Announcing the redesigned ADOM homepage!

Hi folks!

Yet another puzzle piece towards the Steam release finally is live. Krys has redesigned the ADOM homepage and given it a modern and fresh look which I’ve totally fallen in love with.

There are probably quite a few kinks left to be worked out and we plan to expand it greatly in the future but for now it should be sufficient to present ADOM in a modern, fresh and vivid manner.

In the future the following additions are planned:

• As soon as we have a new video up for the Steam release it also will be embedded with the play button on the front page.
• We might decide to randomize the player quotes on the website if we receive more good quotes that we can use.
• The new home page will be the foundation for the extended website and the community site we are going to develop after the Steam release. Major features of the community website will include:
• an event Stream displaying events from games played while online (e.g. character creation, deaths, achievements, unlocked, special levels discovered, …
• shared global high scores
• community statistics (e.g. races & classes played, levels achieved, …)

Let us know what you think – all feedback is welcome as usual!

Thomas & Team ADOM

Slowly redesigning the blog

I have started to slowly alter the blog layout. A long while ago we had an ADOM II design competition and for more than two years Kalle Kolaris header served us well (thanks once more). But now we are slowly creating a unified ADOM brand and Krys‘ ADOM designs (derived from the awesome tiled graphics we now have) will become a prominent feature of the new design.

If you don’t see any changes please shift-reload this web page. Their should be a new awesome logo and header at the top of this page. And for the sake of completeness, here it is, too:

More changes to come over the next couple of weeks. And www.adom.de also will receive a revision soon. Obviously ADOM is currently in focus and ADOM II rests on the back burner…

Back to normal: More undead to the game

Since the hacker incursion finally has been repelled I’m quickly trying to get back to the normal schedule. At the weekend I was interrupted adding shadows to the game (and ghosts and spectres being the next) which introduce attribute drain as a new special ability. This new ability opens up so much room for cool new items that all the PC to drain monster attributes (gauntlets of the shadow touch draining strength, vampiric blades draining toughness, weapons of sorrow draining charisma, etc.) that I love this new addition.

Talk to ya soon about game-related stuff again!

Forums survived the night… hacker attack finally repelled?

No new garbage appearing on the adom.de server overnight. Finally we might have managed to quench all the damage inflicted by the script kiddie attack. I’m picking up hope again and maybe soon things can return to normal… specifically I hope to recover the fun I had working on JADE in the past couple of weeks. Stay tuned…

Hacking aftermath: Forums down again :-(

And yet another hole found, data destroyed, files damaged and the forums down again. I wish I’d be able to get my hands on this cowardly hacker freak… he’d suffer some real pain 😦

I’m not sure when (or if) things will be back up soon – I’ll make one more attempt to save stuff tonight but I’m slowly getting tired of reinstallating the forums. And reconfiguring them… which really is a pain in the ass with vBulletin due to the immense amount of features… configuring those just takes too long.

Oh well, dark times for ADOM and JADE. So much time and energy lost…

Update on the hacker attack: Forums back online

I’m slowly making progress. Here are the latest news and a plan for revenge…
The forums are back up. I upgraded to the latest vBulletin version (which cost me $175 but hopefully will be worth the investment). There were some troubles with the project tools (used for the JADE issues, etc.) but this should be under control now, too. On the positive side the forums now

• should be even faster,
• have better options to prevent bots from registering and
• probably can include nifty new features once I am happy with the overall state.

The layout is still messy (vBulletin 4 has 100s of new options and it’s a bit difficult to find ones place in that jungle 😉 ).

Concerning the hacker attack:

• Slowly things are getting under control. 
• The blog is still gone and I’m not sure that I will get it back up running with the old content. The main problem is that my WordPress installation was heavily customized with plugins and thus I never again was able to update it. The script kid found a security hole in some obscure plugin I never even used (grrr) and exploited that. Now the blog installation is in shambles, it’s not an option to restore the old version due to the security hole(s) and I’m not sure that any modern installation will be able to make sense of the plugin-modified database. A real shame…
• Our preliminary analysis indicates that the hacker was some rather bland and stupid script kid that nonetheless possessed enough brain tissue to discover above mentioned security hole. But not much more.
• At least the hacker kiddy was bright enough to hide decently and my provide doesn’t have the resources to track the kid.
• The attack occurred via the IP 69.50.201.180.
• The script kid tried to include the server in some kind of bot net.

As far as we know no other damage than destroying some data and some PHP files was done. The site is slowly recovering and hopefully we have plugged all holes.

As for the revenge… since the script kid dummy decided to hack a roguelike game site I intend to do the following:

• I always wanted to include a deliberately humorous episode in ADOM, now this will happen in JADE.
• There will be a minor story arc concerning the script wizard of B’ot, trying to concquer the world with some kind of infectious disease.
• The script wizard of B’ot basically will be some kind of snotty and rotten bastard, too incompetent to achieve anything worthwhile and a target for the attacks of JADE players in their very early phases of hero life.
• He will be trivial to defeat and usually die a horribly painful and gory death. Again and again. As he will be bound to turn up in various intervals in the game. Maybe with yet another stupid plan, maybe just to be brutalized in a few seconds.

In the way we will at the same time immortalize the hacker kid that dirtied the ADOM website and mortalize (nay, annihilate) him/her/it in a very special way. May eternal shame be the reward for the foul deed.

Suggestions for funny and embarassing deaths of the script wizard of B’ot (or whatever we are going to call him/her/it) are welcome.

P.S.: If you notice problems with the forums please post them here in the comments. Right now I am busy on many front lines and this a place I look at regularly.