Cur time: Sat Jan 10 20:04:16 1998

Delver is the "next great role playing game engine", with Cythera being the first scenerio to utilize this engine. Here is a list of tenative features:

• Background music

• Stereo Sound - the sound of a fountain moves as you move.

• Main view similar to Ultima 6 (everything is layed out on a grid of icons, but objects can take up more than one square, overlapping other squares, animated tiles - both color table animation (for things like flames) as well as real animations (for things like clocks, flags), etc...)

• "One Finger Interface" - everything (except for typing in words in conversations) is done with the mouse, and no modifier keys required. All the basics are handled by click (to look at something), double click (to use, open, close, talk, attack, etc... as appropriate), and click and drag (to move things on the ground, between inventory, between inventory and worn/weilded, to move the current player, etc...), and finally click and hold to bring up a context specific menu to make it easier to attack things that you normally just want to use (for example, this is how you break down a locked door). Basically an interface that is Mac-like, not your typical 80's PC game.

• Extensive use of multiple windows - openning a chest will show the chest in a chest shaped window, with its contents in a list (which you can pick up by dragging them to your player's inventory). If you have a large screen, you can spread out your windows to take advantage of it (but it plays in 640x480 fine).

• Extremely "manipulable" world - you can push chairs around, throw wine bottle (breaking them), mirrors show a reflection when you walk in front of them, candles can be lit (brightening a dark room)

• Up to eight characters in your party

• Support for multiple fantasy languages, including ones that use different fonts (and if you understand them, a translation will appear).

• Conversations can include more than one character, combines both clickable keywords as well as a text edit box for typing your own where appropriate.

• Over 2000 tiles, up to 1000 objects, 255 unique characters, 255 levels up to 1024x1024 each with 16,000 objects (obviously few of these limits will ever be hit in any given scenario, since the resulting game would not only take years to make (try laying out over 1 million tiles by hand), but would take hundreds of megabytes of storage...)

• Diffferent things happen at different times of day

• A whole bunch more cool stuff

***New***

Here are some very preliminary screenshots of the renderer. This first picture is an outdoors shot, with mountains and a river flowing past.

Here's the inside of the main keep in Cademia, complete with bed, throne, tables, etc... - a much more interesting picture.

Still images don't show off the really cool things (for example, if you take a step to the west in the second shot, the room to the right dissappears, and the walls on the corner change shape to just wrap around what you can see).

Disclaimers:

1. No I don't need beta testers

2. Everything is subject to change - even the name

3. I'm hoping to release it before the end of the year (the engine is about 90% done, but the scenario is only around 10%-15%)

4. It currently needs 8 megs of free memory to run, and it runs well on both PowerPC and 68K Macs (although the PowerPC version has better lighting effects, and is obviously faster.

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