Been super busy for the past year but may be looking at a lot of extra free time this winter so thought I pop in to see how the old ACK community is doing.

So great to see a new patch from rld! And he even found time to work on enemy AOE attacks as well! Not sure what I'll be doing this time around if and when I get extra time to work on ACK related stuff but I have stockpiled a lot of good inspiration for something.

And I plan to stick by the golden rule of keep it simple stupid and keep my end goals realistic and attainable, i.e. no super mega uber prodigious magnum opus projects. Short and sweet shall be my new motto. or "good things come in small packages" or "its not the size that matters but what you do with it" or something along those lines.

I shall draw encouragement from the fact that in the real world miniaturization seems to go hand in hand with technological advancement. Think Miami Vice and those mobile phones as big as your head compared to today's realtively tiny cell phones. And ofcourse computers started out filling a large room and now we have super slim notebook PCs.

Come to think of it, same thing with the progression of life on the planet. From epic sized dinosaurs down to pretty F'n big megafauna down to the relatively tiny fauna of today.

I think I found a bug with weapons that might be related to this update 0.9.
I had a magic key that unlocks magic doors.
The key attacks the door with a weapon only used for the key, or used with the spell equivalent.
When the door gets attacked "by this weapon" , it is replaced by a new door that is passable.
But when I use the key now, it gives a message "No Weapon"
This was working recently. The only change to the doors key
has been the update.

UPDATE: I was wrong. It works fine. Sorry. The weapon number had changed and forgot to update it with the key. Again very sorry.

This is super news thank so much rld
You are awesome!!!

Working on the next patch release, and since I think I
have a couple of bugs fixed here it is for someone bold
to try out:

[url]http://www.80sgaming.org/ack_files/ack_patch_09_alpha.zip[/url]

Bugs which are (hopefully) fixed in this patch are:

Creatures Blocked by Opaque/Lightsource Tiles: Previously
creatures were unable to walk on spaces (even if they should
have been passable) that were set to opaque or lightsource
mode. This should be fixed in both world and room maps.

Creatures Shooting Cone weapons:
This should be fixed in world maps; waiting to see if I broke
anything else before porting it to the room map module.
Fixed the bug that made creatures shoot cone weapons in
randomish directions; creatures should now target their
cone weapons correctly. Also, for cone weapons, there
was an issue with the same square(s) getting pounded
multiple times during the attack; fixed this so now each
square should only be hit once. This should also hopefully
fix stream weapons since they use the same code, but
I haven't tried it.

Additional note on creatures shooting cone weapons:
their targeting is a bit smarter than the player, so they
can fire their cone weapons diagonally if need be. The
range calculation is still a bit off, so players right at the
edge of range may not cause a creature to fire in some
instances where the cone pattern would actually hit the
player, because the creature believes the player is out of
range.

Anyway, give it a try and let me know what you think.