would be a freeware or open source program with
> > comprehensible help that could create these demos, preferably in a form
> > that can be viewed by users on all platforms. Then I'd volunteer in a
> > jiffy. :-)
>
> I could expand AdomBot 2.1's demo recorder to a separate program so it
> could "record" the screen of any DOS program under Win NT/2K/XP, and
> then write a cross-platform demo player... does Crawl have a DOS port?
I don't like playing it much (I can't get the fonts to be a decent size
without trying, and since the Windows port works fine, I never fiddled with
them), but I certainly could make the sacrifice in order to educate the
masses. :-)
Erik
Thomas Biskup
> Malte Helmert wrote:
> > As far as I remember, ADOM Sage is merely an input/output filter is
> > neither a patched version of ADOM nor based on disassembly. You might
> > want to check with Joshua to be sure.
> ADOM Sage technically does more than just input/output filtering, but
> that's only because it's much easier to read and alter the messages that
> ADOM generates while they're being formatted internally rather than when
> they're output to screen. For all practical purposes, ADOM Sage just
> alters input and output.
> I think that I did a little bit of disassembly to help debug ADOM Sage,
> and I used disassembly to find out how to work around a bug in ADOM
> 1.1.0, but otherwise I used no patches or disassembly. Thomas mentioned
> ADOM Sage in a newsgroup posting around the time ADOM 1.1.0 was released
> and didn't object to it, so I'm pretty sure he's okay with it.
No. I haven't looked at recent versions of ADOM Sage but some
input/output filtering really is nothing I would object to. This
neither alters the game intrinsically nor requires "spylike" reverse
engineering of any kind sao I don't see any problems with that. But
this issue teaches me to spend some more time about thinking about the
revised license ;-)
> *sigh* I've been saying for over a year now that I need to finish up
> the next version of ADOM Sage and release it. Hopefully sometime soon...
Hey, I know that feeling ;-)
Thomas Biskup
ADOM Maintainer
http://www.adom.de
Thomas Biskup
"Marcus" <a...@afdslkj.com> wrote in message news:<j8SdnZRJlok...@adelphia.com>...
> Malte Helmert wrote:
> > Dear group,
> > To dispel some other rumours, this new release will *not* be a final
> > release of ADOM. Thomas told me that even now, after two years without
> > an update, there are about 10000-15000 downloads per month on
> > www.adom.de, and this is sufficient reason to continue working on the
> > game. However, in the future Thomas would like to devote more of his
> > development time to JADE -- JADE development is fun, while ADOM
> > development is hard work due to the way the source code has developed
> > into a writhing mass of programming chaos over time.
> Cool! Now tell him to fix his donation link :P I was all set and ready to
> send him some money around Xmas, and it took me to a german donation page.
> I'm not donating in a language I can't read. I mailed him about it and
> recieved no response...
I have your email in my inbox... but I so far did not find the time to
fix the link. Paypal changed its behaviour at some point and I either
missed their email or the spam filter caught it or they didn't send
one (not likely) :-)
So it's not forgotten.
> > With ADOM moving to a group development model, changes are also
> > planned for www.adom.de. Ideas include adding a Wiki, overhauling the
> > bug tracking system and turning the "Ancient Scroll of Mystery" into
> > a real blog with comment features. An often requested feature which
> > is *not* planned is a forum -- Thomas prefers good old newsgroups
> > [and if a personal comment is allowed here, I agree :-)]. However,
> > all this requires work that would detract from actual development, so
> > it is not clear if, when and how all this can be turned into
> > practice. Do not hold your breath.
> This strikes me as counter-intuitive with his third point below. If he
> doesn't want any reverse engineering/cheating/etc, but he does want a wiki
> that tracks bugs and wants a team of devs, how exactly are people supposed
> to locate obscure stuff? Some things are simply not apparent, and some
> recent bugs only turned up after code diving turned up anamolies. Adom lacks
> Nethack's Explore/Wizard mode, and if he doesn't want people hacking away at
> it, it needs some other method of experimentation. Indeed, a similar feature
> was mentioned long, long ago in concert with Adom Deluxe.
Maybe a Wizard Mode might be worthwhile when/if more people get
involved with the code. I never felt the need for a wizard mode, but
you are right - maybe something like this is required for some
experimentation? What would you think of? Just receive a wand of
wishing with 5 charges and don't be able to enter the highscore? Or
something more elaborate?
xhoch3
[snip]
>
> Maybe a Wizard Mode might be worthwhile when/if more people get
> involved with the code. I never felt the need for a wizard mode, but
> you are right - maybe something like this is required for some
> experimentation? What would you think of? Just receive a wand of
> wishing with 5 charges and don't be able to enter the highscore? Or
> something more elaborate?
>
The wand of wishing is a great idea, 'cause you can only wish for things
you already know of and you can't wish for artifacts, so a newbie couldn't
get too spoiled. Some other means of fast teleportation could be handy as
well, so you can teleport directly to D:50 to test something and don't
have to walk all the way, but again you could only teleport to places you
know the name of.
And you could make the Wizard Mode only available after you have ~100
kills in your highscore.
--
It has just been discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
rgra bug list: http://adombugs.100free.com/
Marcus
> I have your email in my inbox... but I so far did not find the time to
> fix the link. Paypal changed its behaviour at some point and I either
> missed their email or the spam filter caught it or they didn't send
> one (not likely) :-)
>
> So it's not forgotten.
Cool :)
[changes to adom development model, addition of adom wiki]
>> This strikes me as counter-intuitive with his third point below. If
>> he doesn't want any reverse engineering/cheating/etc, but he does
>> want a wiki that tracks bugs and wants a team of devs, how exactly
>> are people supposed to locate obscure stuff? Some things are simply
>> not apparent, and some recent bugs only turned up after code diving
>> turned up anamolies. Adom lacks Nethack's Explore/Wizard mode, and
>> if he doesn't want people hacking away at it, it needs some other
>> method of experimentation. Indeed, a similar feature was mentioned
>> long, long ago in concert with Adom Deluxe.
>
> Maybe a Wizard Mode might be worthwhile when/if more people get
> involved with the code. I never felt the need for a wizard mode, but
> you are right - maybe something like this is required for some
> experimentation? What would you think of? Just receive a wand of
> wishing with 5 charges and don't be able to enter the highscore? Or
> something more elaborate?
>
> Thomas Biskup
> ADOM Maintainer
> http://www.adom.de
Indeed, a WoW would be a good start. A handful of useful debug type commands
would be great also, maybe a set of special hotkeys to activate certain
wishing-like commands, but with no restrictions on the boundries. Nethack
makes the slight distinction between an Explore mode (where you start with a
WoW and can cheat death, simply to, well, explore) and a Debug mode, where
you have access to some commands that allow for more unrestricted game
modifying commands. Teleport quickly to places, create any type of critter,
adjust various attributes/skills/spells/equipment to any values, and so
forth.
I dimly recall using explore mode in Nethack many, *many* years ago for just
that. The game was simply incomprehensible (and impossible) to me, as I had
never seen anything like a Roguelike at at the time. Explore mode cushioned
that blow slightly. Similarly, I remember save scumming in Angband (Moria
was both incomprehensible and not fun at the time I first played it ;)). By
the time I played Adom, I was firmly in the no save scumming, pure playing
camp - but I still see the value of a mode that allows newer players to get
comfortable with the game and try various things out, and one that lets more
experienced players test very unusual situations while hunting for bugs or
strange gameplay quirks that might be worth mentioning.
Fwiw, Adom is probably my favorite of all of the Roguelikes, but I dearly
wish it was in more active development. There are some quirks to it that
really bug me (indeed, a few of which caused me to stop playing some years
ago). I was somewhat bummed there wasn't an updated version when I came back
again. I wound up using a handful of patches/front ends people had released
to tweak that behavior, and was happy playing that way. I hope the plans for
a small internal dev team go through. I can only hope it is apparent that
people are still very interested in the game - otherwise why would they go
to such effort to modify and create programs to work with your game?
Good to see you around btw ;)
Vladimir Panteleev
> Hi!
>
> "Marcus" <a...@afdslkj.com> wrote in message news:<j8SdnZRJlok...@adelphia.com>...
>> Some things are simply not apparent, and some
>> recent bugs only turned up after code diving turned up anamolies. Adom lacks
>> Nethack's Explore/Wizard mode, and if he doesn't want people hacking away at
>> it, it needs some other method of experimentation. Indeed, a similar feature
>> was mentioned long, long ago in concert with Adom Deluxe.
>
> Maybe a Wizard Mode might be worthwhile when/if more people get
> involved with the code. I never felt the need for a wizard mode, but
> you are right - maybe something like this is required for some
> experimentation? What would you think of? Just receive a wand of
> wishing with 5 charges and don't be able to enter the highscore? Or
> something more elaborate?
I don't think the wizard mode is needed at all. It is logical that
NetHack features a wizard (or debug) mode, because it is an open-source
rogue-like - and practically anybody can fix bugs or add features. With
the closed dev-team development model, the dev-team should be
responsible for finding/searching bugs. Allowing ordinary players to
cheat for means of research and not allowing to reverse-engineer the
code doesn't seem too logical to me.
As for cheating to make the game easier, I made a poll here and on the
Brinkster ADOM forums. Turns out, most people find save-scumming enough
to make the game easier for newbies.
However, if you meant a "wizard" mode that would help the dev-team to
debug the game, perhaps you could make use of AdomBot? It could save you
some effort - and I bet you can't beat its map editor with any possible
in-game interface! :D
Talking of AdomBot, what am I to do with it? I decided to shut down the
site until I get your decision on what can stay and what has to go.
Although it is (sadly) mostly used for cheating, it has some features
that can prove useful to some players. For example:
- a scripting language that communicates with ADOM by reading
its screen memory and sending keyboard keystrokes, complete
with debugger and limited WinAPI support;
(can this stay? can the scripts be allowed to access memory
locations other than the display memory?)
- a demo recorder;
- sounds, triggered by game messages (much like nhsound);
- a tool to automate save-scumming; (yeah, I know :) )
- take a plain text/HTML/ANSI/BB-code screenshot (in
yet-to-be-released v3.20);
- a Conway's Life simulator; (this one allows you to place
"walls", to simulate the dungeon layout)
- some more minor stuff.
Torrain
[on blocking save-scumming]
> The checks I was talking about would be about ten lines of code, and
> present in (some) other roguelikes. Since he has not implemented them,
> I'd say that he does not consider preventing save-scumming important.
For curiousity's sake; would those checks prevent restoring a game after
a crash (signal 291, cat on power bar, that kind of thing)?
Love and coffee,
Frances
Malte Helmert
No; the stuff I know basically checks if the current character is
already present in the high score. Crashes don't put the character into
the high score file, so they wouldn't be a problem.
Malte
Elmo
in which case you should update the high score (or something similar) on
the death event, before anything else to prevent sigkilling it (for
example Tome tells you the "last words" and waits for a prompt (that's the
chance to sigslaughter it (ok, I'll go be ashamed now)).
Elmo
yap yap yap!
work, does not make it illegal to do so. Microsoft would like it if
the Samba team would stop reverse engineering their software, It's not
going to happen.
It's a shame Thomas has gone back on his original promise to open
ADOM's sources. More power to those who delve into the code through
reverse engineering.
Malte Helmert
> Simply because Thomas does not want people to reverse engineer his
> work, does not make it illegal to do so. Microsoft would like it if
> the Samba team would stop reverse engineering their software, It's not
> going to happen.
It is illegal in all countries I checked, including, for example, the
USA and the members of the European Union. Please check this topic in
Google groups or read an up to date law text. It has been discussed at
great length several times.
Note that Samba was developed before these laws were introduced, and
that it is based in Australia. (I am not implying that reverse
engineering is still legal in Australia these days, though; I don't know.)
> It's a shame Thomas has gone back on his original promise to open
> ADOM's sources.
Maybe some people would prefer this to be different; maybe I am even one
of them. That is beside the point. Most people learn that they don't
always get what you want, because there are other human beings out there
who also have their own desires, wishes, and even rights. Knowledge of
that sort is achieved through a process called "growing up".
> More power to those who delve into the code through reverse
> engineering.
What *really* is a shame is that people like you don't respect the
feelings of somebody who put thousands of hours of work into a
magnificent game without getting a penny for it in return. Thomas gives
us ADOM as a gift, and you spit on him. Such egoism makes me sad.
Malte
Vladimir Panteleev
> Simply because Thomas does not want people to reverse engineer his
> work, does not make it illegal to do so
Yes it does. He can sue me any moment now.
Since the first days I started hacking at the ADOM binary, when I
started developing AdomBot, I was kind of expecting the one day when
Thomas would come and say "Stop it". That day came - and I was prepared
for it.
> Microsoft would like it if the Samba team would stop reverse
> engineering their software, It's not going to happen.
They're doing it to port the technology to other platforms. We were
(mostly) doing it to find secrets meant to be discovered by playing the
game, and creating cheating utilities. See the difference?
> It's a shame Thomas has gone back on his original promise to open
> ADOM's sources.
If all wishes were granted, many dreams would be destroyed.
> More power to those who delve into the code through reverse
> engineering.
More power to me?
Until that day, I wasn't really sure how would Thomas react to my
activities. I knew he was categorically against ADOM variants - and
that's why I never released a complete ADOM decompilation (although I
could). Now, I have the choice of either to spit in Thomas's face and
ignore his wishes (and thus become shunned by most of the ADOM
community), or to stop, and maybe have a chance to give a hand with ADOM
development.
I can still continue to reverse-engineer the code for myself. Nothing
can prevent me from doing that, as long as I don't share the results
with anybody.
More power to me, then. If you call this power.
frobnoid
> yap yap yap! wrote:
>> Simply because Thomas does not want people to reverse engineer his
>> work, does not make it illegal to do so. Microsoft would like it if
>> the Samba team would stop reverse engineering their software, It's not
>> going to happen.
>
> It is illegal in all countries I checked, including, for example, the
> USA and the members of the European Union. Please check this topic in
> Google groups or read an up to date law text. It has been discussed at
> great length several times.
Its not clean what "it" is in your first sentence, but neither Samba
development nor "reverse engineering" (which is distinct from
decompilation!) are currently illegal in the US.
The key difference here is that, in order to develop samba, one must
simply inspect the packets your system receives and sends. No
decompilation of microsoft provided code is necessary. Even agreeing to
the microsoft EULA isn't strictly necessary in order to do this (although
EULAs are still of questionable legality in the US [but courts do seem to
be leaning towards their enforcement]).
Reverse engineering isn't, per se, illegal in the US (observation of the
game is, technically, reverse engineering). Decompilation of the
executable clearly is, which is the technique in question with respect to
ADOM throughout this thread.
Malte Helmert
> On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 22:14:32 +0100, Malte Helmert wrote:
>
>
>>yap yap yap! wrote:
>>
>>>Simply because Thomas does not want people to reverse engineer his
>>>work, does not make it illegal to do so. Microsoft would like it if
>>>the Samba team would stop reverse engineering their software, It's not
>>>going to happen.
>>
>>It is illegal in all countries I checked, including, for example, the
>>USA and the members of the European Union. Please check this topic in
>>Google groups or read an up to date law text. It has been discussed at
>>great length several times.
>
> Its not clean what "it" is in your first sentence, but neither Samba
> development nor "reverse engineering" (which is distinct from
> decompilation!) are currently illegal in the US.
I should have said "decompilation". In Gemany, the word "reverse
engineering", when used in a Computer Science context, is usually meant
to denote decompilation, although I am aware that it is inexact.
However, I think that saying "reverse engineering" where "decompilation"
is meant, is not unusual in this context, so one must be careful in
interpreting this term. Take this text I was just reading as an example
(from http://www.jenkins-ip.com/serv/serv_6.htm):
"COMPUTER PROGRAMS
In the case of computer programs, the EU directive states (11) that the
ideas and principles underlying a program are not protected by
copyright, and that (12) logic, algorithms and programming languages may
to some extent comprise ideas and principles.
Analysis of the function of a program (but not decompilation (13))is
permitted under Article 5.3, if it is carried out by a licensed user in
the normal use of the program.
Reverse engineering is allowed under Article 6, but only for the single
purpose of producing an interoperable program (rather than a competing
program).
For this purpose, in addition to reverse engineering itself (i.e.
producing a high level version of the code) subsequent forward
engineering to produce the interoperable program is permitted.
However, the reverse engineer has to cross a host of formidable barriers
before he can make use of this right;
1. It must be indispensable to reverse engineer to obtain the
necessary information.
2. The reverse engineering has to be by a licensee or authorised user.
3. The necessary information must not already have been readily
available to those people.
4. Only the parts of the program necessary for interoperability
(i.e. the interfaces) can be reproduced.
5. The information generated by the reverse engineering cannot be
used for anything other than achieving interoperability of an
independently created program.
6. The information cannot be passed on to others except where
necessary for this purpose.
7. The information obtained cannot be used to make a competing
program (rather than just an interoperable one).
8. The "legitimate interests" of the copyright owner or "normal
exploitation" of the program must not be prejudice.
Thus, far from creating a general right to reverse engineer, these
provisions create only the smallest of openings for the reverse
engineer; they are intended for use only to defeat locked, confidential,
proprietary interfaces."
> The key difference here is that, in order to develop samba, one must
> simply inspect the packets your system receives and sends. No
> decompilation of microsoft provided code is necessary.
Yes, this is "black-box testing", and is certainly within legal bounds.
Now an expert on the Samba project would need to provide more details on
whether or not Samba exclusively relies on black-box testing. I googled
around here and there and mostly found uninformed ramblings.
Malte
frobnoid
>> The key difference here is that, in order to develop samba, one must
>> simply inspect the packets your system receives and sends. No
>> decompilation of microsoft provided code is necessary.
>
> Yes, this is "black-box testing", and is certainly within legal bounds.
> Now an expert on the Samba project would need to provide more details on
> whether or not Samba exclusively relies on black-box testing. I googled
> around here and there and mostly found uninformed ramblings.
Good point. I should have said that Samba development COULD be legal in
the US if done correctly. Samba's webpage was the best I could find:
http://us4.samba.org/samba/devel/
Although it, surprisingly, only mentions specific licensing with
microsoft, patents and copyright. Decompilation isn't mentioned
specifically at all.
I'd argue that inspecting processor state is just the same as inspecting
network state, but that argument doesn't hold up in the courts...
Does your job involve writing software?
Malte Helmert
> I'd argue that inspecting processor state is just the same as inspecting
> network state, but that argument doesn't hold up in the courts...
>
> Does your job involve writing software?
Yes, although it is not the main aspect. I am a computer science
researcher at university.
Incidentally, since we were talking about Samba, I read a few papers
co-authored by Andrew Tridgell of Samba fame as part of my research
work. However, this was in a completely different area: learning
algorithms for two-player games.
Malte
xhoch3
> On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 11:42:57 +0100, Malte Helmert wrote:
>
>>> The key difference here is that, in order to develop samba, one must
>>> simply inspect the packets your system receives and sends. No
>>> decompilation of microsoft provided code is necessary.
>>
>> Yes, this is "black-box testing", and is certainly within legal bounds.
>> Now an expert on the Samba project would need to provide more details on
>> whether or not Samba exclusively relies on black-box testing. I googled
>> around here and there and mostly found uninformed ramblings.
>
> Good point. I should have said that Samba development COULD be legal in
> the US if done correctly. Samba's webpage was the best I could find:
> http://us4.samba.org/samba/devel/
> Although it, surprisingly, only mentions specific licensing with
> microsoft, patents and copyright. Decompilation isn't mentioned
> specifically at all.
>
I found an interview with one of the developers of the samba project,
where he says that they don't disassemble windows, they just do 'Network
Reverse Engineering' (listening to the sent packages). It's the same with
other linux projects like the ntfs-driver.
Part of the article (only in German unfortunatly) published in c't 11/2002
c't: Ist ‘Reverse Engineering’ nicht rechtlich bedenklich?
Samba-Team: ’Reverse Engi-neering’ gilt als böses Wort. Wenn wir die
Software disassemblieren würden, dann gäbe es in manchen Ländern
rechtliche Probleme, in anderen nicht. Aber das tun wir ohnehin nicht. Wir
betreiben ‘Network Reverse Engineering’, das heißt, wir sehen uns das
Zusammenspiel an. Das ist wie das Erlernen einer neuen Sprache: Ein Land
besuchen, in einem Café sitzen und den Leuten zuhören - oh, sie sprechen
über Kaffee - und dann die Wörter einfach nachsprechen und schauen, ob sie
einen komisch ansehen. Das ist unsere Methode. Und niemand hat je in Frage
gestellt, dass es legal ist, auf diese Weise eine Sprache zu erlernen.
Summary:
c't asks whether there are any legal problems with reverse engineering and
the samba team answers that if they would disassemble any software there
would be problems, but they aren't. Then 'network reverse engineering' is
compared to learning a foreign language: Visit a country, sit in a
coffeehouse listen to your neighbours and figure out what they are talking
about, try to pronounce the same words and look how they react. It's out
of the question that this method of learning a language is illegal.
--