Development
Development of ADOM started on July 12, 1994 and continued steadily since until November 20, 2002. Core development on the game stopped with the release of version 1.1.1. Beta-quality ports to Mac OS X of this version appeared in 2006. Plans for future versions have not been announced, yet a next-generation successor to ADOM, called JADE, is in development and betas have been released. The developer has renamed the following game to ADOM II, leaving JADE as a game engine name.
On the 2nd of July 2012 a crowd funding campaign was been initiated by Thomas Biskup to resurrect ADOM development. The campaign reached its initial goal of $48,000 on the 22nd of August, 2012, 51 days after starting, and finished at $90,169.
Although ADOM is available free of charge, unlike most roguelikes its source code is unavailable. Despite earlier announcing that the source code would be published after the release of version 1.0, Biskup later chose to reserve it for himself in order to retain some mystery about game operation and to curtail the spread of unsanctioned variants. Despite this stance, he is open to licensing the source to capable developers to form a commercial venture. Players meanwhile have deduced underlying mechanisms through careful experimentation and reverse-engineering by inspecting the execution flow, memory and binaries of the game, although this is something Biskup disrespects.
Despite Biskup's decision to not publish the source code to ADOM, he states in his blog (accessible on the official ADOM website) that he may be ready to reconsider his decision. In a post discussing possible events of the year 2009, he states that it is unlikely that he will work on ADOM any time soon, and is willing to discuss possible release models with the community. Thus, Biskup has dedicated a subforum on the official ADOM forums for the discussion of this matter.
Read more about this topic: Ancient Domains Of Mystery
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