Front end support I'm hoping will be almost free, due to all the work that has been put into it for Angband (mainly not by me, and mainly recently by backwardsEric).

I was wondering about the automaton. Does it work in any sense?

I didn't test it very thoroughly but my impression was that it had never been adapted to Sil at all. I ripped it out of Sil-Q.

There's this cryptic thread about the automaton by half. Seems he did make it for sil but it's extremely basic.

Welp, this is what I get for not having looked at it for a few years. I'm way off base. There's a giant comment at the top of the file even that it's designed for Sil specifically...

However, yes, it is very simple. It doesn't deal with abilities, or item flags, or consumables, or running out of inventory space, or many more things. It is however capable of wandering around, finding a bow and arrows, and shooting enemies, which is somewhat cool. It

It might be possible to repurpose some bits of this to copy some of the functionality Brogue has around automatically going to the nearest down stairs and stopping if an enemy is sighted, which is rather nice as a UI feature.

More validly "unused" elements would be things like RBE_LOSE_MANA, RBE_UN_POWER, RBM_SPORE etc.

http://lotrproject.com/map/beleriand...layers=BTTTTTT

This is probably someone else LOTR's Beleriand's map project. Nick, what do you think of this map's accuracy?

It's not bad. It's based on CJRT's map for the published Silmarillion; I've been working from JRRT's "Second Silmarillion map" as it appears in Volume 11 of History of Middle Earth - here's an online version.

I just dropped by and was delighted to see movement on Beleriand. Nick, you are entirely welcome to use any or all of Sil's ideas and/or implementation in Beleriand. It would be a wonderful home for many of these ideas.

As it forked off NPP 0.4.1, the code base pre-dates a lot of improvements that were made to V. And I'm sure I lowered the standard a bit more too, with some idiosyncratic ways of doing things (sorry Quirk!). One helpful thing is that I usually kept the rules simpler than is the norm in V. e.g. even behind the scenes calculations for monster generation etc was usually done in such a way that it would make sense to explain in a rule book. The complexity standard was something like AD&D 2nd edition, (whereas V allowed crazier stuff than even Gygax would have come up with, where you are dividing equations by random numbers between 1 and your dungeon level, and things like that).

Re the history of the code etc, I've just gone on a quest to see how much I've kept and … it's a lot. Heaps of old code and ideas files going back through all alpha versions and as far back as simple changes to edit files in 2001. I'll contact you (Nick) about how to get this historical archive to you.

Nice to see you here :)

I was planning to email you when I was a little further along in the process. This thread has some useful ideas. One interesting thing is that Sil has the strict clock and sense of confinement, and I'm aiming to do almost the opposite.

I think you're being hard on yourself here. As you say, Angband code has improved a lot since NPP forked. Takkaria deserves most of the credit for that (both actual coding and the vision for what needed to be done), but also there have been a huge number of people who have pitched in and fixed particular bits of it.

I'm fairly deep in the Sil 'translation' at the moment, and pretty happy with how it's going. I am certainly seeing the virtue in your simplicity of rules, and it should translate into code that is in some places much cleaner and simpler than V's. As usual with this sort of task, it's pointing out ways in which the V code can be improved, and also some Sil features that could be imported (the hit display, for example).

This is excellent, I'll look forward to it. I already seem to be becoming some kind of archivist, so this should fit right in :)

I think it's inevitable that you won't produce your best code when extending a messy codebase - I am certainly not proud of the implementation of all my additions either, but the effort required to perform a clean re-implementation often feels prohibitive and so the existing pattern gets extended with all its warts, or hacked.

I do very much appreciate the consistency of the core rules, which I think has made the game much easier both for players to understand and developers to balance. I've certainly expanded my grasp of dice probability distributions through working on Sil-Q!

Yes, I spent a lot of time thinking through some of those probability distributions and dice. The historical progression was something like this:

I didn't like the flat distribution on attack rolls in D&D (1d20+bonus vs AC), and I thought that 2d10 was better. I liked the idea of opposed rolls though, and at some point realised that 1d10+attack vs 1d10+AC was equivalent, but more elegant. It also generalised to some of the other skills I was thinking of and made me think that there could be an evasion skill that went up with experience (unlike D&D where, strangely, only attack does and AC tends to scale only with increasingly magical armour). During balancing, I realised that melee/archery/evasion were still too good compared to other skills and ended up giving them 1d20 rolls to balance them, adding some slight inelegance back.

I'd decided early on that I wanted to try a damage reduction system, as I noticed it allowed an interestingly multi-dimensional system for weapon choice vs different armour, and also for how these fit with different combinations of stats for the user. e.g. that you could make a system where if the opponent had light armour, you would be best with a light weapon against them (as it is sufficient to get through and has higher chance of hitting). This seemed interesting, natural, and modelling real world developments. It gets lost a little in the game as there are so many enemies and you can't micromanage it, but the system would also work well for a table top game where there were few, but high stakes duels against another person.

I started with flat numbers of damage reduction, as is standard, but then noticed that using dice for it (what I call 'protection') completes the duality between attack and defence, where you can have (+3, 1d10) vs [-2, 1d6] or whatever. And after the opposed rolls to hit, there are opposed rolls for damage.

As is often the case, it was a case of a few goals and quite a bit of time mulling them over and trying things out that eventually led to a very simple and elegant base system that really felt like a natural sweet spot in the space of combat systems.