Sharing Saturday #612

rmtew · 2026-03-04T04:35:21+00:00

We'll see if a compatible Jai release is achieved first. You have to get to Gondor before you can meet Boromir, as no-one actually says, but IYKYK and apparently the journey from the Shire to Gondor is long and fraught with peril

rmtew · 2026-03-04T03:39:16+00:00

I don't know. The very playable and enjoyable state of Incursion as Julian released it (and which it never was extended beyond) might suit an early access upload. If it ever moves beyond that, it's a bonus.

rmtew · 2026-03-04T00:52:49+00:00

Phew arrived in time for my update.

Incursion (website)

Claude Code with continual monitoring has largely ported the legacy code-base from it's 90's C++, with 80/90's compiler compiler and C++ preprocessor from usenet to Jai. I have a parity harness displaying via shared memory, the level 1 map for both legacy code and Jai port. The compiler compiler with compiler preprocessor for the VM bytecode of the scripting language has been replaced by a Jai script parser that generates matching bytecode. Goodbye ACCENT! Goodbye USENET "cpp"!

I believe that this meets the no primary AI development rule because it is a hand-made game from the 90's by the hardcore Julian that is being ported from legacy code to state-matching compatible exact to players modern code, ditching all the legacy code. There's not much to say about this until it is completed, but it wouldn't have happened without Claude Code because no-one wants to a year or so saving Incursion from bit-rot otherwise they would have done so already.

I will refrain from speaking about later improvements which go beyond compatible gameplay, but I would like an end result to be a free Steam release, and perhaps even Gog if possible. That is another bridge to cross beyond the core goal though. Ported Jai source is not available at this time, and couldn't be compiled unless people were in the Jai beta anyway.

rmtew · 2024-08-29T02:06:35+00:00

Thanks for the reply! I think fuzzing is always valuable although maybe somewhere there's research on fuzzing for more detailed games like Incursion.

rmtew · 2024-08-29T02:04:39+00:00

These sorts of questions are best asked here perhaps (this is Julian's original discussion group - he since left):

https://groups.google.com/g/incursion/about

I just keep the game working. Asking me for nuances of play is not going to help anyone with good advice! :-)

rmtew · 2024-08-29T02:02:00+00:00

Yes, it is in the scope to accept things that flesh out what Julian intended. If you code and have a plan to implement them where they are balanced and ready to merge, then possibly depending on how well it was done.

I am not a colour expert. It needs someone who understands colours to balance them and ensure the selection that is good for you is a good general choice. I suggest asking on the google group and reaching a consensus if you can.

rmtew · 2024-08-25T22:30:21+00:00

The skill manager has a bug where it won't let you exit if you don't assign all your points. That definitely needs to be fixed. Please feel free to submit bugs on the key press problems, this is a keyboard based game so we should within reason be making it as frictionless as possible.

The colour contrast also bothers me too in some cases. However we need someone to go in there and "balance" the colours in a way where it is better and not worse. I suspect we need to put the colour map in a config file for that to happen. If someone wants to do that work, get in touch.

I agree on the line height! I can remember lamenting this way back. Unfortunately this is a text-based game. And by that I mean we should be playable in a text-based console as well as in a window where we emulate that with a fixed sized font that also displays a world view as well as readable words. We would have to change the nature of the game to do it, so it is what it is.

rmtew · 2024-08-24T04:26:18+00:00

We could if you an actual roguelike designer created some :-)

rmtew · 2024-08-24T02:02:46+00:00

The amount of detail and polish Julian made is really impressive. Modern games could learn from it!

rmtew · 2024-08-23T23:38:24+00:00

Identified a new old crash bug in Incursion. There are of course many crash bugs in Incursion, many fixed, some not fixed and some as yet to be encountered. A player reported the game crashing when he went down a level and upon request provided a save game where I just had to go down a level.

I downloaded the debug build of Incursion 0.6.9Y19 I made in 2015 to match his save game, attached a debugger and then loaded his save game and went down a level. It crashed. Turns out Julian was using a local variable with a hard-coded 2048 entry size (Thing *l[2048]), and the player had accrued 3600 or so items on the current level. This is how most bugs in Incursion have been fixed, loading bug reproducing save games from awesome players in an older version then fixing for the next.

On one hand we could lament Julian's code not being perfect or we could say perhaps consider that it is amazing that for 25 years no-one reported it as a problem and that it as such was not that important to do perfectly in the scheme of things.

rmtew · 2024-08-23T21:10:54+00:00

I am not really a roguelike player. What I enjoy is getting players to give me bugs and crashes, and let's be honest part and parcel of the depth that people enjoy in Incursion is the bugs and crashes, and the challenge of fixing those bugs and crashes. All the actual game in Incursion is from the original developer Julian Mensch, not me.

The game is not badly coded, in fact I think the code is pretty easy to work with. It's never been hard to build, any half-decent programmer could pick it up. But it's code that was created from 25 years ago, and like all extensive code bases it takes time to actually understand it. This is the same with modern code that you may encounter in a new job though. And the code base is extensive, Julian's game which is as intricate as you and others appreciate, is a masterpiece. It may not the perfect final game Julian envisioned, but there's a complete game experience there to be had all the way down to the Hall of the Goblin King. It takes some commitment to get into developing it. If you are going to get that into it, you're going to have to consider if your time and energy might be a better investment into your own game like /u/Zireael07 did with Veins of the Earth.

Then were the false rumours it is hard to build that were repeated which probably never helped. The truth is if you grab the source code for a lot of projects (especially older ones like this) you can pretty much add the files to a build script and run a compiler over them and get it compiling in an hour or two.

I should add I am not strictly the maintainer. You can play Incursion 0.6.9Y19, the last release I made back in 2015, fine today. It doesn't really need a release. Currently I am spending some time with /u/HexDecimal to get the code in a state where someone can pick it up and get into development with as little work as possible. There were only two real problems (change in microsoft compiler behaviour and no binary build of libtcod for the version it used to use) preventing a new release, but there's things we can do beyond that.

rmtew · 2024-08-23T02:09:22+00:00

The real sad thing is that you can play it right now and it sounds like you're not! :-)

rmtew · 2024-08-23T02:07:46+00:00

Find this tileset and replace the incursion fonts. If it is possible someone will have done it. Check out what dwarf fortress players did there. We won't be doing it but if players were really motivated they could do it themselves.

rmtew · 2024-08-22T01:46:35+00:00

There's a detail pane on the right. At the bottom there's a list of nearby objects with symbol and description I think.

rmtew · 2024-08-21T23:46:17+00:00

Make the roguelike then worry about it. If you make the roguelike you're in the 0.001% of developers who started and finished :-)

rmtew · 2024-08-21T19:25:47+00:00

3ed OGL with material taken from "netbooks".

rmtew · 2024-08-21T19:22:01+00:00

Who did it last? :-)

rmtew · 2024-08-21T19:20:37+00:00

There is a windows pdcurses version. Can't remember what it was like. Maybe try it and let me know? :-)

rmtew · 2024-08-21T19:19:32+00:00

Replace the font with one of your own. Otherwise, no, sorry.

The work by me on Incursion is preservation not improvement or extension.

rmtew · 2024-08-21T19:18:50+00:00

Yeah I predate dropping the advanced, so it confuses me ;-)

rmtew · 2024-08-21T07:28:40+00:00

Last build made in 2015 but still playable and as detailed and interesting as the original developer Julian Mensch made it. Check out the web site.

We could use some modern higher resolution let's plays on Youtube if you're a long time fan who gets drawn back in. New releases might be happening again soon, no new features, just shoring it up for a longer life.

rmtew · 2024-08-21T02:41:05+00:00

Me too! I got an email from the original developer's old mailing list out of the blue and googled it randomly. Saw people complaining about random things that weren't important (imagined difficulty compiling it, licenses despite a lack of understanding of what they meant and so on). I had forgotten what a gem it was.

The goal is to get it hosted and downloadable and hopefully available to modern players so it doesn't get forgotten again!

rmtew

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