Kyzrati

The 450-Page TODO

Over the past couple weeks I've found myself on a new and important detour! (Surprised? Probably not :P)

I decided we'll do some feature voting here for Beta 15 (more on that later), and as I went through my incredibly lengthy primary TODO notes fishing for potential ideas to include in the list, I suddenly had the urge to do something I've never done before in Cogmind's decade-plus development history: a complete review of that document.

From 2013 to 2024, as of Beta 14's release...

-cubeBrawl

Many of you are probably familiar with the recent Botcube Brawl event hosted by Plexion and organized via Discord. I summarized the info here on the forums.

(art by Plexion)

There you'll also find a link to a recording of the event, and the results, but what I wanted to write about here today was th...

Multitile Actors, Revisited

Blog time! In order to put out Beta 14 as quickly as possible, while concentrating all my efforts on what was a very significant update that needed to happen at once, I kept the blog on hold despite having several topics I wanted to cover. Now that Beta 14 is complete, I've subsequently patched it six times, and also finished up compiling the 2024-09-03 08:01:32 +0000 UTC View Post

Cogmind Beta 14 Official

Beta 14 is done!*

*done means ostensibly done with no more balance or content changes, but if any annoying new bugs are discovered it could still be updated at the last minute if necessary, by all means avoiding any changes to the save format and therefore this version is now identical or nearly identical to what will be released publicly, hence it is now Beta 14!

2024-08-04 04:03:55 +0000 UTC View Post

>> faction = HD

As I mentioned in the primary announcement, wizard mode is back for the Beta 14 prerelease :)

As usual the latest key is attached to the How-to manual, the contents of which have also been updated to reflect the current state of the game in Beta 14. To summarize the changes...

• I filled in a few of the tags for robots...

  2024-07-27 14:10:25 +0000 UTC View Post

Beta 14 X2 Prelease: RC w/Wizardry

A longer wait than I had intended, but X2 is here! If you've been on Discord you'll know the main reason: I added more stuff, oops :P

In the wake of X1, most of the issues were either quickly hotfixed or resolved on my end and awaiting the final version update, I just wanted to wait about a week to see what else might pop up during playtesting. Well, during this wait, I decided to move some content from Beta 15 up to 14, and... like many neat ideas it kinda ballooned in scope. I had som...

Beta 14 X1 Prelease: *Actual* UFD

The UFD is here! Beta 13 was the original target for adding the UFD (new faction!), but as most of you know we were side tracked with the whole new mega UI update, which as it happens came at just the perfect time. Very glad for that, but also very glad to have finally completed the vast majority of our brand new faction.

This release actually comes over a month later than planned, but I inserted no less than four full weeks of yet more architecture work to help combat slowdown from the...

Side Quests!

Okay so I'm not adding a whole slew of side quests to Cogmind (YET), but I have been doing a bit of side questing of my own lately, using some extra time to work on a few, well, yeah side questable things. Always nice to have the occasional alternative short-term goal, or more unexpected possibilities arising from new encounters that make everything more interesting than a game of pure survival.

One of these involved what is now one of Cogmind's most complex encounters, involving only a...

The Features [Temporarily] Left Behind But Not Forgotten

There are some items on my still very long TODO list of potential features or changes for Cogmind which have always been inevitable, but myself being able to only work on one thing at a time, some of these items have continued to sit there, waiting their turn, in some cases year after year.

Some because they're simply not high priority (despite being desirable and I know they'll be implemented one day), others because they would require dedicating a sizeable chunk of time to complete, b...

Numbers Go Down

What goes up, must come down!

Things are finally settling down, at least on the outside, but I've been hard at work as ever, late nights and very full days, dealing with all sorts of stuff--design, optimization, debugging, tech support, keeping up with the community, trying to replace the freaking DRM-free store which got so old it apparently no longer supported a number of browser setups :/

That last bit was hopefully finalized today as I published the updated version of the Buy ...

Numbers Go Up

April has already been a very eventful Month.

If you hadn't heard by now, after exploring the depths of Cogmind and falling in love with it, DoshDoshington made a great video introducing it to his followers.

As a YouTuber perhaps best known for his Factorio videos (and games like it), his viewers naturally include a lot of nerds like ourselves, and the response to both the video, and Cogmi...

7DRL 2024 Reviews and Picks

As many of you likely know from reading my work (or even played it back then :P), Cogmind originated as a 7DRL in 2012, and the pretty good reception, combined with a concept so full of potential, were what convinced me to start turning it into something bigger the following year. Ever since then, each year I play and review 7DRLs, earlier on doing so in an official capacity, but in more recent years just picking those whi...

Preliminary Beta 13 UI Layout/Zooming Stats!

I just recently put out the Beta 12 stat analysis, which you can check out here if you hadn't heard about that yet.

But what I really want to share here today is that after compiling those stats, I couldn't resist the urge to also do a preliminary compilation of user preferences r...

Calling ME-RLN

As you may have noticed, there was no new wizard key for the Beta 13 final release--the same old key applies. Our next key will come out with the first Beta 14 prerelease, but in the meantime I have some other wizardry news to share...

As of Beta 13 we have some new features! 

Part way through working on those screenshots I talked about last time, I convinced myself to spend a little time adding fe...

The New Age of Cogmind [Screenshots]

WHEW. Well that was a week or three.

Last week was a very successful Beta 13 release, one which both surprised and made a lot of folks very happy, those who really needed the larger interface and/or map zooming capabilities, or those who wanted it but didn't realize before :)

I've definitely noticed more new players hanging around lately, so we'll see how this might affe...

Beta 13 Release Candidate

A long time in coming, and not quite what was expected, but Beta 13 is here :)

To really get the point across, this version is dubbed "Zoom All The Things," and this latest build should hopefully be the final one, to release next week Feb. 27 (my time).

Of course if any new issues pop up before then I'll be fixing them, but saves should remain compatible and this should ideally be more o...

Cogmind Phase 4 UI Complete?!

Hot on the tail of our X3 prerelease, it seems the majority of X4 is now also... done :)

X3 having been released a week late to give me a chance to stream it first, I did already have this past week as a head start on the remaining even more condensed 45-row UI layout option. This third layout is dubbed "Modal 45-row" since it...

Beta 13 X3 Prelease - 45-row UI Layout

The new layout is here! Allllll those mockups, and then some, are now a playable reality as first advertised in those demos from late January (and in a more recent wider announcement on Steam or the forums,...

Adventures in Map Zooming, Part 5: QoL

Back to map zooming again?!

Well for a while I had skipped away do the engine work I had in mind to support UI upscaling, and having proven that would be possible, I then still needed to get back to finishing the zoom feature, which wouldn't be very playable without the QoL features. Although I finished those and did eventually also stream the map zoom features and share them across a number of hours in a real run, the relevant article series wouldn't be complete with a nice wr...

It's happening! 45-row Layout in Action

So I've done a lot of writing about this new 45-row UI, and built a lot of the architecture to support it, but yes the actual work has to actually be done at some point, and that point started a couple weeks ago, with lots of good progress to show for it :D

Here's a screenshot of the 45-row UI layout in 1080p (all images/GIFs in this post were recorded at full size with 1080p, so open them to see that):

2024-01-27 05:22:49 +0000 UTC View Post

Full UI Upscaling, Part 4: Simpler Lightweight Fonts

The series continues! Part 4 is another about new architecture in support of all the recent interface work, which I've just begun in earnest this week. I've been intermittently sharing GIFs on Discord to give glimpses of progress, but so far they're all just random quick recordings as I build the new layout--I'll be recording some proper demos to share with you all later.

Like so far we've got the modal inventory window behavior:

2024-01-19 05:35:36 +0000 UTC View Post

Full UI Upscaling, Part 3: Dynamic Terminal Swapping

That imminent REXPaint release I talked about last time came out this week. It was nice to get that out there for all the users, but it also reminded me of all the cool features I still want to build for it one day... I've had this idea that it could be an even cooler roguelike scene creator with built-in FOV and area lighting functionality, layer blending, and layer masking for obstruction and...

REXPaint 1.7 imminent + Full UI Upscaling, Part 2: Holy Mockups!

Whew, as of today I've finished a ton of writing, including many new articles to put out over the coming weeks detailing everything I've been working on as I get ready to transition to actually building the new UI layout itself. I started a series on that this week, the first part of which you can check out here. The core of that content was covered last year on Patr...

Beta 13 X2 Prelease - MAP ZOOM

Well this was quite the detour! Sorry for the delay, and especially that we were really supposed to be getting new content sooner here, but this turned out to be a mega QoL release instead...

While I'm not sure how many of our existing frequent players will benefit from or take advantage of the new map zooming feature in particular, considering that many are used to what we've had for years, I imagine as we head in this direction we'll be seeing lots of new and returning players as Cogm...

Adventures in Map Zoom... Animation?

Towards the end of the map zooming work I couldn't help but take advantage of the opportunity for a new animation to test out a lot of possible concepts. Like dozens and dozens of them :P

I felt there was a lot of potential in animating an upscale through some combination of modifications to the four map cells making up a single oct, so started by creating a temporary layer that duplicated the tile contents in a 2x2 layout matching the eventual oct locations.

2023-12-07 03:35:28 +0000 UTC View Post

Interface Crossroads: Designing for Larger Text

With map zooming complete, the next step on my list was to work on QoL to make it actually more feasible to play like that. Zooming is great, but if you're always zoomed in, there's a lot you can't see, and that's a big problem. So naturally that's the next challenge I was planning to tackle, but...

Honestly I don't think too many people will benefit from map zoom, and feel that releasing it with just that feature, even with supporting QoL, has several negative impacts. It make...

Adventures in Map Zooming

Time to get serious! Last week I told you about my engine upgrade and the new "quads;" now to put them to use :D

I started this process a few days before writing to you about those engine changes, and am happy to report that after about a week of work, map zooming is now complete.

It was a hell of a busy week, to be sure, working late nights as well, plus 20 hours over last weekend alone xD (al...

Beta Release Schedule Shakeup

My latest post about map zooming has gotten me into a new mindset...

Part of why I've had no idea when Beta 13 will be released is that despite all the work that's already gone into it, I've yet to nail down how much the final version will include. And I'm not talking about minor inconsequential features, just big stuff like there's another map after Scraptown, and more significant related events. After all, ...

OMG Actual Map Zooming in Cogmind

Taking a different tack from last time, I decided that it would be worth getting really dirty with low-level engine work for the next attempt at map zooming. One of the main reasons we'd need to go this route if there's ever to be hope of reasonable performance in software mode: Dirty rects. If we play by the engine rules we get to keep that functionality in its existing simple package, which generally means massiv...

Feature Experiment: Map Zooming

Oh no, I've been sidetracked again xD

A few years back I introduced an experiment to demonstrate a potential "overmap" implementation that still obeys the rules of the terminal interface. What about the opposite--a way to zoom the map itself? Obviously this would be intended for a completely different purpose, addressing one of the more common complai...