Menus are fun again

Oooh, shiny shiny! This week, we did some work on the long-promised prettiness enhancement of Desktop Dungeons. Yes, it’s true that most of said work was performed in the wee hours of Saturday morning because a whole host of errors cropped up at a nerve-frazzlingly late stage, but we believe it’s all sorted now. Mostly. Hopefully. Honest.

We also believe that the crashes common to recent play sessions should be fixed. They’ve been a bit difficult to reproduce, but we reckon we’ve identified the problem areas and fixed them up now. At the very least, there should be a performance increase on systems that previously struggled with the game.

And yes, you can all stop having fun with the Vampire now. We’ve nerfed THAT combo. Can’t afford to let players actually enjoy themselves, now can we?

We may have been tangled up in interface changes, but we like to think we got a reasonable amount of other stuff done this week, too. Here’s your changelog, folks:

  • Interface… Just. Well. Look at it.
  • Burning cap reduced to 2x enemy level.
  • Texture/material caching improved, should be faster/less demanding.
  • Guarded against edge-case wall destruction crash.
  • Render to texture memory leak plugged/avoided.
  • Binlor attitude shifted.
  • Dracul’s revised boons now have revised costs.
  • Vampire nerfed (slightly).
  • Paladin’s Holy Work works wholly differently.
  • Diminishing rewards on successive altar desecrations.
  • Earthmother’s boons spawn fewer plants (and the “plant saturation” problem itself should be fixed)
  • Trisword re-buffed slightly.
  • Halflings and Gnomes have an increased conversion cost.
  • Pre-selected altars spawn more generously.
  • Indulgence works differently, and players are awarded with several charges on desecration.
  • Average increase in the number of opponents who deal magical damage.