Bardness Update

I am pretty much done trying out the 7DRL successful entries. Now I am checking out games with regular updates on rgrd. Today I installed Bardness. The game required a separate XNA Framework download from Microsoft. I wanted to try the game, so I went ahead with the download and install.

Bardness starts out with a huge page of stats and abilities. I accepted the defaults, and quickly lost during a demo verion. Then I went for the full quest. This one had more enemies. But I guess they were spread out better throughout the dungeon. I have not seen an enemy yet.

Bardness has a blinkig cursor next to your player character on the screen. Not sure if that is a side effect or a feature. I like the power bars that graphically show your health. Some of the menus are clipped on my screen. Is this due to my screen resolution? Who knows?

Based on the version number, I suspect this game is still in beta. I will be interested in seeing version 1.0 some day.

User Interface Progress

There is some good news. I read a comment or two from my previous blog. The poster recommended I not use an applet to display my dungeon. A recommendation was made to use libjcsi to do my output. In 10 minutes I got a sample demo running.

An hour later, I have my Angband town like perimeter. I also have the user symbol (@) displayed in the middle. It might not look like much progress. However my previous user interface had some subtle problems. There were spacing issues when drawing the user symbol. Now everything is lining up.

The next step is to figure out how to capture input from the keyboard. If I can do that, perhaps I can get the user to actually move. Yeah I know that does not seem impressive. But it is a giant step forward for us beginning Java programmers. Props to "SZDev - Slash" for the helpful hints. Some day I will return the favor.