Curse of the Azure Bonds - build 1.0.21

Build 1.0.21 has been released. Fixed in this version:

  • Issue 36, Fixed staff-sling weapon targeting
  • Issue 44, Fixed the modify player screen so edits to exceptional strength stay
  • Issue 45, Fixed the Order menu (found off Encamp, Alter), so you can select and place the party members
  • Issue 46, Fixed horizontal menu scroll via comma and dot keys

I also reworked how the combat engine builds target lists, and intend to change it to an A* system, but at this point it is a direct path cost based system, so I added a caching layer, and when all graphic’s and sounds turned off (non commented change) the combat is over in sub-second.

To do this  I hacked the game apart to dynamically turn graphics/sound/delays off, and then used the Red Gate Ant Performance Profiler to find the overworked code and it worked really well. I cheated and just used their 14-day trail version. But I did provide some feedback, and it has some really nice features like the ability to zoom to parts of the run history, and give guidance on hotspots, and you can drill down and see the code related to the CPU time. Check it out if your application is running a little slow.

As always, give the newer version a try, if you find any issues, even “old known” issues, let me know by: commenting here, email me directly, or add them to the issue list

Comments:

dreadwinaard 2009-12-18 15:32:04

Has it been a year already?

I’ll have some more time soon to get back into Curse of the Azure bonds. Great to see that you’ve still been improving it.


Simeon 2009-12-19 15:10:48

Hi Paul,

Well it’s been one and three quarters years since your first comment on 1st March 2008, but yes it has been some time. I’ve been focused on non-game things for the last month or two with the pending move to the USA. I may get sometime to spend working on the game over Christmas break. I’ve just purchased a iPod Touch so have been thinking about porting the game to that system.


Ayhan Kara 2009-12-23 10:59:17

Hi,

I am a big fan of the old goldbox AD&D games. I really appreciate your efforts.

I was wondering, if there is any way, that I can remove the party size cap in the gold box games.
I would really like to play with more than just 6 PC and 2 NPC.
It has nothing to do with game difficulty, I just like to play with big parties.
I have been searching the Internet, and noone seems to have figured out how to remove/alter the party size cap. Do you know how to do that?


Simeon 2009-12-23 11:15:00

In the original DOS ports it’s not possible, the value 6 (total PCs) and 8 (total party size) are hard coded throughout the code. Well actaully less-than-equal 7…

Also the display code for the part list in non-combat screen does not have the space to fit a larger team, you could manage this with a paged/scrolling list as per shop code.

The port could be made to handle this. As the UI code is open to early rewrite, but I have no plan to support this in the near term. Interesting idea. The code is just a giant control loop so does not care how many players there are (as long as total monster size is less than 255 currently)


Ken 2010-04-30 18:06:42

Loved these games, back in the day and played them on my Commodore 128 (I can remember getting up to make a sandwich while the game loaded from 5 1/4” floppies).

Now my kids are playing D&D and I was going to show them this game. I downloaded it at work on Windows running XP with no problem and thought “This is great!” I got home, though, and tried running it on my computer there (Vista), and I just get an error that says “MainUI has stopped working”.

Doh!

I’ve got .Net Framework 3.5 SP1. Any ideas?

By the way, these games did an awesome job of transferring the AD&D experience to the computer. Keeping it alive in C++ is very cool and well appreciated.


Simeon 2010-05-01 02:49:26

I’m sorry that is does not work on Vista, I still only have XP on my development machine…

If your very keen, you can download DOSbox, and then find the original PC Dos version, and play it in the emulator.


Ken 2010-05-01 04:01:15

No apologies needed. It’s a great game, and you did some good work. I considered running it in an emulator, but I thought I’d see if there was another solution, first.

Thanks again!


Simeon 2010-05-07 02:20:07

Try build 1.1.0, it now runs under Vista