Hi everyone! It has been an awful long time since the last update but things are returning to normal (or rather: better than normal - expect a pretty exciting announcement probably within the next six weeks). Lots of work has happened behind the scenes by my team colleagues and I took longer to recover than I expected from my broken arm/wrist/hand (see older posts) but finally we again are moving forward and working towards new releases. We have been focussing on several areas and the next release will bring a number of pretty fun features and changes (besides the usual batch of bug fixes and minor improvements). With me being fully back in the saddle and our GIT infrastructure finally in full motion I hope that we also will be able to switch to much faster release cycles (especially as far as bug fixes go). Below you will find main areas of work of the past months: Art Krys is extremely busy on animating the PC and all our monsters. This actually is pretty tedious work considering that we are switching from still images to animated parts but the results are nothing but wonderful. ADOM feels a lot more alive now and some of the animations are incredibly funny and fascinating. The following blog posts provide various sneak previews: http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/05/advanced-adom-animations.html http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/05/sharks-in-adom.html http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/04/a-glowing-example.html http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/03/animation-and-line-of-sight-live.html The animation system also finally will simplify enhancing the player character as outlined in http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/05/customizable-player-character.html Sound Lucas has been very busy over the past couple of months adding both sound effects and musical scores leading to an ever expanding sound library. Here's one blog pertaining to that (and other refinements of graphical nature): http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/03/ever-expanding-soundscape-where-no.html Gameplay Besides working on a pretty big package of new features a major part of the next Steam release will be an even more simplified UI with much more focus on a more intuitive mouse interface and generally better interaction between the player and the game. We have been doing field tests with new players (and are continuing to do so) and defined a batch of issues to address for that release, as outlined here: http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/06/simplifying-adom-ui.html For ASCII mode you can see one example for the look mode of ADOM here: http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2017/06/look-better-in-adom.html Very soon this will be integrated into the graphical mode and I hope for true tooltips so that in the future you don't even need to know how to activate look mode but rather just can hover over the map to get more detailed information about specific spots. Another example for such improvements is the long requested standardized handling of the ESC key (e.g. showing a popup with the most important commands like saving and quitting). The full list of issues to be addressed (still growing) is listed here: http://www.adom.de/forums/projectmilestone.php?milestoneid=8 Organization Our team organization behind the scenes currently is improving greatly but I can't yet explain the details. Sadly I can't even explains the reasons for not being able to explain that - but some of the most recent delays have been caused by re-organizing. It's worth the wait and very soon I can speak... stay tuned. All in all I am happy to be back to much more time to work on ADOM and we'll focus on releasing ASAP. See you soon Thomas & Team ADOM