Downtown is a cheater in progress for ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery). This web page currently sucks, but then so does downtown at this point.
Downtown has been designed to have a variety of different editor front ends. At present, there are three front ends: an ultra-simplistic line-mode text editor, a plain dump, and an ultra-simple inventory fixer.
To dump all data from your save file, just type "downtown -d <path-to-svg-file>" and watch it go. It will read in everything that I currently know about, dump it in human-readable form to stdout, and quit. Not very exciting, but there you have it.
To use the editor, type "downtown -l <path-to-svg-file>" and you'll be at the menu. It's all line-mode, menu-driven, ultra-low-tech, but you should be able to figure it out. Everything should be working now.
To use the inventory fixer (it was really added just to prove how easily new front ends can be built; the same functionality could be provided by scripting the line editor), just type "downtown -f <path-to-svg-file>" and it'll automatically identify and uncurse everything in your inventory, printing a report at the end.
The output is pure unformatted plain text, so the "screenshot" is just a text capture (in dump mode). And yes, I picked the file that works the best with the current version to show off.
Downtown is now hosted at SourceForge. So, you can get the latest release, in source form or binary (currently only linux-x86-glibc2 binaries) from the project page. If you're really brave, there's an RPM package available as well. Or you can get (possibly newer and/or less stable) source through CVS, either manually or by using their spiffy web interface. I know that CVS can look scary to newbies, but it's worth learning and using.
The source builds just fine on my computer, but it may very well not build on yours. If you do not have a C++ compiled named g++ that generates object files ending in .o and executables with no suffix, if your standard C++ library isn't up to date, if you don't have getopt on your system, etc., you will probably have to do some tinkering.
If you manage to get it to compile under Windows or DOS, you may need to rename downtown to downtown.exe before it'll do anything. If you do manage to make a working DOS or Windows executable, please let me know so I can distribute it.
The binary runs just fine on my computer, but it will probably only run for you if you have an x86-based linux computer with glibc2 (or a means to run binaries for such a system). You may need other libraries as well. A RedHat 6.x/7.x system or equivalent is probably fine. You may want to rename the binary from "downtown-0.2.5" to just "downtown".
You can also find the save games that I've been using to test downtown, and output from the 0.1.0 dump mode (to test your own build, or just to prove that it really does work sometimes) on the project page.
At present, source downloads are available in .tar.bz2 and .tar.gz format, binaries in .bz2 and .gz, and RPMs in, um, .rpm. So you'll probably need tar, bzip2 or gzip, and/or rpm to do anything useful with the stuff you download.
To use each type of file:
If you don't have a modern GNU'd out system, commands like "tar xvjf" may not work for you. Ask someone for help.
If people want other formats for the source (.zip, .sit.bin, etc.), let me know. I can't build binaries for other platforms, or Debian packages, or anything else that would require another computer, but volunteers who wish to build such things are always welcome.
If you have any interest in helping with any of the above--or contributing anything else--please let me know. The best way to volunteer is probably through the project page.
The "PT" in the times above stands for "Pacific [Daylight/Standard, as appropriate] Time," and the times are in 24-hour (aka "European" or "military" or "correct") time. In other words, it's whatever time it says on my screen when I edit the release notes before building the packages.
Why is this project called downtown? Because I borrowed almost all of the algorithms and some of the code from (w)adomf by Petula Clark. And the most famous thing Petula Clark released (unless you know her as a 90s Broadway actress, an 80s country singer, a 70s film star, a 50s TV personality, or a 40s child entertainer) is a string of rock/pop hits in the 60s, starting with a song called "Downtown."
And before you ask, I'm not old enough to remember 1964, but I am old enough (barely) to remember 1978, when the B-52s covered "Downtown."
If someone wants to borrow my code and name a project after the most famous Andi Payn song, you can call it "deltacoman" (see http://www.mp3.com/iceivv/ for details).
Last update 05Jul2001 05:04PT, Andi Payn, payn23DESPAM@hotmailDESPAM.comDESPAM.