Well it's that time of year again. It hardly seems like a full year since we last wished all our readers a very Merry Christmas. Yet again, most of you are probably too busy downing the bottle of whatever-it-is that you found in the back of the cupboard, and stuffing yourself with mince pies to notice this post, but I'm still going to say it anyway.
 
Merry Christmas to all our readers, and we hope you have a wonderful new year - whatever you're doing and however you're celebrating.
 
Links:
Christmas (Wikipedia)
 

Hugh Robinson has contacted us to let us know that he's converted classic Acorn platformer Asylum to C, using the SDL library. With full support of original author Andy Southgate, Hugh's source code has now been released under the GPL, and is available to download from the SVN repository on the SourceForge project page.
 
Although a quick look at the source suggests to me that it's fully converted, there are still some bugs and compatability issues to sort out, so feel free to send any fixes Hugh's way if you manage to get the game running. Although the source to Asylum has been available on asylum.acornarcade.com for a few years now, this is the first known port of it to any other platform (and could potentially form the basis of a back-port to RISC OS, to produce a fully 32bit compatible version).
 

I figured it was about time for another oldschool review. This time I'll be talking about LASER, a game written by Mike Goldberg (and his cat) as part of his series of graphics programming articles in Acorn Computing magazine. The game was released on the subscription disc for the February 1994 issue of the magazine, along with a level editor so users could make their own puzzles.
 
 

Previously, on Bob and Trev: Resurrection...

Game over, man
 
The competition is nearly at an end, which can only mean one thing - tomorrow's article will be the conclusion, and will (hopefully!) feature a copy of the game to download.

...and here it is.
 
 

Previously, on Bob and Trev: Resurrection...

Next time I'll be talking about monster AI. I'm not going to be creating an Einstein, but I will be able to talk about a few of the basic features I'm hoping to implement.

But before I talk about monster AI, I might as well take the time out to talk about the time system that the game will use. Also, I don't have much other material for this article.
 
 

Previously, on Bob and Trev: Resurrection...

Next time I will be tackling combat. Having never written a roguelike combat system before, it will be an interesting exercise in deciding how mechanics such as strength and armour class will work, and attempting to get the numbers right first-time to reduce the amount of balancing required.

Forsight, there.
 
Combat is an important aspect of all roguelikes. But having never looked at a roguelike combat engine in detail before, I don't really know much about how they work. Monsters have strength, dexterity, and armour class attributes, but how do those translate into how hard the monster hits with a weapon?
 
Note that a lot of the values and equations presented in this article aren't set in stone yet, and will require tweaking during play-testing. But hopefully I'll be able to shed some light on the different aspects of combat, and the thought processes involved in creating a balanced combat system.
 
 

Previously, on Bob and Trev: Resurrection...

...

Yeah, looks like I forgot to write anything to lead onto this article.

Anyhoo, this article will be discussing visibility and pathfinding. Both are important aspects of many roguelikes, and both have some important implementation issues to try and overcome. Line-of-sight algorithms are a popular topic on rgrd - right now I can see two threads talking about LOS algorithms, and know of at least one other that talks about them.