Scattered Evil News

Scattered Evil 2.0 is now available on SourceForge and ModDB.

Monster Models

• Fully animated models for the Ettin and Chaos Serpent families, including damage skin variants and special overkill animations. Besides the move from 2D to 3D, many models feature additional visual changes compared to their previous sprite iterations (see the list below).
• Ettin Slingers use slingshots and chuck stones.
• Ettin Grenadiers brandish flechettes.
• Ettin Commanders carry a hammer.
• Ettin Warlords gave up their helmets and replaced most of their armor with pure gold pieces. As a warlord, you gotta show off your bling or how will your underlings know you da boss?
• All Chaos Serpents now have a standard death animation (falling down) and an overkill animation (bloody bits flying everywhere).
• Magma Serpents are now huge and their skin is infused with molten lava that only stops glowing upon death.
• Frost Serpents are a new blue subspecies that like the cold and have displaced Wendigos in the icy reaches of Charybdea.
• Flayed Serpents were first conceived in a sadistic wizard’s twisted mind, who wondered what would happen if you took some young Chaos Serpents and removed their skin. They live in constant pain that only abates at those moments when they bite into the flesh of some unsuspecting adventurer to drink their blood.

NPC Models

• All animated NPC sprites have been replaced with animated models.
• All female NPC sprites have been replaced with models.
• Most non-unique male NPC sprites have been replaced with models. Some of them even learned how to sit on furniture.
• Chickens, pigs and piglets now have unique animated models.

City Updates

• The city of Ocadia has been rebuilt from scratch, leaving only some of the most iconic buildings more or less intact. Besides a more up-to-date look, it should also greatly improve frame rates.
• Annoyed by all the construction noise, the market stalls from Ocadia moved to Sichabroner. The joke is on them though, as that cityscape underwent some changes over the summer, too.
• All good things come in threes, so the city of Thystes got a facelift as well.

Gameplay Changes

• Whether health artifacts (Quartz Flask, Mystic Urn) are used automatically is now controlled through a setting in the Options menu, independent of the difficulty setting.
• While in the berserk state, now you can open the Journal (ends berserking) and the Map Scroll (suspends berserking, resumes after closing the scroll).
• Items that can be picked up now always glow, items that can’t be picked up don’t glow. Most of them also rotate in addition to float bob.

Miscellaneous Changes

• Built on the concurrently released Vavoom 1.34, the GNU/Linux binaries are now 64-bit (Windows 64-bit binaries will follow in a subsequent release).
• Removed a number of unused textures and compressed all non-transparent textures to optimize memory usage.
• Adopted the bugfixes present in KMOD 5.0 but not in Scattered Evil 1.9 (fighter levelup bug, load/save screens display issue).
• You can now initiate a conversation with domesticated animals.
• You can now punch most fences and furniture.
• When looking into a mirror, the player now sees an idealized version of himself.

This year’s SE trailer is now available on YouTube in Full HD, showing off some of the improvements in the four releases since last year.

Scattered Evil 1.9 is now available on SourceForge and ModDB.

New Armor System

• Armor now comes in three basic classes. The stronger the armor, the higher percentage of damage it absorbs but there is also more weight to carry.
• Armor now has resistance slots for Fire, Frost and Poison. Any class of armor can have any combination of these resistances, which absorb up to 99% of the incoming damage without losing any armor durability.
• Armor can be restored to pristine state by a master blacksmith in a town. You can also purchase or loot an Armorer’s Hammer, which allows you to repair your armor (to what degree depends on the RPG complexity setting).
• You need to keep an eye on your armor’s degradation as once a piece is completely depleted, not even the best blacksmith can restore it.
• The old Hexen style armor has been discontinued. You might still find some battered pieces in the wilderness, but besides the metal itself being worth a few coins, there is no use for them any more.
• There are rumors about an armor worn by ancient kings that is supposed to be better than anything today’s blacksmiths can craft.

New Feature: Carried Weight

• Inventory items (including money) now have a specific weight and depending on your character’s stats, sooner or later you’ll become Overburdened, a state in which you move slower, tire faster and get hungry sooner.
• Playing on Old School RPG complexity, with even more weight you become Extremely Overburdened, a state in which these negative effects become crippling. On the flip side, if you keep your carried weight beyond a certain threshold, you gain Lightfooted, a state in which you move faster and take longer to get tired or hungry.

New Feature: Banking and Finances

• You can now open a bank account at Ocadia’s Counting House and deposit some of your cash in it, both lightening the load in your backpack and earning interest with time.
• The Journal now includes a financial overview page that lists not only your cash and your current bank account balance, but also your real estate holdings (if any) and the estimated sale value of your more valuable inventory items.

New and modified Class Abilities

• Cleric: Levitator is a new prayer that allows you to lift all nearby enemies high into the air, then splat!
• Fighter: Phalanx is a new martial skill that blocks all incoming damage for a short time, but the fighter cannot move during its duration (he can still attack).
• Mage: once advanced sufficiently in his studies, the mage can now summon monsters to do his bidding (there is a small chance this can backfire).
• The mage’s Arcane Shield (defensive spell) now only reflects missiles and offers no protection against melee attacks.
• The cleric’s Healing prayer now costs significantly more and heals somewhat less in the beginning, but scales much better with the player’s Charisma score in later stages.
• The red haze during the fighter’s Berserker rage now obstructs the view to a lesser degree. A few other class abilities (Phalanx, Arcane Shield) now also have a faint coloring of your view during their effect.

New Dungeons

• Rebuilt from scratch, The Rift is open once again, connecting The Canyon to the Dark Conclave.
• Hytesthani Ravine is now the target of Senior Wizard Robert’s quest for the ultimate weapon.

Miscellaneous

• You can now punch trees.
• In Thystes Fortress, soldiers can now be pushed out of the way.
• The Journal now includes a new chapter on Old School RPG complexity, Tasks (the first entry appears as soon as you talk to your order’s representative in the first town).
• Cost of ability booster potions reduced to a quarter of their previous value.
• The text-based setup utility now allows you to set the screen ratio along with the resolution and it writes these parameters in a separate text file, making it easier to add your own command line arguments to ScatteredEvil.bat/ScatteredEvil.sh.
• Added status marks for more conditions (still disabled by default, you can enable them in the Gameplay Options menu).
• New visuals for the Mage’s Fireball spell cast.

Bugfixes

• Fixed: gold bars dropped by monsters flying off into the blue wild yonder.
• Tears of the Gods damage massively increased, bringing it to the level it was meant to have.
• Fixed Jodisec Mine keys disappearing from inventory.
• Fixed incorrect player name being shown if multiple characters have been set up.
• The Fighter’s Journal on Old School RPG complexity now shows the Spellbook chapter as soon as he obtains any of the combat spells.
• Potential fix for enemies trying to cast a spell on a dead player, crashing the game.
• Corrected the map scroll coordinates for The Canyon.

Scattered Evil 1.8 is now available on SourceForge and ModDB.

New feature: The Mansion

• Purchase a luxurious mansion in a prime urban location that comes with a staff of servants
• Unless playing with RPG complexity turned Off, you receive a property sorely in need of improvements, allowing you to unleash your inner decorator
• Travel the breadth of the province to buy, steal or otherwise acquire various pieces of furniture and artwork

New feature: Map Scrolls

• Press a key and up pops the map of the region or city you are currently in (provided you have that region or city map in your possession), automatically showing your current position on the map
• If you don’t have a map of the current region or city, the newly added province map is displayed instead, showing your current position in the world (there is also a switch in Gameplay Options to always show the province map)
• Configurable option whether map scrolls should show annotations
• The collection of maps in the Journal is newly called the Atlas and it now always contains at least one map at game start (the province map)
• Configurable option whether maps in the Atlas should show the current player location
• Most Coach Stations now sell maps of the region or city they are located in
• Added souvenir stalls at city entrances, selling city maps

New dungeons and monsters

• Three new dungeon maps: Gonos Fortress, Isle of Ancient Kings, Tomb of Ancient Kings
• Updated questlines for class leaders in Thystes Fortress and Thystes Cathedral, now once again requiring the player to travel to a dungeon
• New monster type: Afrit Dominator (see the Bestiary for details)
• AI and attribute tweaks for several existing monsters

Interface improvements

• New unified look for the Main, Game and Option menus and their submenus
• Pressing J while the Journal is open will now close the Journal, no matter what subpage is open

Miscellanous additions

• New and updated 3D models including climbable rope, animated rotisserie chicken and the Crown of Ancient Kings
• Status Marks are now available (you can turn them on in the Gameplay Options menu). They show up both in the player HUD and over monster’s heads for things like Berserking, Poisoned, Terror, Mana Burn etc.
• Berserker now has a new non-fighter-specific icon, since both the player and some monsters use the same ability
• Added a new artifact status icon for torches
• New system for tracking hidden mini quests, allowing a rapid expansion of small tasks that reward EXP (targeted at Old School RPG complexity)

Bugfixes

• Monsters now use the correct sound when poisoned
• Artifact status icons are now positioned and animated correctly
• Fixed the issue of pressing J while the Journal was open spawning a second Journal instance in the background
• Fixed the issue of some of the sailboat routes transporting the player to the wrong destination

The next version of Scattered Evil is currently targeted for a late August/early September release. These screenshots should tide you over until then.