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SIGGRAPH Sunday August 3rd, 2008 14:52:23 EDT

Well, I'm off to Los Angeles for SIGGRAPH '08 next Sunday. Fortunately, I have just released a new version so I won't have to use it as an excuse for any delays. Any also at Siggraph are welcome to send me a message. My schedule can be rather hectic, but I can always find time for POWDER players. If you are wondering how you can contact me, I recommend reading to the end of the README.TXT that ships with POWDER.

Congratulations to the PAX 10 Sunday August 3rd, 2008 14:10:32 EDT

Penny Arcade has announced the PAX 10, ten indie games that will be show cased at PAX. The list is here. As it happens, POWDER was submitted to the contest, which means those ten were found superior to POWDER. I encourage you to give them a try! POWDER lovers can take some consolation in the wide range of genres judged in the PAX 10 contest, I really would not want to be one of the judges faced with selecting between such a variety of games. What makes this newsworthy is that my submission was not a mere download link. No, I did not want the excuse of believing that POWDER was unfairly judged by the Mac build ("Too pixellated!"). I went the extra step and submitted an actual cartridge! So, without further ado, here are pics of the ultra-rare POWDER cartridge! Before you inquire, only one such cartridges has been made and I no longer have it.

Japan Sun April 13th, 2008 7:51:11 EDT

I find myself in Tokyo, Japan until Friday. Any POWDER players in the vicinity are welcome to contact me and we can try and arrange a meeting. After Friday the POWDER tour continues to Kobe.

Still Yet Another 7DRL Complete! Saturday April 5th, 2008 19:58:52 EDT

Two points to announce. I managed to write another roguelike in 168 hours! Woohoo! The Seven Day Roguelike Playing week is on us! This is the time to actually play the large number of roguelikes that were created this year and post mini-reviews and bug reports to rec.games.roguelike.misc. Don't worry, POWDER is still being worked on. Check it out at: http://www.zincland.com/7drl/fatherhood

Five Years of Development! Tuesday January 22nd, 2008 20:08:53 EDT

According to my records, this marks five years since I first touched main.cpp in my POWDER baseline! I've managed to break my dismal prediction of three years to 100 by reaching that goal on my fifth anniversary!

Be careful what you wish for... Tuesday January 22nd, 2008 19:53:21 EDT

I thought I was going to be able to post an ascension in 099. However, my own cleverness got the better of me. The uniquely named Orange had reached the dimensional portal. He was faring very well. A strange paucity of dig wands had been made up for with an unending pile of polymorph wands. Polypiling rings and the Identify spell led me to having one of every type of ring, including polymorph control. I then made my first mistake: I decided to be clever and polymorph myself before entering the dimensional portal. Equip ring of polymorph control. Zap self with polymorph wand. I turn into a slug. Oh. It seems I grabbed the ring of polymorph by accident, not polymorph control! No problem, I figure. I swap on the polymorph control ring and get ready to convert to my chosen form. I then made my second mistake. While I was in my slug form, some enemies had started to surround me. I figured I'd clean them up first so I can enter the portal without any followers. So, I decided to first polymorph into something really powerful. Scrolling through the list vanquished foes, I thought I found the perfect form: Living Frost. All of my equipment falls to the ground. Living Frost's don't have any inventory slots. No problem, I'll just random poly until I'm in a form that does. I quickly clean up the pesky creatures with my frost attack, ignoring their puny attempts to damage me (resist physical damage is nice). Now it is just me and the portal. Time to poly into something with a ring slot. I zap the wand. "You shudder." I then realize the horrible truth. In addition to all of the super-cool intrinsics, like resist physical, resist cold, etc, Living Frosts also have unchanging. My new form is permanent. Life as a Living Frost gets old quick. First, they are not smart. So walking into doors doesn't open them - you have to use the Open command. Even worse, they are so weak that they can't even open doors in this manner! I had to quaff my supply of mana potions to get enough magic points to be able to cast Knock to make my way forward. Still, not one to give up, I soldier on. Surrounded most of the time, I slowly bash my way forward. My only weakness is fire so I run at the sight of fire elementals. Eventually, I get to level 25 and come face to face with Beezlbub! He casts fireball. I die. Let this be a lesson to other adventurers. Some forms are not as good as others!

Website Changes Saturday January 5h, 2008 20:51:02 EDT

Those who have become accustomed to the iconic red, black, and white look of this website may be dismayed to see these recent changes. Before you complain, please consult your optic nerve, as it has been sending me angry emails for years now. It is always a dangerous thing playing around with one's website change. While maintaining The Actively Developing Roguelike List I get a semi-monthly look at all too many end-stage websites. All too often the final message from a roguelike author is: "I hope you like the website's new look!" However, I have confidence in confidence and confidence in me, so I shall charge ahead and change the website, thumbing my nose at fate.

SPAM Thursday November 15th, 2007 30:13:43 EDT

Late last week I noticed that I didn't receive an external email. I found out about it when another person replied and CCed me. I thought it was some weird mail bug issue. Today, I noticed that in a mailing list I am on I was only getting one half of the conversation. Some research provided the answer. It seems that upstream from my mail machine Spam Assassin was installed. This was done year(s?) ago and left me with a blissfully clean email feed. Unfortunately, I never bothered to check the spam basket to monitor its progress, naively treating it as a black box. Any AI researcher will tell you that the hardest thing in setting up learning sets is avoiding the system finding some trivial solution to the problem. Every complex problem has a simple and obvious solution that is wrong, after al. In this case, miscategorized real messages slowly polluted the learning set until the system decided ALL email was spam. One would think I'd notice this immediately. Unfortunately, the system does have white lists that cover 99% of my normal email, so it was largely business as usual with just some strange hiccups. So, why is this in the POWDER news section? The contact address I give is routed through this system. Which means if you emailed me and I didn't reply it is likely because it was eaten by Spam Assassin. Please re-send any such email. I am now dutifully reading the spam box to rescue any messages.

SIGGRAPH Thu August 2nd, 2007 21:16:37 EDT

Well, I'm off to San Diego for SIGGRAPH '07 on Sunday. This will delay the 088 update, which might be a good thing as I'm reworking the tile management system so likely should take some time to do it right. Any also at Siggraph are welcome to send me a message. My schedule is rather hectic, but I can always find time for POWDER players.