I've actually taken two other stabs at writing this Illumination newsletter.
Stab One: An overambitious attempt at relating the DROD community to the rise and fall of BBSs and Usenet. I realized that in order to pull that off, I'd have to write about ten pages of farfetchedness. Guaranteed boredom for everyone not interested in electronic bulletin board systems and distributed messaging hierarchies.
Stab Two: A cryptically preachy thing about how people should resist the urge to be cynical and malicious when participating in an online community (like the Caravel Forum).
Yeck. I need to slap the cheeks a bit and get my head straight here. The danger is in taking the Caravel Forum too seriously. It's not the Roman Empire, after all. It's a place where people come and talk about DROD and other geeky things. We've been blessed with a well-above-average selection of forumites due mostly to the fact that they are DROD players, and DROD requires patience and intelligence from its players. It remains one of the best game-related forums around. Offhand, I can only think of a few other game communities where I've seen the same level of maturity and constructiveness.
There's about 3,000 people that this message will go to. A lot of them have never even been on the Caravel Forum. I would like to try a little recuiting here for the folks that haven't really seen the forum or know what it is. Let me explain briefly why you might want to tune into it:
* You can get hints for DROD with the forum. That's how most people stumble upon it. Any room that is at least a slightly difficult probably already has some hints written for it. If it doesn't, you can ask questions and expect solid answers coming back.
* If you want to talk about DROD, (i.e. what you like/hate about it, what should be in new releases, how it affects your love life) there is no better place to do it.
* If you want to talk things other than DROD, people here are well-rounded enough to have a conversation about just about anything: Harry Potter, vacationing in Germany, meteor strikes, Avril Lavigne, air conditioner installation, or non-deterministic polynomials. (All real examples from the past. See the Topic Picks further below for what is being talked about now.)
* People stay on the forum for years. So you can get to know them, and they can get to know you. When you invest time with people, it's good to have them stick around.
* All forum content is scrupulously monitored by a team of moderators. We get spam and other disturbances like every other forum, but on our forum it is quickly taken care of. A large amount of effort, both social and technical, has been put into keeping the forum clean and... I want to say "
safe"
. Nothing is really safe, if you think about it, but this isn't a bad place to let a kid hang out.
* We've got contests and games happening all the time. Several are running right now, and an official contest with real prizes and incentives to win starts every month.
* The forum was engineered to allow sharing of media such as music, artwork, writing, or voice recordings on the author's terms. We want you to create things and share them, so there is built-in support for licensing under public domain, Creative Commons, or all rights reserved. We have a group of people who are dedicated to promoting "
Grand Constructions"
(creative works) on the forum.
* Don't worry--the forum is free. You just browse to
http://forum.caravelgames.com to start reading and writing messages with your Caravellian comrades.
The Stupid Patch Already
There's a lot that is sitting behind the completion of one task: release of the patch for
DROD: The City Beneath. When the patch is done, we print CDs for
The City Beneath and offer deluxe box sets. When the patch is done, we contact publishers, portals, and affiliates to get them to carry
The City Beneath. When the patch is done, we start going after game magazines and websites to review
The City Beneath. When the patch is done, Mike and I will breathe a sigh of relief so hard that our deflated lungs will crumple to a pair of singular points.
Anybody else put a Google Alert on "
The City Beneath"
? I keep getting all these prosey references and travel guide blurbs, i.e. "
Gripping the balcony rail, I cast a final gaze upon the city beneath, my precious Islamabad."
We will fix this. After the marketing begins, it's going to be "
Google News Alert for: 'the city beneath'. This game YOU MUST PLAY BEFORE YOU DIE! Mike Rimer is a frigging genius!"
Trust me. We, literally, have not even started. You will be completely done playing through
The City Beneath, and then you're going to hear all this hullaballoo from the newcomers. Then you can be smugly irritated about it if you want.
But first we have to get the stupid patch out. As I write this, the official bar estimate is 99.5% done, and there is one bug left to fix. (No pressure, Schep!!!!!!!!!!!)
TFMurphy's Law
There's a guy on the forum, TFMurphy, that has been amazingly helpful in testing and writing code for the above-mentioned patch. He has spent many, many hours thinking about bugs and how they might be fixed. Looking through the record of his work that is kept on a private message board, I see just one example where he helped with an issue by reproducing a difficult bug found by someone else (JBluestein), clarified the steps needed to reproduce the bug, analyzed the source code causing the bug, posted his suggested changes, and gave the results of further testing after his changes were made. Did your eyes glaze over there? This is the kind of hard work that real bugfixing requires. It is considered by most programmers the least appealing task they are given. TFMurphy dug in deep and really helped us out.
We have a tradition here of awarding a prize to people that do things without asking for anything in return. It is to offset the world's natural bias of giving stuff to people that ask for it. The winner of this month's "
Don't Ask"
award is TFMurphy. He gets 100 rank points and can apply a nickname of his choosing to the 3.1 patch for
DROD: The City Beneath. He could call it "
Quiet Desperation"
or "
Blue Steel"
or "
Old Chompybits"
or whatever. When we update different pages on our website related to the patch, we'll note the chosen nickname.
Invisibility Contest
Calamarain, rising star and the people's darling, has organized our official contest for September. It's just barely begun, so yes, you can get in on it now! Basically, you've got to make a DROD room that follows certain interesting constraints.
Thankfully, the contest itself is not invisible. That's why, after reading this announcement, you will be able to follow the link below and see a full description of what it's all about.
Contest details
Tim's Topic Picks
Tim reads every message posted on the Caravel Forum. He knows that you will not be able to do the same since you are not Tim. That's why he came up with a list of what he feels are the more promising topics to take a look at:
New Windows 3.1 Beta version released
A new version of TCB has been in public beta. If you want to play it now,
and want to make comments, be my guest! To upgrade, please back up your old
TCB version first, then export your player file, and import this player
file into the new version. The official version right now is still 3.0.0 for the full version of TCB.
This mean that you might experience incompatibilities with holds created in
3.0.0.
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=15530
Hold Converter
Stefan has released a program that can convert holds made in 3.0.2 or 3.1
into 3.0.0, so that we can all play the holds. Most of the current holds
are presented in 3.0.0, but if you need them converted you can use this
utility.
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=15931
The Secret of the Slayer, Troshian Tower, An Architects Audition, A Mini
Adventure!, The Mining Business, The Forbidden Fortress, Perfect Chaos,
Magic Show 2, Album, The Long Quest, Part 1: A mysterious threat emerges!
These are the holds released since the last Illumination. If you haven't
noticed, most of them already use the new 3.0.0 engine. Most of them are
being rated very high, but there are also easy hold with good scores.
Please note that when 3.1 is released, some of these holds will have some
modifications to them; they might change some of your highscores if you
care about them.
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewboard.php?BoardID=11 or
The Old Webmaster is gone, long live the New Webmaster!
Patrick Fisher (Gamer_Extreme_101) has stepped down as Chief Editor of the
website. Instead, this new guy Matthew Curtis (Ezlo) has taken over as the
new Chief Editor. Good luck on him!
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=17244
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=17245&page=1#200612
Architect's Block?
For everyone who thinks (s)he is a really good architect, but can't think
of any ideas for a room, Calamarain made a "
DROD Idea Generator"
, which is
supposed to generate some sentences to give you a challenge to create
rooms. You might want to try it.
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=17100
Subforums update: A Tale of Two Kingdoms v1.2 and Wonderquest Dreams beta 4.03
The latest patch for A Tale of Two Kingdoms is version 1.2 and a link can
be found from our Forum.
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=16800&page=1#201896
Wonderquest Dreams is reaching beta version 4.03 and can be found in this
thread:
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=16387
I need a doctor right now!
No additional comment needed, just read it!
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=6448&page=0#202087
I am hoping hard that are mail delivery software don't dump 10 duplicates of this message on people again. I think we got that fixed, but it's still possible it happens again. If it does, then we will lose more subscribers, I will feel really bad, and I will go back to work on fixing it.
-Erik
____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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[Last edited by mrimer at 05-18-2008 05:38 AM]
Disclaimer: I'm Welsh, left-handed, and stupid. 
/dy
, because everybody uses 
May all your smiting sessions be succesful and all you holds high-rated(that is, when you take a break from being the, oh, so helpful guy you are(assuming you are a man, of course, thing of which I'm not so sure, since your name is usually used for females where I come from)).
Mmmm... fire.
.
