Next competition
 

As some people are probably aware, I am taking over the Angband and variants competition from Tony Holmes, who has run it from the beginning for 60 competitions.

This is a call for suggestions or savefiles for a character for the next (November-December) competition. Savefiles can be emailed to me at nckmccnnll@yahoo.com.au; suggestions can be posted here.

The competition has declined somewhat in popularity from when it started; if anyone has any ideas of changes that could be made, or comments on the general idea, or anything else relevant to say, this might be a good place to do it (as opposed to, say, telling a random stranger on the bus).

I think one way to cause a major spike in popularity would be to have the competition hosted here at oook. I realize I'm nominating pav for a lot of extra work, but I just want to throw it out there.

Having a special ladder organized around the parameters of the competition (ie. first by max depth, second by min turncount) would give people a constant index to see what they're up against, and spur them to compete. If there were a big message on the front page of the site reminding folks about the competition I think you'd reach a lot more people that either missed the announcement on rgra or simply forgot about it.

Lastly, I think it would be worthwhile to make slightly more advanced characters as the starting point (I believe this suggestion was made on rgra). I believe that having an excuse to savescum from an advanced stage in the game would entice people to play a variant that isn't their particular cup of tea. Of course, not many people who get so far will want to offer their savefile to the masses, but it would be nice.

I like the competition-centric mini ladder idea!

It might also be worth its own separate forum?

I wouldn't mind seeing a character that starts beyond the first few levels, but higher than that seems like a waste to me. The low levels can in some ways be the most interesting, though it's a phase that goes by quickly.

I think a competition would be great fun, so long as you have a way of checking up on the other entrants. That way I feel kinda plugged in- instead of just playing a normal game by myself. Maybe have all the entrants post an update of their progress every day or so.

I've never been in a competition, so I don't know if those are reasonable ideas or not- but it sounds like fun!

Ok there's now a new forum section for competitions.

Nick, get in touch with me over email and we'll set up something for the competitions here outside the forums.

Cool. I'll email you later today (my time). Meanwhile I'll go over and light a fire under the people on rgra :)

This is a great idea. Though I was a aware of, and bookmarked, the competition page, I rarely visited it (and never entered a competition).

I'm also fully on board with frequent, mini-ladder updates. This will make it feel much more like a competition, rather than a blind auction.

Another idea might be to to have 3 or 4 competitions running simultaneously, but staggered. Maybe start a competition in a different variant every week or so, just in case the current competition isn't ones cup of tea. That way one wouldn't have to wait weeks/months for a new competition to begin.

A little deeper but not too advanced? It might also be nice to have a little blurb about the variant on the competition page, so people who haven't played Entro (or whatever) before will have some idea of what to expect.

I have always been interested to try a competition, but am discouraged by all the unfamiliar variants.

What if each month there were a V competition and also another one with a variant that changes every time?

Out of curiosity, how are the savefiles created?

It would be handy if we knew a way to hack the savefile to turn off the "cheater" bit so that Wizard mode could be used.

Ahhhg, you make it sound so easy. "I'll submit a depth 45 char tonight"

I can hardly make it past 300' without getting canned by orcs.

Nick, I've emailed you a save file for an Oangband-110u High-Elf Assassin. He's at clev 15, 1500' with no resists. Comments are welcome (from everybody).

Is he at 1 HP surrounded by Hydras with empty inventory? :)

Seriously though, any uniques killed? Any artifacts lost/found? Egos?

Is he now in town? Is there enough food/oil/WOR/ID/whatever in town right now? If not in town, is his backpack overfull? Does he have enough consumables on him?

How many 1d5 daggers in his quiver? (I like O assassins.)

Why such a cheesy race? I'd prefer a Hobbit, for example.

No uniques (...except maybe Lotho Pimple and some Maggot dogs), no artifacts, no egos.

He's in town, with enough essentials. Pack is empty except for basic kit.

Two {good} 1d4 daggers.

Well, this was my second [O] character ever, so I wanted to make a character that at least had a shot. Besides, I always cherish the fact that you don't have to worry about see inv.

--

I'm gathering from the tone of your post that you think this char is too tough... My idea was to have an essentially blank-slate character that starts at stat-gain. I figured folks would like to find their own artifacts and have the thrill of killing Wormtongue.

The inexperienced can scum for stat pots if they want to, and players are forced to learn survival skills that don't involve spending an eternity at low levels building their kit, i.e., the kind of tactics that become necessary if you want to survive past 2000'.

So yeah, it's a bit of a challenge game, but a useful exercise, IMO. But maybe that's not what people want in a competition char.

You've got me all wrong. It's really great that there are no artifacts nor uniques killed. If the character is too tough for some lousy players (like me, for example) they can always get to some shallower depth and scum there (if there is WOR depth reset in O, I don't remember). I'd play in that compo.

A later starting point would be interesting - it would give a chance for newbies to play an advanced character even if they can't normally get that deep on their own. Which isn't really the point of the competitions I know, but still fun...

Also just thought of another idea: a series of mini-competitions that last only a few days or a week each. The point of these would be to accomplish some specific task: for example they would be given a savefile with a certain unique on the level, and you have to kill that unique in the fewest turns. Or you need to retrieve a certain item from a vault. The players would be limited to the kit they are given (or can find on the level), because they wouldn't be allowed to leave the level. Perhaps give them an odd set of equipment and make the players deal with what they have. Would this be fun? Thoughts?

I was thinking of chess: playing full games is fun and all, but once and a while it's also fun to solve the "mate in three moves" problems.

This sounds really cool. But I wonder how difficult it would be to set it up. I'm not even sure how you'd go about it. At the very least, it sounds like a fruitful idea for an intrepid developer...

I like it, but I don't know how many others will. I think that the simple fact that you can't scum will irritate quite a few.
Upon reading your post, I immediately thought of Worms (Worms 2/Armageddon), the PC game (which I happen to play a lot). It's a slightly different take on your idea, but I frequently limit commonly used weapons, and power-up the lesser used, so that I will be forced to learn how to play, and win, the game without them. Else I would have to take the time to build a more familiar kit. Without the luxury of time, in this turn count competition, they will likely have to use the starting kit to some degree.

This is the problem I forsee. Given that you are not allowed to leave the level, the game becomes very static and a lot less random, and random dungeon generation is the very heart of Angband. A great deal could be learned from your early failed/sucessful attempts because the dungeon design and creature/object placement wouldn't change from game to game.

There are no cheesy races in O - HE is just slightly less suicidal :)

Also, I used a FA Hobbit Priest in a recent comp and everyone just died horribly - Hobbits really are challenge characters in O (as are Shadow Fairies :mad:).

I'll see how it all progresses. I think I'll probably go back to a comp per month soon (although I'll keep the current one at two months); I don't know about multiple comps at once, but I think making sure there's a V comp at least 1 in 3 months is probably a good thing to aim for.

Someone just creates a character, sometimes plays it for a bit, then sends it in.

This has been done before (Eddie Grove made a hobbit warrior with a perma-cursed Sting wielded), and may be done again, as it was popular. I would certainly be able to create such a thing, or turn off the cheat bit if someone sent me a wizard mode savefile.

pav - love the new comp mini ladder. One request, can there be a sortable column for last updated (which is the submitted date if no updates)? As they don't appear on the homepage I have no quick way of checking for updates. Thanks!

Si

Yeah, I don't know why I went with 'submitted' instead of 'updated', in the first place. So, fixed :>

:D (none of them sort for me)

Click the View full listings below the table first. Then they will sort :)

Thanks very much pav... however something is still a little awry. When I sort on that column, it doesn't actually sort properly:

I get those two 10.11.2008 in between the 11.11.2008s ...?

My fault. Try now.

Thanks pav! Speedy service as always! :)

Sorting by CL does not work for me. (Others work.)

P.S. Oh, and I would like to see max depth in one of the columns. :)

Damn hard apleasing folks these days!

See if you like it better now.

Heh, slightly better, but I can't sort by turncount nor depth. :(

I don't understand why would you want to sort by turncount, but if you want it, you shall have it :)

Sort the ladder by depth and you'll see the light! :)

P.S. Thanks a lot. Sorting was a fancy, but everything adds to the flavour.

I guess since many competitions use XP/TC, an own column for it might make sense.

Just a thought.

Actually, the main competition listing is sorted by XP/TC. Only when you go to the full listing, other sorting options are shown.

Oh, okay.
But still, for comparison =P

On the full view it is back to submitted again...?

Not anymore!

Thanks pav!

An idea for some future short competition, inspired by this screenshot by Shade:

http://angband.oook.cz/screen-show.php?id=1473

Let somebody submit a savefile with an absolutely too deadly vault and let's grade by score (the assumption is it'll measure how much of the vault is explored) or the number of artifacts seen. Two rules: no teleport other in any form and the game ends as soon as the level is left in any way. Or perhaps allow teleport other if the character has a lot of charges so that no scumming for teleport other outside the vault will be needed (would reward boring play).

Is there going to be an archive of all the competitions? I would assume that people would still want to comment on competition dumps even after the end of the competitions. So ideally, you'd need a ladder for each competition. I don't know if pav decided what the layout is yet but it's something to consider. I wouldn't be opposed to a couple competitions at the same time.

@bandobras, I suggested something similar earlier in this thread. I don't know if there would be any interest in eg. the normal competitions running at 2 months each, and a mini comp at for the last two weeks? But that would probably take a lot more work to organize. I dunno.

Though moving the competition to oook seems to have certainly increased its popularity!

I don't have anything particular to say about the variant, cLevel, or whatever for the next comp, but I would like to request

(1) disconnected stairs

(2) a savefile where the ancestors have developed decent monster memory and everseen flavors/books/dragonscale etc
(3) the option to show flavors in descriptions of aware items turned off

If you plan to submit a comp, please at least consider these points.

Sounds good to me. Regarding (3), you can certainly do that in FA and O - I use it to help prevent the long description lines getting truncated on my small PDA screen.

I was kind of curious as to what kinds of competitions there could be other than just fastest to win, so I took a look through all the old competitions. We get the following:

Competitions #35, 38 and 47 don't seem to exist. EDIT: Added most wins so far. EDIT: fixed Dean Chung, thanks Nick.

Cool. Also:


2 - drchung
+
1 - Dean Chung
_
3
:)

Maybe we should do a ToME comp to welcome our long lost brethren. I'm sure somebody could think up something weird.

Then again, it's not like ToME needs any more exposure on the ladder ;)

Since competition 61 seems to have come to a natural end, I have moved the finish date forward to the 19th of December.

This is a call for savefiles for competition 62 - any that are unused will be kept for future comps.

So I've still got a week... :)

You could play that short a game in 2 days :)

Most of my attempts are closer to 2 minutes at the moment...

The last fifteen competitions have been:

65 FAangband 0.3.6 Ent Rogue
64 Entroband 0.7.1 Vampire Ninja
63 Angband 3.1.0 Kobold Rogue
62 Angband 3.0.9b Dwarf Warrior
61 Oangband 1.1.0u High-Elf Assassin
60 Z+Angband 0.2.3 Nibelung Priest
59 Ironband 14Aug08 Human
58 Angband 3.0.9b Human Paladin
57 FAangband 0.3.3 Hobbit Priest
56 Steamband 0.4.1 American Officer
55 UnAngband 0.6.2-wip7b Dwarf Mage (Druid)
54 Oangband 1.1.0 Dwarf Warrior
53 Sangband 1.0.0 Hobbit
52 NPPangband 0.4.1 Hobbit Warrior
51 Angband 3.0.7s3 Gnome Mage

There is no obvious contender for comp 66 (V and NPP new versions are not quite ready; Portralis' maintainer deems it not yet competition ready; Un is a little of both). Comp 65 technically finishes on the 22nd of March, and has seen little recent activity on the competition page.

So any ideas or, even better, savefiles would be appreciated.

I'm not their maintainer, but just for the heck of it I'll put forward TinyAngband and XAngband for consideration. :D

TinyAngband would probably have the highest proportion of people finishing as WINNER ever, so might be good for getting new players in there. It's aimed at being a quick game to play. (P.S. Watch out for death swords!)

Both games are having a lot of fine tuning done on them so it might be best if a 'competition source archive / binary' was produced rather than using the last release.

[EDIT]I've just heard that 0.0.3 of TinyAngband is due for release in a few days. (Don't be put off by the number, no bugs turned up when I played it ;-). That will be the first official English release.

I don't really consider them 'serious contenders' but if there is real interest in this idea I will co-ordinate with the maintainer.

My first thought is that, with four rogues* and a warrior in the last five competitions, it's probably time for a spellcaster. Though I guess the NPP comp when it happens will be a Mage or a Druid.

* - I assume an Assassin plays pretty similar to a Rogue. I know the Ninja did.

Are folks interested in playing a dead(ish) variant? I've recently discovered sCthangband, which is pretty different and very fun, particularly for its magic, though it lacks a squelch system. Or possibly Ey, which was way ahead of itself for UI enhancements and served as inspiration for a lot of NPP's upgrades.

Another option could be Hellband, which I think if it got a little publicity, we'd see some more development from the maintainer. :)

I can work up a savefile for one of these if anyone's interested.

I be more interested in a character that wasn't way overpowered to begin with. I feel that too many of the recent competitions featured characters that have started out at low level with either exceptional armour or weapon. Lucky and Cain come to mind.

The idea there is to give players something they can't get by simply rolling up their own characters, randomly, to induce them to compete. Comps, after all, are the only place where it's socially acceptable to savescum. But Psi with the current comp ably demonstrated there are better ways to do this than give them a neat-o item. Not sure how to provide a single-dungeon solution, other than provide a deep recall.

Really? Did I miss the memo on this?

I assumed he meant 'start again from the same (initial) save file'. Although the competition rules do say that you can do some initial shopping and restart from that save file.

*************************************************

How about Tom Bombadil for a pacifist competition? The winner is whoever defeats Morgoth while killing the fewest number of other monsters. I could set him up with Life + Sorcery and a special area sleep attack. (Special feature: Is unable to identify The One Ring and it has no powers when worn by him ;-)

Precisely. Lighten up, Buzzkill - nobody's cheating.

I've always wondered how a Nethack-esque conduct would work in a *band. Naturally, it would have to be in a variant where charm spells actually work. You'd also have to take care that it wouldn't be a scum-fest for items on the floor - I suppose disconnected stairs would take care of that. There'd also have to be some way of tracking total monsters killed in the dump; I don't know which, if any, variants do that. Fewest monsters killed sounds more fun than least XP to win, though.

I could probably fudge those issues with a 'competition binary/source'. It would be interesting to try, anyway. :D

I was considering a (reduced) XP payout for monsters rendered (mostly) harmless. It would probably be too easily abused, though.

OK, this is what I'm planning (implementing) so far. Comments and notes of (dis)interest very welcome!

Variant: TinyAngband (Morgoth on level 27, quick advance, nice items, relative of Hengband and Zangband)

Character: Tom Bombadil
Race: Earth-spirit*
Class: Avatar*
Melee and ranged pretty much suck, racial ability Twilight Song puts enemies to sleep. Racial ability gets more powerful with level.
Spell realms: Life and Sorcery (essentially Mage/Priest)
The One Ring: Has no power over Tom Bombadil, and its abilities cannot be used by him.
Tom Bombadil is essentially unbeatable while in The Old Forest but loses much of his power out of it.

Monsters can be 'tagged' once for 1/5 normal exp payout. 'Tags' are awarded for non-fatal disabling effects (sleep, teleport away, etc.)

Victory conditions: Banish Morgoth to his prison while killing the fewest other monsters.
If nobody kills Morgoth in the time limit then "Kill Sauron", and if nobody kills Sauron then "Deepest level reached" - all with 'fewest monsters killed' proviso.

The Earth cried out when Morgoth, Lord of Darkness broke free of his prison before the prophesied time of Dagor Dagorath and Tom reluctantly decided to get involved. Killing is not in his nature and he will avoid ending the lives of even the most misguided of Earth's creatures whenever possible.

* Competition special, not in standard game.

Is Tinyband in English? I know you mentioned an English version was forthcoming.. Could you provide a link?

Also, I'm a bit wary of all the special conditions disrupting game balance. It should probably be playtested a bit privately before being submitted for a larger competition.

You can use the compile hints here with the developmental code here to get an English binary.

I think you can point your favourite SVN utility to this url
http://svn.sourceforge.jp/svnroot/xa...yAngband/trunk
to download it.

The official English version will be out in a few days.

Well, I would be quite happy to just have a standard TinyAngband character and a standard competition (first to kill Morgoth), but there didn't seem to be much interest in that.

Obviously I plan to playtest it myself - as it's a 'quick' variant that shouldn't take a vast amount of time.

No OS X version? That sucks.

It seems that the
main-mac.c
version could probably be compiled for OS X. I don't know anything about the Mac side of things so I can't give guarantees.

main-mac.c may or may not work. main-x11.c will certainly work, though the interface is lousy compared to native OS X.

Apparently there's someone on the Japanese side who can compile for OS X. I don't know the details but if it goes ahead he should be able to provide an archive of the binary.

In other news the TinyAngband maintainer has taken over producing the 'competition version' from me. Probably for the best :p (I'll have to get the practice doing something else ;-).

At least if I don't do that bit myself I might be able to take part in the competition. (Depending on whether I end up play testing or not).

[EDIT] Oh, and I still want to hear people's opinions about this (pacifist option and normal comp. in TinyAngband option). The sooner I know whether it's 'go' for the next competition the sooner we can get started.

OK, I have (with a couple of minor hiccups) downloaded and compiled the source to TinyAngband 0.0.3. It seems, though, that the English translation is not complete - object and terrain feature names still seem to be trying to display in Japanese.

I'm also not quite sure how the pacifist thing would work, with the tagging etc.

The translation seems like kind of a showstopper. Do people think we should try to pursue this for the next comp, or do something else and have Tiny later?

I haven't run 0.0.3 specifically (I've been compiling off the development version), but object names at least certainly shouldn't be trying to display in Japanese.

Did you follow the hints in the Compiling XAngband Source page? In particular failing to delete any .raw files before compiling may cause what you've described.

Aha, thanks - I had configured without --disable-japanese the first time, and saw my mistake on running, but forgot the raw files had been written then.

To answer your other concerns;
I'm quite happy (indeed it would be more convenient) to just have a standard TinyAngband character in standard TinyAngband game for "first to kill Morgoth". (The competition period should be short as it is a 'quick' *band variant).

My thoughts on doing a 'special' were just because there didn't seem to be much interest in 'straight' TinyAngband. I envisage the 'tag' system as a way of getting some exp without having to kill monsters. You get exp for 'seriously disadvantaging' monsters. They don't disappear from the level, and if you encounter them again you don't get extra exp for 'disadvantaging' them again (to prevent farming). You still get full exp if you do kill something (but you will generally want to avoid doing that).

None of the 'special competition features' have been implemented yet (although we do have a good idea of how to do it all, and it shouldn't take long if it goes that way).

I think this might be a better option - especially since TinyAngband is new to pretty much everyone. If you want to send me a savefile, I'll get it organised in the next couple of days.

Will do. Er, pm me your email?

I'll get in contact with iks and update him on developments.

Every spammer on the planet has it already:
nckmccnnll@yahoo.com.au

Should I offer congratulations? :D

Looking at the Competition Rules it suggests that having a 'decent monster memory' is recommended so would a low level knowledge of all monsters be a plus? (iks is going to be handling the save file).

[EDIT] OK, I think we're good to go. I'll email you the save file.

[EDITx2] Apparently the person we were hoping for a OS X binary from is busy this week (and it wasn't as easy as hoped). However there is the following information relayed from iks:

If make and gcc for OSX are installed from OSX CD, OSX binary can be
compiled as follows:
% ./configure --disable-japanese --disable-sdl_mixer; make; make install

X for OSX should be installed from CD.

% ./configure --disable-japanese --disable-sdl-mixer; make; make install

(small typo corrected :)) also works for linux.

PS: X for OSX is now officially part of the OS, and does not need to be installed. (Post 10.4)

Nevertheless, the X version is much uglier and the UI is noticeably worse than OSX native :(

I suppose I should give it a spin. If I like it I can do the port. They don't take more than 2 hours with the current main-crb.c, though the makefile is a bit of a pain for non-portable builds. (ie: makefile.inc and/or makefile.src is not present)

If you do, then send it on to me so I can send it to iks (or just pm iks for his email address). My email is blay.paul AT googlemail.com

(I don't know why I bother spam trapping the address - I've got 484 emails waiting to be auto-deleted in gmail's spam folder :confused: )

Oooh I hadn't realized Tinyband was a variant of Hengband...need to read more good. I suppose Xangband must be as well. I'll be checking it out directly.

Maybe next time...

Oh, yes. I forgot about that post. ^ ^;

iks thought that Warrior would be the best choice for a variant you're playing for the first time.

Competition 98
 

OK, I'm doing a bit of thread necromancy here because I want to make it a regular thing to discuss the next comp beforehand, and this thread already has some useful info in it. I'll ask pav to make it sticky.

The current comp has a few days to run, and I'm intending to have another V comp for 99. The obvious choices for 98 are RePos or Cheng, and I'd appreciate a savefile. My email is included at least twice in this thread...

I'll get back to you with a re-pos file, but I'd be interested in Chengband too :D

hi , please turn on stairs in competition~ thanks .. eeeee

So that you could stair-scum because you have no skill to play game othewise? I don't think that would happen.

please no rage, i like stair scum, ee~ i think its good time.. if u dont, please dont do it... ???

The entire point of a competition is to put everyone on an even footing. If you stairscum and the rest of us don't, then you get an unfair advantage. Going with disconnected stairs simply obviates that issue by ensuring that nobody can stairscum.

In a competition with connected stairs, the winner is going to be the person most willing to abuse stairscumming. Since most of us don't want to play a comp about that, we prefer disconnected stairs.

A compromise would be an FaA competition as its wilderness is hard-wired to have connected stairs (but with disconnected stairs as options for the dungeons).
Hmm - did the connected wilderness stairs give anyone a big stair-scumming edge in previous FaA competitions? I suppose the alternative would be to make future FaA competitions ironman events - to paraphrase dos350, "eek"...

PS Is anyone else tempted to modify Orfax and Boldor to say things like "eek", "hoo", "disconnected stairs please" and "I've got the munchies"? (only relevant for O/Z-variants, unless V uniques can talk now) :)

http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=3993
Hehehe. This isn't like what you are suggesting, but funny enough.

It does with non-Ironman mages who can stair scum the wide open Fenns using telekenesis...

Pre v1, Ang56/58 used to give bountiful treasures. It is toned down now though.

Heh, that's close enough, Philip. He's turning into a very effective "stay away from drugs, kids" cautionary tale...

Psi - I'd forgotten about Telekinesis. That combination is pretty unbalancing alright. Talking of FaF competitions, I really ought to set up a competition entry for a weaponless Druid, if only I wasn't too lazy to work out how to disable the a) slot...

yes, we need more ironman comps.

look for functions with "tester_hook" in them. Maybe item_tester_hook_wear.

My first reaction to this was "But we need something which is just changed in the savefile".

But in fact, we could have custom versions of the game to be played just for the competition - that might be fun.

Custom versions will lead to clutter.

In this case, could you create a permacursed object and wield it? Then nothing else is ever wielded into that slot.

But then you'd use that for your attacks instead of the barehanded attacks.