Dungeon Crawling RPGs & Graphical Roguelikes

[Nefaro]

I picked up that Demise thingie based on your post.  Man, what a horrible, horrible mistake.  I have never seen a worse front end GUI and in-game interface in my life.  Who designed this thing?  The Inquisition?

I've been playing Undercoft on my iPhone.  Much more enjoyable RPG experience and it's free.

Ha!  Yeah the UI isn't terribly good, although it's still probably better than many of the Roguelikes listed here.  That thing is so old, the intro screen still has "3DFX" listed as one of the vid card manufacturers.  ;D

Perhaps I should warn everyone about the punishment involved with most of these old-style RPGs - they still have old-style interfaces!   They're also almost universally screen resolution limited, too.   Enter at your peril!  :P

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Yeah, it took me a while to get the damned thing up and running.  Had to select the three game .exe files and set them to WinXP SP3 compatability, then add some command lines to the shortcut to run in windowed mode and not use DirectX or the thing would just crash.

[son_of_montfort]

Yeah, it took me a while to get the damned thing up and running.  Had to select the three game .exe files and set them to WinXP SP3 compatability, then add some command lines to the shortcut to run in windowed mode and not use DirectX or the thing would just crash.

Any tips, because mine is saying I have too large fonts and doesn't want to cooperate.

[Nefaro]

Yeah, it took me a while to get the damned thing up and running.  Had to select the three game .exe files and set them to WinXP SP3 compatability, then add some command lines to the shortcut to run in windowed mode and not use DirectX or the thing would just crash.

Any tips, because mine is saying I have too large fonts and doesn't want to cooperate.

I'm guessing you have larger fonts enabled in Windows then? Or a different desktop theme.. or Aero on? 

I've seen some mention of a windows font being scaled oddly, and a workaround for it, below.  But first try checking 'Disable Display Scaling' in the Compatibility tab along with disabling visual themes and desktop composition on the two or three EXEs (one is the server host program and you probably don't need it there.   Anything besides basic Windows desktop stuff can probably mess it up so this should (technically) turn all the extras off.

by journeyman72 » Sun Apr 15, 2012 8:33 pm
HUZZAH! I can finally duplicate the problem!!! :-D Which means I also have a workaround for how you can likely fix it.

Please run the registry editor (REGEDIT.EXE) and check the following value:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts -- name "MS Sans Serif 8,10,12,14,18,24"

I'm guessing your machine probably has SSERIFF.FON. Change it to SSERIFE.FON and reboot -- that *SHOULD* fix your Ascension fonts problem. SSERIFE contains the "normal" sized fonts, while SSERIFF is scaled larger.

Windows sets up these font mappings during initial installation. According to a few pages I found, Windows uses SSERIFF (instead of SSERIFE) only when your graphics card is in hi-resolution mode during Windows installation. That probably explains why not everybody is having this problem -- most pc's use a pretty low resolution during Win install (I guess 800x600 or 1024x768... which isn't considered hi-res for this.)

So try that out, HOPEFULLY this will fix it! :-)

Thread here:
http://www.decklinsdomain.info/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=4969&start=25


I didn't see this issue so you must've had some of the text scaling going on in Win7??  Although I do recall having to edit some text font in the Windows 7 Registry before, for a completely different game before, too.   

Damn yous Microsoft!  Why you no like backwards compatibility?  :P


Sorry for the extra headache guys.  I should've complained more about the downsides to this thing before you guys picked it up.   I believe it's recommended that you run it in WinXP SP2/3 compatibility mode along with "Run As Admin", "Disable visual themes, desktop composition, and probably even Disable Display Scaling on the compatibility tab for the exes.  My brain isn't working well lately, and I failed to mention this in the first thread about it where I should have done so.  :'( 

On another note, I'm hosting a "Noob" multiplayer session so there's a whole fresh multiplayer dungeon to violate.  I was told that the long-running servers' shops are often filled to max with items that players sold to them so you gotta switch servers to sell the loot you can't use, if it doesn't already have a similar stack in stock to add to.  The real reason I made a fresh server is because the main quests have mostly been finished on those old ones.  From what I understand, most servers are mostly people running around solo on their own (+chatting) until they die and ask for a body retrieval (to keep rez costs & possible CON stat loss to a minimum) and/or when they find some nasty boss encounter they need help with.  The common vendor shop is also nice because someone's sold junk could be what you're looking for. 

You also need other people to trade stuff between your own characters - notably books, tomes, and potions that give permanent stat increases which are vital to character development pre~ level 30.  This will happen enough because many items not only have guild (class), level, and stat requirements but they also have alignment restrictions.  You can pay to have the alignment of a piece of loot changed to your own, at the vendor, but it's extremely expensive so I think most only do that in the higher levels with the badass stuff.  Also note that the ideal starting class(es) to take are Warrior to 25->Artisan to 29->Warlock to 38 (can drop Warrior or Warlock for a different class if in a hurry to level) because this maximizes your Hit Points;  they're only gained in large amounts to a certain level in each class, with some getting more than others.   Since you can multi-class to your hearts content, besides race/alignment/stat restrictions on which ones a character can take, you can take some of the highest HP gainers such as those three and only suffer some small xp penalty that reportedly levels off after catching up in levels in the new one.  There's obviously a lot of odd tips to character building and levelling mechanics.  ???

So it looks like the Master game server is where your character and stuff is saved, though, so swapping servers isn't a big deal.  Besides the odd way of going about doing that.  You gotta go into the Multiplayer page, from the main menu, and query the server to get a list of hosted games.  Then highlight and click 'Copy' to move it over to your list on the top right side.  Then highlight over there and click on "connect".   No problem, right?   Well, now you exit to the main menu.  Hahah!  It should mention on the bottom of the main menu that you're connected to multiplayer server ****.  Now you hit 'Create Character' and start with that one.  So you basically go into the multiplayer screen to connect, then back out to select your character (in the character select window if it's not already selected) and hit play.  Gives us a healthy appreciation of modern GUIs, huh?  :P

Anyway, if you wanna start multi-player fresh today then let me know.  I'll send you my server password.


Extra tip:  The Windowed Mode shortcut (with the -DIRECTX switch) is already installed in the Start Menu, under "Decklin's Domain" entry, so you can rt-click it and Send To Desktop As Shortcut if need be.   Another tip I should've mentioned.  :o

[Nefaro]

On another, easier, note...

There is a new Monster Den dungeon crawler out, Monsters' Den Chronicles

http://www.kongregate.com/games/garin/monsters-den-chronicles

Fancier than the older versions.  8)

[Nefaro]

There is a new Old style dungeon crawler recently released, called Swords and Sorcery: Underworld Gold.

http://www.olderbytes.com/

I'm very tempted, as it's $20 and an indie.  But it sounds like a single playthrough is only 20 to 30 hours (20 dungeon levels?) so I'm not sure about it if there's little:
a) Replayability
b) Content to explore

I'll probably pick it up sometime soon.  However, the Might & Magic series being on sale at GOG for 60% kinda filled up my old-style dungeon crawler plate lately so it can wait a bit.  :D

[Rayfer]

I played one of the earlier builds of this indie remake of this classic S&S game when it was free so maybe this paid release is different.   It was like a lot of RPG's from that era.....enjoyable but incredibly difficult.  Some gamers thrive on that level of difficulty, unfortunately I don't so I moved on and passed on the paid version.