Preparing for 4.2 release
 

There are now new builds on the nightlies page and angband.live with the following changes:

• The 'p' option in targeting works again (thanks Ingwe)
• New experimental birth option - to-dam, instead of a flat damage boost, adds a percentage (5% per +1) of the damage dice. Some of you will realise that this is the central feature of O-combat, and I was kind of curious to see how it looks if just that change is made. The short answer is it's a bit broken, but not nearly as much as I expected. The effects are roughly:
  • Damage from small dice weapons is significantly reduced
  • Regular damage is somewhat reduced across the board
  • Damage from slays and brands is generally increased
  So it might be an interesting option for some, and it also makes a discussion point for potential future combat system changes :)
• Added a THROWING flag for weapons which are intended to be thrown. The existing weapons to get it are daggers and spears, and I have also added throwing axes and throwing hammers. The effect of the flag is that the damage of the thrown weapon now includes the player's innate to-dam value (so from =Damage, etc) as well as the weapon's.
• Added a new type of shield, Knight's Shield (heavier and better for bashing)
• Smallish rework of artifacts:
  • The 'thancs have all been nerfed from 2d4 to 1d4
  • Wormtongue has the speed bonus replaced by a moves bonus, and acquires trap immunity
  • Belegennon has its DEX and stealth bonuses replaced by damage reduction (think Frodo being stabbed by the orc captain in Moria)
  • New artifact, Knight's Shield of Eärendil, and all the artifact shields got the correct damage dice

These are the last gameplay changes (as distinct from bugfixes) that I intend before releasing version 4.2.0. The number of bugs on my list has now dropped below 30; I would appreciate any feedback on this list (things I've missed, things that are incorrect or no longer a problem).

So this is now a call for complaints. What's wrong with the current state of the development version? In particular, I am interested in feedback on the new classes and the changes to the monster list, but also on other things that have changed since 4.1.3 like XP penalties (both for races and classes), artifact changes, randarts, lighting. Feel free also to re-litigate changes made from 4.0 to 4.1, or suggest lost features from even older versions or new stuff.

Lack of comment will be taken as approval :)

I'm generally very pleased with the new changes but I got few complaints now that you asked for them:

Packs of Old Forest Trees don't add anything to the game. Other than sometimes blocking a corridor. I just ignore them every time I see one.

Another tree complaint is about Hasty Ent. If you wake one up, you basically want to lure it somewhere and destruct the area, because it finds you anywhere and digs walls. I'm not particularly fond of those Huorns either. Mostly because they start to appear bit too early.

Wiruin is the kind of unique you just want leave it where you spotted it and never come back. Or destruct it. This, if you can detect it before it gets you.

For flavors I don't tend to complain but "Etten"?

Staff of Starlight and Wand of Door Destruction I never use, even though they are supposed to be beneficial. Buff em or ditch em.

Also, the game has too many fights against canines. Wolves and wargs are everywhere and then come the Z's. I sometimes even let myself to get wounded under 50% HP, just so I can get the whole wolf pack to follow me in the corridor without pelting them moving on and off from doorway (EDIT: this, of course, is a very old issue. Not the new problem).

These came in my mind first. Some changes are excellent, like huge buffs on mature dragons, wraith buffs. Nazguls being moved much deeper is kinda good but Uvatha wasn't nowhere near as dangerous as other dlvl70 uniques.

+1 to this!

I thought you were planning at some point to start individual threads for the various character classes to do this systematically. (Maybe I'm just hallucinating... or someone has snuck in a mushroom of confusion into my rations. Amnesia - that's it! :rolleyes: )

I've liked most of the changes to classes and monsters, except for the big nerf to Rangers. It's bad enough that I stopped playing that class completely, but it did get me to try out the other new classes. :)

The tree monsters don't bother me as much, I think they add a neat bit of Tolkien flavor. Multi-headed hydrae seem a bit too much still. If I detect a pit, I'll avoid it at all costs, I didn't use to do that. And gorgons summoning 8-headed Hydra can get out of hand quickly.

Ooh, I will enjoy trying the new combat damage thing. I hope weird, big damage dice weapons drop like they do in O and FA, like 2d17 lances. I can't remember much about my recent playthrough of Vanilla... sometime, last year?

Complaints?
I still think lanterns should be in the general store.

Carry on!

What is it about rangers - the reduction from 2 to 1 extra shot, or the change in their spells, or both?

Yes, I might need to nerf both of those a bit more.

New builds up on the nightlies page and angband.live to fix a bug that was stopping randart files from loading.

Extra shots IMO.

Both. Losing resistance and haste is huge. (Same for rogues.) Teleport other is still plenty common, so less of a loss. The supply of resistance potions--along with other utility scrolls and potions-- is way down too, now that Temple and Alchemist are combined.

Finding Scarabtrices was huge in previous releases. The new spell books don't come close to replacing it.

Also, at least a while ago, ironman ranger was a disaster. No fun. All the nerfs plus you have to carry three shooters to get enough ammo. And minimal incentive to use a bow. A create arrow spell would help a lot and maybe additional to-hit bonus for bows only.

I really like almost all of the new features so far. I think the new classes have really tightened up and are working well (though I'm inclined to agree with those who think Necromancers and Rangers are still a little underpowered).

Playing with randarts is even more fun than it was before. I actually like the trees, they require a bit of tactics to tackle (much like nexus quylthugs -- yes, they're annoying, but they're an interesting challenge) and make fire-related items much more worth hanging onto. My gameplay style is definitely changing to use items that I previously didn't bother with because they weren't useful enough. It's cool to have new uses for familiar objects that I never took notice of in earlier versions.

I agree with whoever said lanterns should be available in the General Store, though I'd be fine with them being relatively rare. Or maybe rings of light should sometimes turn up in the magic shop, or earlier in the dungeon? I'm also frustrated by how often there are no shooters available in the weaponsmith's.

Re: someone else's comment about Staves of Starlight, do they actually do more damage than a Staff of Light? If not, then I think they're completely pointless, but if they do significantly more damage they have value, especially for tackling orc or jelly pits.

Am I hallucinating or has dragon scale male become rarer? Also, I understand you've reduced drop rates for spellbooks @ can't use, but in my games with the build before this one, I was getting a LOT of prayer books, particularly Cleansing Power and one of the dungeon prayer books (at weirdly early dungeon levels), while playing a Rogue.

One random thing I've suggested before but thought I'd throw out there again anyway: I think it would be thematically appropriate for Kobolds to get, say, a +1 or +2 to tunneling given that they're meant to live in the underdark.

ETA another point: the behaviour of the Rogue spells Cure Poison and Resist Poison now seems inconsistent in light of the recent change to !RP to both cure and prevent poisoning (especially considering that the Heroism and Berserk Rage spells for other classes both cure and resist fear). I'm not sure this is really a problem (or whether it's already been discussed), but since they get Resist Poison right after they get Cure Poison anyway, maybe those two spells should be rolled together and a different spell added instead.

I'm not sure what other spell, but it occurs to me that something that could be super useful for Rogues would be a spell that temporarily enhances stealth in some way -- either by 'quieting' their footsteps or making them invisible/shadowy. Alternatively, some sort of 'backstab' spell might be useful -- phase door to target, make a sneak attack, and phase door away? Or would that be too powerful? I know the half-casters aren't meant to have attack spells but it does seem thematically appropriate. (It'd suit Blackguards as well.)

I don't know if this sort of thing has been suggested before because I don't follow the development forums too closely, but I'd be interested to hear what anyone else thinks about it. I'm just spitballing, as is the way of my people.

Rangers still get haste.

I'd say it's pretty severely broken. Here is an example with regard to a pretty great early launcher, and comparing some enchanted pebbles with a bog standard iron shot. The average damage/round calculations are definitely wonky. Have the magics all been excluded?! :confused:

@ STR 18/10 DEX 18/50
Sling of Accuracy (x2) (+19,+6)
Rounded Pebble (1d2) (+5,+4) Average damage/round 4.4
Iron Shot (1d4) (+0, +0) Average damage/round 6.4

This looks reasonable (well, expected) - with that sling you're getting (1d2 + 50%) x 2 for the pebbles, and (1d4 + 30%) x 2 for the shot.

This is pretty broken, I agree. If you are going to use deadliness, you really need to make the base damage higher, since angband monsters tend to have more HP than O monsters. Or you need to make the deadliness multiplier higher. +10 should be closer to 100% than 50%. You knocked the value of that sling almost to zero here. (Difference between 5 dam and 6.4 dam is just miniscule, and it is worthless after around DL 5.)

Finally, compare it to magic devices. With this calculation, a sling will ALWAYS be worse than a lousy wand of lightning, which I never carry for more than a little while. You need to balance damage with other forms of offense.

I think those calculations show why in variants that work of damage dice and % damage increase, ammo damage is always set much higher.

The current values are designed for much of the damage coming from damage bonuses.

Some math: with the new system, melee DPR is
where nblows scales from 1 to about 6 with CL, and base_damage currently from 2 to 20 depending on the weapon (with more powerful weapons at lower DLs).

Ranged DPR, on the other hand, is

where nshots ranges from 1 to 2 (maybe 3 for rangers with very good equipment), base_damage*launcher_multiplier scale together from 3 for a sling with pebbles to 12 for a heavy crossbow with bolts, for regular ammo, and 4x as much for specialty ammo such as mithril.

weapon_bonus, launcher_bonus, ammo_bonus all scale from 0 to about 1, very loosely dependent on level, but it's not impossible, with some luck, to find enchanted arrows and a bow of power with high bonus even early in the game. They are forced to have the same scale, if we want enchant weapon scrolls to work in the same way on all targets.

The most obvious asymmetry is that there are more multiplicative factors for ranged damage. This might require some more work to balance, but it's not so big of a problem.

In my view the biggest problem is that ranged damage scales less sharply with CL, since nshots is a lot more flat than nblows. This makes ranged damage very equipment-dependent, so luck-dependent. A possible solution would be having nshots scale with level like nblows (with rangers getting a bonus), but that would require everyone to blow through much more ammo. What about having a STR-dependent, or DEX-dependent, might multiplier? That would restore some scaling with CL for ranged damage.

Another effect of the change is that ranged damage now scales linearly with ammo and launcher type: slings will always deal less than half as much damage as crossbows. This isn't necessarily bad, but it makes them almost useless in the late game. Maybe bows and crossbows should be deeper items, so that there is a gradual upgrade through the game, with crossbow the natural late-game choice for everyone who isn't a ranger.

Why not make the draw (~multiplier) of a launcher require a minimum strength?
Sling = none.
Short bow = low
Long bow = bit higher
Light Xbow = high
Heavy Xbow = very high

We already have min strength for lances and other super heavy melee weaps

Another point to consider is that ranged damage is currently a very effective way to get through the early game, for various underpowered race/class combinations. A gnome mage is much tougher to play without a sling or a bow.

I'm not certain what you mean. If you mean a minimum str to use a crossbow, the game already has that.

If you mean the multiplier is based on str(draw) thats odd on mechanical device like a crossbow. It takes str or a mechanism to load it, not to shoot it.

I've been contemplating str based shots/round with a bonus for rangers with str being draw on a bow or reload on a crossbow. The idea being slings are fast first (like the dagger) and the crossbow never getting enough shots/round to be ideal for late game rangers, but never got round to plugging in numbers to see if it worked out right.

New builds up on the nightlies page and angband.live which try to deal with some of the issues raised so far in this thread:

• Rangers get a new spell, Create Arrows, which allows them to convert a staff into a stack of arrows. The better the staff, the more likely to get better arrows
• Rangers get .1 extra shots every 3 levels now, so that's up to a max of 1.6 - almost back to their former glory
• 9-headed hydras made to summon much less (and breathe more), and reduced hitpoints for them and gorgons
• Staffs of starlight now give off damaging light; wands of Door Destruction replaced with wands of Darkness

Thanks for all the discussion of the percentage damage option - hope people are having fun thinking about it. I'll probably play with it a bit to see if I can make it viable without wrecking regular damage, but it really was a spur-of-the-moment addition. So probably I'll be more focused on bugfixing.

I really like the idea of using staff level to improve the quality of the arrows! Well done!

It would be interesting to have both combat approaches available through options. You will keep the new one?

I like *all* these changes. Especially 'Create Arrows', which is so brilliant it feels like it should have existed all along. Thanks for your hard work, Nick. I feel like you've improved the game by leaps and bounds already.

My blackguard is making good use of the Knight's Shield, even though I still haven't found a really decent melee weapon at CL29. (And I had a major setback during my first dive when a room full of dragonflies ruined most of my armour. Those things are NASTY.)

The help files, especially birth.txt, are outdated. That file is missing the new classes, and description about old classes should probably be revised (for ex: rangers use wisdom instead of intelligence now).

Apologies, Nick, if you've already thought through all of this. Please feel free to ignore it. :)

I believe you should be able to get the balance for percentile damage boosts mostly right through pure analysis, though it will of course take gameplay testing to really dial it in. I am assuming however that the goal is "bigger weapons should deal bigger damage" without otherwise affecting balance -- i.e. players will choose different weapons to use, but will otherwise have similar DPS as under the standard rules.

Under that assumption, you "merely" need to look at a variety of scenarios, representing different classes/stats and different "optimal gear". For example, a level-1 half-troll warrior with a Main Gauche under the old rules ought to map to a level-1 half-troll warrior with a Bastard Sword or a Lead-Filled Mace under the new rules. As long as they do comparable damage, you should be within spitting distance of correct balance.

There's a couple of caveats of course, to wit:

* The current system has very flat damage, because most of the damage is constant and the player gets multiple blows per round. Moving to a dice-multiplier situation while at the same time reducing blows per round means that damage will be massively more variable, and should probably be increased somewhat overall to compensate (e.g. 50 damage per blow @ 1 blow/round instead of 10 damage per blow @ 4 blows/round).

* Classes that cannot manage the strength to wield heavier weapons should not be excessively penalized.

* Why would anyone ever want to use a weapon with small damage dice under the new rules? What happens to small-dice artifacts?

* Somewhat minor, but at level 1 characters will not be able to afford the bigger weapons, so damage output in the very first dungeon dive will be substantially reduced compared to current. In general melee characters will have a slower start. This will particularly hurt ironman characters, as few early weapons have big dice.

You may find that this option will also require altering damage dice on weapons. It's possible that you could do this automatically but it'd probably be easier to have two sets of dice in the data files.

I like the idea of a spell for rangers to create arrows. For most of the rangers I've run, the main reason they decide to head back to town is because they've burned through all of the 80 arrows they started the trip with. Other classes go home because they've got full inventories or are overburdened, but ranger just run out of arrows. This should help avoid that.

@Derakon got it right. Do compare the expected mean damage output of a 'good' distsnce weapon wutb a 'good' melee weapon for a given dungeon level. Same for ego items. Distance weapons are way low just now.

Yes, I have a ticket for this. Also, takkaria has done an awesome online version of the help. The plan is to cut in-game help to the basics (command keys, symbols, etc), and encourage people to use the online one (which they can also build locally if they want).

Thanks again everyone for the discussion of the new damage option. I am indeed planning to keep it. I agree with Derakon that the small-dice weapon issue is probably the trickiest; I'll give it more thought, and I'm sure I won't be the only one :)

Looking at the decoy code, all pathing with PROJECT_STOP flag stops when hitting a decoy, which means player spells and probably missiles will hit the decoy if there is one in a corridor between the player and a monster. Shouldn't that be limited to monster spells only?

Yes, it probably should.

The ticket should probably also mention that hobbits are *not* actually any better with slings than anybody else; that bit of 'flavour' in the help file may be canon or fanon, but it ain't accurate.

Online help ...
 

Good job Takkaria to do an online help.

I just think it does the game no good if the download page and the online help page are not the same one.

Angband Live?
 

My search did not show any results to Angband live (or did i just overlook them?).

Please what is Angband Live?

Necromancers
 

Even tho i dislike the reduction of book numbers a lot,
i must admit that on 2nd look the new books seem to make sense overall.

I just toyed around character generation and i thought that high-elves should never be necromancers or blackguards. Just my imagination?

discriminating females
 

The character background always refers to the father alone ...
to make babies you need a female as well.

You are the son of a human royal prince and an elven woman.

More like this ...

birth option usefull kit
 

I start usually with the birth option usefull kit off.

As mage you have a hard time then ... no starting books available in the shop ... doh!

Lol, mage without useful kit. Isn't that masochism?

Tibarius is, as I recall, very big on shopping. Presumably the intent is to start with max gold (the "useful kit" deducts from your starting gold) so they can buy exactly what they want to buy instead of what the game thinks they should have.

Considering how weak mages are in the early game, I could absolutely see someone deciding to e.g. get an attack wand instead of spellbooks.

Are you looking in the right shop? Shop 4 is now a bookseller rather than temple, and holds town books for all the classes.

That's a good point.

Click the link and find out :D

Mage books are sold by Bookseller now.

This *is* a good point, although we've come a long way since the shops gave you a discount if you played a female character because I guess the original developers believed in the mythical "pussy pass"?

Feminism? In *my* Angband? It's more likely than you think!

I wonder if adding some professions as well might be add a bit of flavour. The key would be not to assign them by gender or use gendered terminology, e.g. 'dancer' is gender-neutral but 'dancing girl' is problematic. There's no reason the father can't be a weaver or a tailor (note that 'seamstress' is again problematic), and no reason a mother can't be a warrior or a priest. There are all sorts of other potentially interesting professions you might add as well, e.g.,

• Apothecary
• Healer
• Bowyer
• Fletcher
• Innkeeper
• Archaeologist
• Teacher
• Candlemaker
• Tanner
• Brewer
• Miller
• Baker
• Potter
• Chancellor
• Sergeant at arms

Alternatively, you could go Pythonesque and just say, "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries."

You see 2 Gloopy Green Potions.
Your body starts to scramble...
You see a Gloopy Green Potion of Surprise.

um, when did this get added? It's quite a surprise. :D

It was a replacement for Lose Memories. A number of possible effects, one of them potentially useful.

You drink a Gloopy Green Potion of Surprise. You hear Mike Patton starting to sing...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCdUfAE5Rz8

:D

Minor cosmetic bug using Create Arrows spell. It stays 'untried' in the spell list, even after you have already successfully cast it. You don't get extra scum EXP casting it over and over again, though :)

I'm playing with UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer enabled and when a monster cast a darkness spell, it emitted the following message:
project-player.c:874:28: runtime error: index 26 out of bounds for type 'element_info [25]'

Apparently, the function 'project_p' does not expect the projection type ('typ') to be outside of the element projections (ELEM_MAX: 25), which DARK_WEAK (26) is.

Confirmed, same is happening for me.

Thanks for those last two bugs, both easily fixed in development.

New builds up on the nightlies page and angband.live with the following changes:

• Lightning Strike can now only strike targets in line of sight (thanks kaypy)
• Meteor Swarm now has the subsequent meteors continue past where a dead targeted monster was rather than continually hammering the same grid (kaypy again); this is a result of more general code to make multi-effect spells target correctly
• Cones of effect now make sure to hit every grid in the target path (thanks wobbly)
• Create arrows spell now stops showing as untried when it's tried (thanks Sphara and gglibertine)
• Memory overrun error in darkness spell fixed (thanks Kusunose)
• Recharge activation for Thingol now reasonable (thanks Holy_Rage)
• Fast monsters summoned by traps are now held until the player gets a move (thanks Sphara)
• The correct maximum (z_info->f_max) is used for bounding terrain features in map_info() (thanks wobbly)

There are also a few things which have been reported a while ago and I'm not sure if they're still problems:

• Crashes or other weird behaviour from Single Combat
• Problems giving things with the {??} inscription to stores
• Monsters failing to attack a ranger's decoy

so if anyone can clear those up one way or the other, that would be good.

So had my 1st death to bloated, & while there was a good chance I was dead anyway it still just felt like a bad way to die. I don't see what this adds if the solution is to press R x if full. My own opinion is this is just reverting to a bad mechanic that was originally removed because it was in fact bad.

I think the system needs some improvement - for example, ?SatisfyHunger needs to set the players's hunger to just full, rather than almost gorged. If it's working properly, the simple rule should be "don't eat if you're already full", and that should almost always avoid getting gorged.

In addition, I think there should be some better measure of hunger status. How do you judge the time between "Full" and "Hungry"? And then one can go too quickly from Hungry to Weak. Once you see that Hungry indication, it is often too late to start foraging. You see a ration, is it safe to eat it, or will @ soon be in a fight where quaffing potions will leave @ Gorged, slowed and dead (especially dangerous in the final fights)? So many "gotcha's" have been removed from the game, or changed to be meaningful in an interesting way (ala traps), but reintroduction of hunger as currently implemented has just been bringing back a "gotcha" that was removed for good reason.

What do you feel the Gorged status adds to the game? Or perhaps a better question is, what potential do you see in the concept?

It's an extra constraint on how the player deal with food. If there's no constraint at the top, then it's just a matter of stuffing your face when you're in town and not thinking about it at all. And before anyone mentions ironman, I'm trying to bring back ironman's status as a challenge option :)

On Ingwe's idea, we could always have a meter of some sort.

It sounds like your goal then is to make it more important for the player to manage hunger while in the dungeon; is that accurate? If I understand you correctly, then couldn't you accomplish your goal by just significantly reducing the satiation maximum? If "maximum Full" was half or a third of what it is now, other sources of food contributed less fullness, and Satisfy Hunger was rarer, that would make players have to manage their food more closely. And the penalty for overeating could simply be that you wasted food, not that you were slowed.

To clarify my opinion a little, I'm not absolutely against a speed penalty, I just think -10 is well over the top. If the intention is to catch the player out & kill the @ it makes sense. If it's just there to annoy the @ enough to stop stuffing its face with rations you could probably achieve that with as little as -2 or so.

I also wouldn't mind seeing food a little less plentiful or filling, but not necessarily by much. I don't think there's many people who'd want to play angband as a food management game.

It doesn't resemble a hunger mechanic anymore rather than not-being-gorged mechanic.
I got gorged against Morgoth in the middle of fight drinking healing potions. So this is what I have concentrate in the future? To rest off satiation level before big fights?

Personally, I would remove food altogether but I think there's enough vocal opposition against that. At least show the satiation level if this is really where the food mechanic is going.

OK, I have some ideas. Next build should include them.

Little bug on Beorn. In monster description, his human form is supposed to move at normal speed and bear form is supposed to move quickly (+10). Still, Beorn has normal speed in both forms.

Yeah, that's actually intended (it's meant to be only the race that changes), but silly in the case of speed. I'll change that.

Shouldn't it be everything but hps? I'd expect AC to change for instance. I'm also a little curious about what happens if something shapechanges into a breeder.

I think it's wrong that shape-changed monsters get the high-end powers of the new shape. You might look like Huan, or even get the hitpoints, but really, you get all the supreme powers too? And what about shape-changing into things with spell powers? Did the shape-changer get an instant education that took years for the actual one to learn?

The big shapechangers are Maiar, so yeah, I reckon they can do anything they set their minds to.

As far as what the actual mechanics go, when a monster changes currently they just change their race. So they keep their current hitpoints, status effects, and inventory, but for many things it is the race that is looked at - spellcasting and other abilities, hearing, smell, AC are all examples. For detail, look at what is in struct monster_race and what is in struct monster in monster.h. Speed is a special case because, while average speed is defined in the race, speed for an individual monster is allocated at birth, and may be a couple of points above or below average. Consequently speed needs to be changed when the player changes.

Just something I spotted while porting some stuff to PWMAngband...

File: player-util.c

One day you should get rid of that "player" global variable... And the "cave" one while you're at it...

OK, new builds up on the nightlies page and angband.live which will probably break savefiles (although probably not if the character's food counter is below 1/2). Changes are a couple of bugfixes plus a biggish rework of food; in detail:

• Shapechanging monsters adopt the speed of their new shape
• Character state of nourishment is now referred to in most places as a percentage
• There is a permanent hunger meter displaying the percentage, along with the usual hunger descriptions
• Full now starts at 80% nourished, and the player loses 1 speed with every 2% above that
• No more gorged status or vomiting
• Regeneration now goes faster the more nourished the player is, including when they are full
• Druids' Herbal Healing has been replaced by Rapid Regeneration, which gives phased healing over several turns (as before) at the cost of 10% nourishment per turn, and Herbal Curing, which cures the same status conditions as before plus Black Breath
• Rangers get Herbal Curing but not Rapid Regeneration
• Necromancers in the early stage of vampire form where they still get HP and nourishment from their bite attack are immune from slowing due to fullness
• Satisfy Hunger (both scrolls and spells) now sets the player to 50% nourished; Elvish Waybread sets to 75% (or gives no nourishment if the player is already above 75%)

These are quite big changes, which aim to integrate the food system more thoroughly into the game. I think they work well, but let me know how they play.

Thanks. You're right, of course, but not tonight :)

Looking at the change that adds random attack to bloodlust-affected characters... it involves modifying the process_command() function. Ouch... When I look at this function in PWMAngband... it's a client function. This means modifying the code like in V doesn't prevent anyone from hacking the client and removing/tweaking it. Not something that I would want...

Now looking where I could implement that on the server instead... it seems the best location would be the "has_energy" function which rejects commands if the player doesn't have enough energy to act. Including the code there and returning "false" when a random attack occurs should work fine.

File player-attack.c, about shield bashes:

Problem: blows is always 0 (see py_attack), so the x2 buff always applies for all weapons...

FYI, my savefile didn't break and when I started my food was at 99%. Rested and down to 76%, when for a whim I cast Satisfy Hunger (I'm trying out the revamped Ranger class). Food drops to 49%. Shouldn't the Satisfy Hunger verse just do nothing and leave you at 76%?

Later I ate two slime molds (yum!) which take me to 83% and slow, so I cast Satisfy Hunger and back to normal 49%. I can also verify that the Satisfy Hunger scroll acts the same way.

Satisfy Hunger putting you at 50% even when you are above that is by design, I think. It has always been this way: the spell is both a way to cure hunger and to ensure that the next 2 or 30 CCW potions won't leave you gorged.

Reading that function signature, I *do* wish it included const correctness. All those mysterious pointers, and I am trying to figure out what arguments might change underfoot!

Satisfy hunger used to put you at, but not above, satiation. It was a dangerous spell if you planned to get into a big fight. Having it as a replacement for potions of salt water is a much better solution.

While still not a fan of the "hunger" mechanic, though I may be converted over time once I get used to it again, I think these changes make it much more manageable and much less of a "gotcha". Thank you, Nick! One question, I can't tell for certain, but it seems to me that Slow Digestion isn't working very well anymore, if at all. Am I imagining this, or did the changes break Slow Digestion?

It should work just as before - it divides the amount of food digested by 5. Other things have changed around it which may make it feel different; I believe I haven't broken it.

PowerWyrm - keep it up :)

There's no has_energy function in the V code, but I guess the equivalent would be in process_player(), or the bit of run_game_loop() where process_player() is called?

That was a nice bug ;)

Here are some notes I wrote up over the last few weeks. Some of these items have been on my mind for years, some are from last week. There are bug reports, wishes, and ideas. Some are very minor. Some not so minor. I think most of these are still relevant to the nightly from last week. I haven’t played the most recent nightly yet.

I play on a mac with Shockbolt’s tileset.

1. Stealing Bug. If you steal from a monster when your pack is full, your pack overflows and the last item gets dropped even if the item you stole is on your ignore list, so it also is not in your pack. So, you have an empty slot and an item on the floor that you have to pickup.

2. Lighting Bug. If you enter a dark room and explore it fully, it becomes fully lit. Then a monster spits darkness at you, so a region around @ becomes dark again. Once you can see again, the region of magical-dark becomes lit while your light source covers it, but if you move away while staying in the room the magical-dark region becomes shadowed, even though you are still in the room. Is this intentional? I guess there could be a distinction between natural-darkness and magical-darkness, but it still seems like a bug. Walking over magical-dark with a light source only temporarily lights the region, while walking over natural-dark with a light source permanently changes it.

3. Easy Digging Bug. I can’t pin this one down. But sometimes it becomes impossible (or at least impossibly long) to dig. I mean it takes thousands of turns to dig into quartz, or so many turns that I give up. This has only happened when I have had 2 shovels (+0,+0) in my pack and was wielding a normal weapon (like dagger or main gauche), but it hasn’t always happened under those circumstances. I thought maybe if there was a stack of an even number of diggers, the wielded weapon gets selected as your best digger. But I can’t reproduce this one reliably.

4. Display Bug. Some items like Cammithrim or the Battle Axe of Balli Whatshisname get their name (that displays at the top of the window when you are looking at them) truncated. But it truncates the start and leaves the last characters. Surely, it should truncate the end and display the beginning.

5. Acid Attack Bug. Cones of Acid have no visual representation. Fire cones have little flames in each square, cold cones have little blue snowballs, etc. But acid cones are completely absent. There is just a slight stutter. I think @ flashes once. And you take damage, get comments, etc. (I am guessing this only applies to Shockbolt’s tileset.)

6. Recall Walking Bug. Once when I was recalling back to town, I was walking down a dungeon corridor until the recall took effect. When I arrived in town, @ landed on the down stairs in town and then immediately stepped onto the lava next to the stairs. There was no warning asking if I really wanted to step onto lava. I am guessing the last keypress to walk along the corridor in the dungeon carried over as it happened after the recall event. (Or is this related to the running bug previously reported that causes @ to step one extra step when running. I may have been running. Can’t really remember.) In any case, why was there no warning? “Do you really want to step onto lava?” (Happened once.)

7. Feather Falling. I like diving and find the opportunity to do so in game limiting (not enough Deep Descent). From my point of view Feather Falling is a malus not a bonus. I know it helps with spike pits etc. But those are such minor events in most cases. I would never wear a ring of feather falling. What I am suggesting is that Feather Falling should be considered one of the new curses. It has an upside: spares you spike damage. But also a downside: stops you from descending more than one level. So, when it occurs on a shield or shoes etc. it should be removable. For anyone who doesn’t like diving, they would just never remove that “curse”.

8. Summoning. Are low level summoners sometimes way over-summoning? I think there was a recent tweak to make high level summoners summon less. But did the tweak flatten the curve so low level summoners now summon more. I had a priest summon a bunch of blackguards and more priests who then summoned more etc. I died very quickly. (Happened once.)

9. Drop All. From the item menu you can Drop (press d) or Drop All (press shift+d). If you choose Drop All, you then get asked to confirm (y/n). Seems if Drop All is meant to be a shortcut, it should require fewer keystrokes than d+*+enter, but it’s the same shift+d+y. I would get rid of the y/n.

10. Pick-up All. I often play with the pick-up everything option. When monsters die and drop something that rolls beneath my feet, I never remember to pick that something up until I have walked one square away and then have to go back and pick it up. It would be nice if when you have the pick-up everything option, if you leave a square with something on the floor you pick it up, not only when you enter the square.

11. Poisoning. It would be nice to have a poison meter or grades of poison (like now for hunger). Especially, it would be nice to distinguish “You are Mortally Poisoned” meaning the amount of poison will kill you at your current hp from “Slightly Poisoned” which means you have more hp than the poison will take from you. Also, it would be nice to be able to run when you are Slightly Poisoned or whatever it would be called.

12. Uniques Dropping Cursed Items. Several times I have had uniques drop items with the new curses on them. This is annoying. I think uniques should drop something special. At least, they should not drop cursed items.

13. No-Magic-Devices Option. Sometimes I like to play a warrior without using any devices (no wands, rods, staves). And of course books are irrelevant for warriors. It would be nice to have an option that squelches all devices and books from the start, so you don’t have to do it one item at a time.

Just some thoughts. I want to take the time here to thank everyone who posts here. I really appreciate it. I have read almost everything posted for the last ten years. A big thank you to Derakon, takkaria, and Nick!

Not sure I understand your issue with Feather Falling. It doesn't slow your deep dive. Falling into spiked pits doesn't take @ to the next deeper level and Feather Falling doesn't prevent @ from falling (or purposely walking) through trap-doors, it just prevents @ taking damage from the falls.

Then hunger must have accelerated, because with slow digestion you could go for a very long time without eating and that is no longer the case. Even with slow digestion, I'm sometimes having to recall to town just for food.

It is still a pain to figure when it's safe to eat. The food is described in terms of turns, but the hunger "clock" is in terms of percentage. I think this still renders this mechanic to be more a pain in the @$$ than an interesting rework, but it's getting closer.

People on the forums report the visible bugs. I report the invisible ones. :D

I've noticed this with priests too. They actually summon less. They changed from 1 in 12 (1 in 3 with 4 spells) to 1 in 15 (1 in 3 with 5 spells). However they now summon kin (instead of summon monster), heal kin & the light ball blinds(forcing you to lose a turn). This can spiral out of control quite quickly if you get multiple priests healing/summoning each other while you stay constantly blind.

Quite possible I have always misunderstood how feather falling works. I thought if you read deep descent when wearing ff you only drop one level instead of multiple levels (in addition to ff's other effects). Since it appears I am wrong, pls ignore this point. Or consider a new curse that slows descent.

Yeah. Summoners summoning summoners is a bad idea unless you want to kill @.

Bought a ring of escaping for 0 gold at the BM. That's a bit of a bargain

OK, I think I mostly have answers.

That's annoying and needs fixing.

This is a limitation of lighting with tiles. Grids currently lit by your light source, and grids not currently lit but that you know about have the same tile, which is different to the tile for a lit grid (as appears when you have lit the room).

This is intentional - a digger in your pack doesn't get use if it's in a stack of more than one.

I can't repeat this - in particular, the names all fit completely in the main window. I tried using object recall in a subwindow, but they seem to truncate normally.

Shockbolt's tileset used to use some tiles fro the Gervais set; his latest doesn't, and is consequently missing some, notably some of the spell effects. Thanks for pointing it out.

I will have to check this carefully.

Ingwe answered this one :)

And I think wobbly pretty much covered this one.

Sounds reasonable.

Hm, not a bad idea - I'll think about that.

I don't think I want the player to know if the poison is going to kill them or not, so that pretty much rules out the running too.

Uniques have a better chance of dropping good stuff, but it's still random. Learn to love this :)

I think that's a bit niche for a birth option.

You could carry some :)

1% is 100 turns. Don't tell anyone ;)

100 turns is 1%. So !clw is 1% & food rations are 40%

I figured it out. I have more prompts auto cleared. Due to the length of the full item name, it gets split across multiple lines on my main window. I only see the last line and thought it was truncating the start. But the subwindow displays it on a single line.

It just occured to me: how would you ever drop anything. Drop item on floor, move and pick it up again. Repeat infinitely.


I knew I wasn't going to win this one! :p

No need for a birth option. On the item ignoring menu, have each category page with a page wide toggle at top. Ignore all rods, etc. Or have a list like for quality/ego tailored to each class. Rangers don't need to see dark magic books or arcane magic books etc.

This is a nice idea, I wish I'd come up with it.

Is inability to enchant artifact armour an intentional thing? I'm on 4.1.3-465-g2a840212b still (so as not to corrupt my savefile) and while I've been able to enchant artifact weapons, armour fails every time. It *could* be coincidence, but I've tried a LOT, given that all my armour is artifacts, and it's failed a couple of dozen times at least, including with *Enchant Armour*.

Chance to successfully enchant depends on how enchanted the item is already. It's flat-out impossible to enchant anything above +15, and it's pretty hard to get above +10. Most artifact armors have AC bonuses well above +10.

If I recall correctly, artifacts also have some degree of "enchantment resistance" that makes them additionally harder to improve, presumably to counterbalance their innate resistance to being disenchanted.

Ah, interesting. I didn't know they resisted disenchantment! I must've used up a couple of dozen scrolls of Enchant Armour on a +9 artifact cloak, though. I know you can't get above +15, but I've managed to get above +10 with things if I'm persistent enough in the past. This time, though, absolutely NONE of my artifact armour has taken an enchantment, whereas the weapons have, so I started to wonder if there might be a bug.

It's a flat 50% fail chance for an artifact & I think 30% chance for +9. It's this table anyway, & chance is out of 1000

Sounds like you got a little unlucky, but not extremely so.

The rate you get hungry at with regen seems crazy & I barely use the rest command (190 rest turns by dlvl 37). While it's nice that slow digestion has a use, I think this is currently over the top. Certainly I wouldn't want to play iron man with it like how it is now.

OK, I see what the problem is. I have reduced the size of the food meter from 17500 to 10000, and halved the rate of digestion, which looks like you need less food; but the effective size of the meter (above hungry and below slowing starting) has gone from 15000 to 6000. I will make some adjustments.

So, I wasn't just crazy? ;)

It would seem not. Changes in development move the top of "Hungry" down to 15%, and the bottom of "Full" up to 90%, which means the good range should last the same number of turns as before now. I've also made food descriptions include percentage as well as turns.

Gotta love Nick, always the statesman and only going to say that I don't "seem" crazy. :D Reminds me of a Robert E. Howard quote from a "Conan" novel that I remember reading as a kid, "Those who are sane believe there is a great difference between illusion and reality-- those who are mad know that this is simply not true."

I'm just glad someone's paying attention ;)