Hello Artfoundry, Odd that this bug still exists - I thought it was caused by memory leaks that were fixed long ago - haven't experienced slowdowns on my 3gs. I'll look into this issue today, my theory is that it has something to do with sounds - I've seen that sometimes after a while Cavern runs much slower with headphones or speaker on than with sounds muted.
Ok the slowness wasn't so good, but what happened this morning is far worse - I started the game, and while loading, it crashed. So I started again (though I first used a memory app to free up memory), and this time my saved game was gone! I've never had any problems with that memory app, so I'm sure it was the crash that deleted the save.
I haven't seen this on my 2nd gen iPod Touch / 3.1.3, and I've had a few long games over the past few days. If I do (and/or get a crash) I'll let you guys know and submit files. Side note - rarely have I been so positive about getting killed in a game - maybe because this one feels more like an old school roguelike. My first game played left me feeling, "I just got killed -this is great!" Makes me sorry I didn't pick this one up earlier.
I took a look at the files in Cavern's Documents folder to see if a save file is still there for my game (iPhone Explorer is awesome for that). The only files listed are prefs.cav, corpses.cav, _onlinescore.cav, and _highscore.cav. None of these look like saves. Is it stored somewhere else, or did my save file get deleted when the game crashed? It would be really nice if the game offered multiple saves in case something like this happens in the future.
One other thing that needs to be fixed - with tap to move, you should be able to cancel your move. As it is now, once I tap to move, my character won't stop until he reaches his destination. This can be annoying when I'm searching for secret doors, and I tap on the other side of a wall, thus causing my character to walk all the way over to the hallway on the other side. Tapping in another location or on the action or d-pad should stop him. But wow, this is a seriously addicting game. Even though I lost my first save, I'm happily playing my third game now.
I feel like I'm starting to have a conversation with myself here. I think I either found a bug or I need some help. The level I'm on (6) has no stairs going down. I've looked all over for a secret door leading to the stairs but haven't found it. The one thing I have found is a door leading nowhere - it's like the Winchester Mystery House. The door opens up and behind it is a wall. I can go into the space where the door is, but can't move past it, and there is no secret door in the wall. Am I missing something? Is there some common indicator to show where secret doors are? I've tapped on most of the squares where I think a secret door would be, but since there's no feedback when tapping on a wall to search, I have no idea if I'm really doing it correctly (only thing I have to go on is the few doors I've found before). Since I haven't found the door, I figure either I'm not doing it correctly or there's a bug on this level (which would suck since I'd have to start over again).
I've played a fair amount of Cavern and have seen similar problems that you mention- a door that appears to open to nowhere, and occasional malformed levels that don't give you access to the stairs. Actually that type of issue made it impossible to beat the game back at one point with an earlier build. I know it's tough to create good procedural content levels that guarantee access to all areas of the dungeon. Artfoundry- if you have access to save data (via jailbreak or other means) you should try to make a copy of your save game data next time you run into a malformed level, it might help soulinhki find the root cause. Even with small blemishes Cavern is another fantastic entry to the genre, hasn't left my phone since purchase
I still have the game saved - haven't started over yet. And yeah, I have iPhone Explorer that gives me access to the files. I'll email him the file if I can figure out which one. Do you know what the name of the file is?
Wish I knew for sure. Maybe you could grab everything it has saved and zip it up for soulinhki? At least that way you'd be sure to get everything he might need. Never heard of iPhone Explorer before... looks like it might be a handy thing for beta testers to use too
Hello Artfoundry, Sorry for late response, I'm on our summer cottage and unfortunately my only connection to internet is superslow tethered gprs connection... Anyways, I checked your save game (had to actually implement a feature to read in savegames to editor, never thought that someone would send me the files ) There is a second secret door in the room with the chest, see attached screen grab Cavern engine should remove the "doors leading to wall" after level generation but I've seen those too and it's a bug. Will look into it.
Hi soulinhki, I'm wondering if there are any plans for a Universal version of this? I love Rogue-likes, having played them for many years and even, once upon a time, was the compiler posting versions of various versions of Angband on the net for people. As nice as this is on the iPhone, it would be even better if it took advantage of the larger screen on the iPad. (I scanned the thread to see if this was asked earlier, but didn't see anything.)
Ah well - I started over anyway and have surpassed where I was before. Maybe having some kind of vague indicator for secret doors would be helpful? Something like when you get within 10 squares or so of one, a message appears saying "You sense something odd nearby". That way, it doesn't give away the exact location but at least gives a bit of a hint since searching every single wall tile can be pretty tedious.
Hi all, Small update on what's coming : 1.5 will be out in a few weeks, with main feature being a brand new opengl backend. Some benefits : -Huge performance increases, affects especially first gen devices -Smoother animation, time based, not frame like before. -Brings back some gfx like smooth shadows for walls -Fixes some odd bugs related to old game logic relying on uiviews etc -Easy to scale to higher resolutions. I will include some other enhancements too but major gameplay changes are saved for 2.0 (which will reset highscores too) Universal binary is coming but not yet in 1.5. (Cavern looks very cool on the iPad with pixel doubling, by the way ) If you guys have any feature requests, bug reports etc, I would be glad to hear them! -Sami
Sounds awesome! A few suggestions I have would be: - make the mage character more unique by giving him access to AOE (area of effect) spells/wands - right now, he's too similar to the adventurer character. - make some bosses that are more than one square in size (just for effect, though they could be even stronger too) - like maybe the dragons - make one of the NPCs (maybe the wizard?) in the shops sell items (just like the armory NPC buys items), and every time you go down and come back up, he has different items - particularly high level, expensive items - provide some ambiguous way of detecting secret walls - like a hint that says "there's something strange nearby" when you get within like 5-10 squares of the door - traps and pits (which could also be detected the same way as the secret doors, but then you'd need probably another function to allow players to tap a square to activate it without walking over it)
Hi soulinhki, I bought this game on a whim from my wishlist. It's absolutely fantastic! (and REALLY hard to put down too I might add). It does have a bug with saving though, sometimes I'll stop and switch apps midgame and everything is lost including high scores. Will this be fixed in the next update? Any ETA on 1.5?
Weird that this and Soulinhki has disappeared. This was a great Roguelike with some different features and a wonderful atmosphere. Hey, Soul, you out there? I'd hate to see this project abandoned.
Love the look of this, reminds me of the early Ultima games. Going to TTY it out asap Oops didnt realise this was an old thread . Shame if it's abandoned
