[Captain Vimes]

Has anyone else played this game? It's awesome! I found it while searching the project database here, but when I went to find it again, it wasn't there so I can't post a link to it and I don't know who made it. Anyone have a clue? Because I was going to review this game but now I can't find it...

DEADCOLD FANS UNITE!
_________________
"Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than to curse the darkness."
- Terry Pratchett

[Terry]

I found a roguelike on google called DeadCold. Is this it?

DeadCold Roguelike
_________________
http://www.distractionware.com

[Captain Vimes]

Yeah, that's it. Download NAO. You must play this game!!!

Basically, the entire world is made of ASCII text (you are represented by a green @, the floor is a bunch of blue ., the monsters are different colored letters, etc.). The storyline of the game changes (I think it's determined by a random number generator), but basically you are on a space station called DeadCold where funerary rites for various alien races were performed. The lights are out, there are bloodstains on the floor and walls, there's no sign of any other human life, and your ship's computer is crashed.

Some things:

- Open the .cfg file before you play and add the word SafeMode to the end of the file. If you don't your file will be erased with every game over.

- The controls are really funky at first, but you quickly figure them out. Type ? for information on the controls.

- Conserve your ammunition. Ammunition is worth its weight in gold on DeadCold. Polyps are pretty much immune to anything but gunshots, and you'll want to keep your distance from the zombies that appear later in the game.

- No matter how many monsters are in the rooms with floors made of %s, always run in and grab as many of the items on the floor as possible. Keep on the lookout for Security Drones, because there is no way to tell the difference between them and peaceful Maintenance Bots without typing / to examine them.

- No matter what you have read in comics, HOLY WATER DOES NOT KILL ZOMBIES. I don't know what it does.

- When you find a room that is only a space big and has an item in it, don't go in. Unless you wanna get lasered. Search like hell until you find the trap, and then disable it. Then you can get the item.

Your briefing is complete. Join my newly-founded cult of DeadCold fans!
_________________
"Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than to curse the darkness."
- Terry Pratchett

[tunginobi]

Joseph Hewitt works on the GearHead universe nowadays. GearHead has a project entry here, and GearHead 2 is in the works right now. (http://gearhead.roguelikedevelopment.org/)

As for Dead Cold, I keep modifying it to compile under FPC in Linux, and giving it a circular field-of-view, and then I keep forgetting to save my modifications when I inevitably lose track of the game and have to redownload it.

[tunginobi]

DeadCold source (2007-02-13) (153 KB ZIP archive)

Not a permanent link. I really posted it for Joseph's benefit here, but I figured I may as well share it at this place as well.

Features and changes:

• Various changes to make compilation/play in Linux easier.
  
• Changed the field of view to be circular instead of square.
  
• Made the Sentry Bot LightRed instead of the same colour as Maintenance Bots.
  
• Allowed ESC to cancel repeat (.) commands.
  
• Repeat movement now stops at doors and revealed hatches.
  
• Disabled cheats in not-SafeMode.
  
• Quitting in not-SafeMode automatically saves the game, like how GearHead saves the game between scenes. Makes the game more challenging.
  
• Fixed scrolling so distance before recentreing is no longer off by one. Doubled the recentre distance for the X axis (from 3 to 6).
  
• Critical failing to disarm traps will now tell the player they stumbled into the trap, rather than just doing it silently.
  

Install Free Pascal. On Linux, just type 'make' and everything is handled for you, and then run './deadcold.sh' in a terminal like xterm.

On Windows, once you have Free Pascal set up, you could probably type this in the CLI:

[Captain Vimes]

Sweet. Looks good. But one of the major issues I have with DeadCold is that you get hungry every 30 seconds. Has this been fixed too? And what exactly are the consequences of not eating?

Ammo is also too hard to find. Even if you find ammo, you don't know what gun it matches with. Each gun should tell you what kind of ammo it uses (like the Khan Heavy Pistol - WTF does it use for ammo?!).
_________________
"Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than to curse the darkness."
- Terry Pratchett

[tunginobi]

If you stay hungry for too long, your max HP will slowly fall. So early in the game, you want to cover a lot of ground without backtracking. Finding your first store room is essential. If you find a lot of food, you can eat several things at once when you get the hunger message. It's the norm for me to eat 5 hard biscuits at once, or 2 canned cream soups, or 3 bananas.

The Khan heavy pistol uses 12-gauge shells.

According to the source, there are six different calibers, numbered as so:

1. CAL_5mm
   
2. CAL_8mm
   
3. CAL_12mm
   
4. CAL_25mm
   
5. CAL_Energy
   
6. CAL_Napalm
   

Myself? I enjoy the discovery aspect of the game's items, including finding the correct caliber ammo for my guns. Still, I could add a deadcold.cfg option to show such information.


::EDIT::

Pascal has perfectly good string functions. For some reason, Joseph didn't opt for them back in 2002, instead using PChar, the equivalent of the awful char* of C. I can't programmatically add caliber descriptions without allocating and deallocating memory to hold the strings. And I can't use existing string space because they happen to be static, and not heap allocated.

Long story short, way too much effort for too little benefit, at least for me.

If you want to have a shot at it yourself, everything you need is in dcitems.pp. CGuns[] is a constant array which holds all the guns, including descriptions, so you can modify those to show the caliber if you want, before compiling.