Current master post 4.2.0
 

The first post-4.2.0 builds are now up on the nightlies page and angband.live, with source here.

Changes are:

• Crash after block fall trap fixed
• Obsolete hints removed and new ones added
• Character resist panel now correctly shows pFear when Heroism or Berserk are active
• Chaos Dragon Scale Mail description improved (thanks Derakon)
• Percentage damage birth option now gives full blown O-combat, and there are some minor changes without the option switched on (some changes to artifact dice, throwing weapons are much improved, non-artifact weapons with increased damage dice are more common).

The last one is obviously big, and rather than derailing this thread I am giving it one of its own.

Thanks!!! I like the direction you and others have taken the game.

same here! keep up the great work :D

New builds up on the nightlies page and angband.live (source is here) with the following changes:

• Ent draughts now nourish the player up to 60% like honey cakes
• Fix wrong variable bug in EARTHQUAKE (thanks PowerWyrm)
• Make the plural of hydra always hydras
• Make nether worm masses immune to nether
• Change order of message when taking items off, so the message shows the new label of the removed item rather than the old one
• Fix bug in O-combat that made branded weapons do no damage sometimes
• Attempt a fix to bug #2164, which prevents writing lore or window prefs on macOS Catalina
• Detarget monsters after they are teleported out of LoS, fixing single combat town corruption bug

Just realised I should have added the Gervais tiles that Bill Peterson has supplied; they'll be in the next build.

Looks better on Catalina. Turned sound on and saved and it worked. :)

Excellent :)

Necromancer's light penalty has been discussed before. Still, the amount of +Light artifacts bum me. I know a necromancer is supposed to be bit of a challenge but +Light items make things even worse. So many EARLY artifacts have this property. Cammithrim, Forasgil, Sting, Orcrist, Eriril just to name five outside light source +Light items. Disenchantment is close to 50% with a light source even at CL 25 and thus pretty much useless by the time it should one of your main attacks.

I do understand that it fits thematically well necromancers getting penalties from 'benevolent' items. Nevertheless, I wouldn't mind +Light disappearing from majority of artifacts. I don't seek it even playing other classes.

What do others think?

Having a big light radius is a substantial quality of life improvement for everyone that isn't a necromancer. It's like ESP but available earlier, works on mindless enemies, and (of course) shorter-ranged. It's not essential, but I'm not convinced that we should remove it from artifacts just to give necromancers an easier time. Especially since it's an established thing in Tolkein that magical equipment glows.

What if necromancers had a "break the light on this item" spell that followed the remove-curse rules? That is, it could remove the +light modifier from an item, but it might fail, with a chance to render the item fragile or destroy it. You could have different "strengths" of +light on items if you want some to be more resilient against the ability than others.

I think the problem, though, is that it was handed out as a universally good thing for a lot of artifacts. I think it could easily be removed from several artifacts; if we're talking thematically, Sting, Orcrist and Glamdring were only meant to glow when orcs were nearby, and I don't think we're thinking of implementing that. Similarly, there are things like the whip of Gothmog which gets +1 light and could happily get -1 light.

I would in fact argue that Sting, Orcrist, and Glamdring should glow because having them never give off light is far worse than having them always give off light. Especially when you're basically constantly close to Morgoth's minions. Players will look at them and go "Oh yeah! I remember this weapon glowing in the books!" Whereas if they don't glow (while other items do, showing that glowing is clearly a possibility), they'll wonder "hey why doesn't Sting glow? It's supposed to glow!"

Cammithrim, Gothmog, etc. I'm less attached to having +light on, because I don't remember them as a canonical thing.

But I note that you carefully didn't render an opinion on giving Necromancers the ability to corrupt the items they find, stripping that cursed light from them. ;)

Whip of Gothmog is *made out of fire*. So yeah, it has light. Cettainly blessed weapons should not be vulnerable to removal of light, and indeed should up the fail rate even more.

Gothmog is a creature of fire and shadow; what does that look like? I can definitely see an argument for his whip making things darker.

Ah, you noticed that.

I'm reluctant to do that. Messing with item properties (aside from curses) is something that was taken out when the old Curse Armor and Curse Weapon scrolls were removed, and it doesn't feel quite right to me.

Maybe giving necromancers -1 to the light bonus on any object would be a possibility?

Wait, so you're saying sound worked as well as the lore file saving properly? I must be even more awesome than I thought.

I thought so, but it's still crashing on quit. Spinning cursor and then I get the Angband quit unexpectedly message. And now when I start again, open my save file, save, get the failure trying to create window.prf.new and lore.txt.new

Starting a new character though, I was able to turn randarts on and that part seems to be working. I'm playing with full monster memory, so it shouldn't need to write to lore.txt much? Turning sound on seems to trigger the bug.

I would expect lore.txt being updated with the kill counts on each save.

I've suggested elsewhere that Morgul weapons should be usable for necromancers which doesn't solve the light issue but may give them some alternatives.

Curiously, that doesn't trigger the bug.

May I suggest that Ent draughts make @ just a wee bit taller. But not referenced in the description. Just a little Easter Egg for those who notice the change on their character information screens. :D

I love it! :-D

From what I see, the file descriptor, used internally by Apple's initWithContentsOfFile() for NSSound, isn't being closed in 10.15. Because of that, there isn't an available file descriptor when trying to create window.prf.new and lore.txt.new. As a quick fix, deleting one of the redundant calls to load_sounds() in main-cocoa.m (I got rid of the one in beginGame()) works for me: that leaves enough available file descriptors for saving the preferences and lore. I'll try to work up some simple sample code to see if this is Apple's bug or if something in main-cocoa.m is to blame.

Thanks for following this up :)

New builds are up on the nightlies page and angband.live (source here) with the following changes:

• Updated Gervais tiles included, kindly provided by Bill Peterson
• A raft of memory leaks fixed (thanks backwardsEric)
• Also due to backwardsEric: improved macOS rendering, and another attempt at fixing the Catalina lore-writing bug
• Nerfs to magic devices, mainly for mages and rogues:
  • Device damage boost removed
  • Tap Magical Energy now stuns the player for 1 or 2 turns, and being stunned cancels FastCast
  • Recharge spells are much more likely to destroy devices (more in line with the scroll)
• Buffs (mostly) to necromancers:
  • The magic light modifier on objects is now reduced by 1 for necros, which means they can wield LIGHT[1] objects without getting an increased spell failure rate
  • Necros now get the EVIL player flag, which gives innate RNether, but vulnerability to orb of draining
  • Some monsters now cast orbs of draining :)

Again, getting rebalance changes out early in the journey to 4.2.1. Voicing of opinions encouraged.

Font seemed to change. There's extra space between characters, making it hard to read in the windows...I had been using fixed width Menlo size 14, but now to make it fit in the inventory window i have to set it to 12 point but there's still extra space between the characters.

But the save bug seems to be fixed. I successfully turned on sound and have saved progress, even started a new game with randarts and it appeared to be working. Thanks.

Agreeing with mrfy, with that nightly build running on MacOS 10.15.2 beta in a virtual machine and sound enabled, I don't see the problem saving lore.txt and window.prf. I filed a report with Apple about NSSound's initWithContentsOfFile leaving a fie descriptor open: that is still present in Mac OS 10.15.2 beta. With that underlying bug present, adding more sounds to sound.cfg has the potential to cause calls to open a file to fail because of the limit on the number of open files for a single process.

The rendering change for the Mac dd increase the size of the rectangle used to render each character and aligned those rectangles on pixel boundaries. Changing line 800 of main-cocoa.m to

would get the horizontal spacing closer to what it was, though you'll still need wider and taller windows to render the same amount of content with the same font as you used with Angband 4.2.0.

Is this the boost from your devices skill?
All sound good to me
Whoa, that all sounds pretty awesome! Has any suggested changing "Nether" to "Wither"? Seems like a more apt title these days, though "Wither Worms" doesn't really please my ear.

Should blackguards also get this flag, since they cast from the same book?

Yes - it's a percentage bonus to damage from when your device skill is greater than the object level. It can be up to 138%.

Maybe, but I'm inclined not to for now - they seem more like casual users of dark arts :)

There's still a bug where you hit an invisible trap, set it off, move past, and it's still invisible. Shouldn't it be visible after you trip it?

My $0.02 I think this is cool and would like to see it kept.

I can't get the nightly on angband.live to run. I get to the splash screen & no further. Tried deleting my save & fiddling with font settings, no luck.

I have the same problem - thanks for reporting.

EDIT: Attempted a fix, didn't work; the consequent new builds do have a fix to the book coloring inconsistency, though :)

I assume gnomes still get their racial device damage boost, so a gnome mage would have a boost, albeit less than before.

Physical vs Magical Traps
 

Is there a way to tell these apart, in-game? If not, that would be a cool addition.

Artifacts already do not receive this bonus, correct? Or is there a higher device skill threshold?

It used to be any magical item effect except for scrolls and potions, I believe. So wands, rods, staves, and artifacts all benefited damage-wise from your device skill.

I'm curious why you felt it necessary to remove this. It was a fairly significant differentiator between races.

Because it came up in the mage and rogue competitions that devices were completely OP compared to anything else.

It's possible that in fact it should be just halved or something, but I've started by removing it completely as the first step in a binary search :) Also, if it goes away, so much code simplification...

There isn't, and it's a good point. I think the best way to do it would probably be in the trap knowledge menu.

Please forgive me for suspecting that you let your love of deleting code sway your judgement. ;) Believe me, I've been there!

I don't think most players felt that devices were overpowered with the mage's old spell list, where even Greater Recharging had nontrivial odds of exploding high-level wands, and of course there was no way to tap wands for mana. I think the main complaints came from "purists", like Sky, who begrudged the need for devices moreso as a comment on the gaps in the mage's spell list than on the power of the devices themselves. (Sky, please correct me if I'm misrepresenting you)

You may well be right on all counts, but I stand by my binary search methodology. Let's see how people think the current situation plays.

You maintainers are lucky men. You write code and code is patient. Unfortunate player that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living @s.
- Catherine the Great (... with minor tweaks)
:)

More seriously, can I assume that I don't need to repeat my earlier comment, that I have found a non-wand-breaking Recharge spell a good thing? I don't have time to playtest anything at the moment, but I'm fairly certain that I'll find the new version a step in the wrong direction. :(

May I ask why? It seems to me that turning every wand into a large rod stack is unideal.

Agreed. I much prefer the model that wands should be reserved for when you jeed them, and rods should be used for the simple cases. With this observation, perhaps some rods should be deleted? I haven't carried a rod of fire bolts or the like in a looong time.

In principle, I agree with the model where wands/staves are only used when you need them. I wouldn't mind scrolls of recharging being either weak, rare or going altogether. However, spell-based recharging only applies to mages and rogues, so it doesn't affect the value of wands for most classes and gives these two the option of a different playstyle.

For mages, wands aren't generally overpowered (tap spell excluded): fast casting doubles spell damage per round, so damage from wands, even annihilation, eventually falls behind spells. However, rechargeable wands add a lot of variety between games: finding an early drain life or speed or insertnamehere can significantly change the feel of the game for the next 1000'. or so.

For rogues, wands are an interesting choice because they are pretty bad at everything else!

I never really used them that way (with the exception of stone to mud), I used them as batteries instead, at least prior to the most recent tweaks. But otherwise, yes.

I've been running some rogues lately, and I'm going to have to disagree with this. I really like that rogues are so reliant on wands. Not only does it make for a really different game than the paladins and priests that I've mostly been playing, but at least with the new spells, it makes the rogue *feel* much more like a rogue, i.e. a tricksy fellow who heavily relies on "mechanical" tools rather than swords or spells.

@Arch--
This doesn't mean that recharge shouldn't sometimes fail catastrophically. For what you describe, archery is the right answer, possibly with a poison brand spell to juice it a little in the endgame.

I wasn't disagreeing that recharges shouldn't fail catastrophically sometimes, I was disagreeing with the idea that wands should be used "only in emergencies." I don't see any reason why we can't have a class that leans heavily on wands, and supplements with weapons and arrows. Especially since wands provide things that arrows don't (like a success chance that depends solely on the player, and AOE). Besides, rangers are already the archer guys. No sense in making rogues a poor man's ranger.

Maybe Rogues get a recharging spell with a higher success chance than mages, since it sounds like it's the tap-recharge combo that's broken and not necessarily recharge by itself. Not sure if Rogues get the Tap spell, because I haven't found all three spellbooks yet but if they do, you could always remove Tap from their spell list.

Oh, sorry. By 'when you need them' I meant more than just emergencies. I also meant 'really worthwhile fights that you otherwise couldn't afford.' Which is not to say that a poison brand spell wouldn't be a good idea, too...

So, quiver shenanigans.
I went over the 10 stack limit: 9 pebble/shot stacks + 1 bolt stack + 1 arrow stack. My best stack of sling shots ended up in the inventory & the bolts & arrows remained in the quiver despite the fact I'm using a sling. My inventory goes up to the letter 'w', a full pack.

I then inscribed all my pebble/shots so they'd move into the quiver. Now my inventory goes up to the letter 'v' suggesting I have room for 1 more item, except it wont let me pick another item up, it thinks the pack is still full.

My bad on the misinterpretation. Still like the idea of an arcane-based character whose offensive "spells" come from tools rather than knowledge/innate-power/wherever-it-is-arcane-spells-come-from-in-Angband.

That being said, I would also not turn down a poison brand. It could replace the steal-and-teleport spell. Haven't found a use for it yet, since near as I can tell, you only teleport if you steal successfully.

Revisiting this... INT is already such a dump stat for all non-INT casters. Shame to take away one of the few things it does well for all classes.

i tried playing some 4.2 with little success.

my two main observations are:

1. the new color for the ground and walls looks really bad - iam having a hard time distinguishing stuff from the background. too bright by far. I would really be much happier if there was an option to have the background set as it was in 4.1
2. the new dice size thing doesnt work on ranged weapons, and also works in weird ways on ordinary weapons.
Stuff that i know should be doing a lot more damage, doesn't; but i guess this was the intended result, to have bigger weapons hurt more and lighter ones hurt less. However, wouldn't this simply result in endgame stuff being even stronger? Things like MoD - or anything heavy, really, when you already have high stats.

Does the cover tracks spell do something useful at the moment? or is it actually a minus to have this cast?

I've been seeing this funny effect in the AI where sometimes you phase out of melee & the enemy takes a few steps in the wrong direction before correcting itself & tracking you properly. I'm guessing that's the monster picking up the scent of where you were a few turns ago. It seems as currently implemented scent is actually a penalty to monsters tracking you.

I've attached a set of patches from git format-patch for the Cocoa rendering in the nightly build so that the text is more compact. It will still take more space for the same content than 4.2.0.

New builds up on the nightlies page and angband.live (although still not playable on angband.live - we're not sure why yet). Source here. This update has some technical fixes to the macOS and X11 ports from backwardsEric, and a fix for teleport messages by sanedragon.

Not a lot of development happening at the moment, but I should have some more time soon.

This line is probably a copy/paste error.

Wouldn't "SHARDS" be better here?

I just noticed that daggers have been increased to 150 gold, yet main guaches are still 84. Shouldn't they cost at least 184 or 200 gold? Rapiers are still 104 gold. :confused:

"Creature" in Recall
 

The word "creature" seems to be a informationless noun used to drape adjectives like "evil" and "non-living" onto. It could be replaced by the "base" creature. It would be a bit redundant at times, but at other times would be very informative to someone who doesn't know the bestiary very well. This would also take a bit of pressure off the "name" and "desc" fields.

Examples: Recently I saw complaints that a "Water Spirit" doesn't have a spirit (for Necromancer purposes). Putting "elemental" in place of "creature" might clear that up. The "Tamer" often confuses me because Shockbolt's tiles make it look like a centipede, and he doesn't have any "taming" powers. Having "person" (or perhaps "human" or "humanoid") in there would clarify what this lover of nature is.

EDIT: We're already replacing the word "creature", but I think only in line with "slays". Could get a bit awkward to say "natural spider" for pretty damn unnatural spiders! But leaving off natural and just going with the base creature name would lead to ambiguity about what "slay animal" slays. Most of the slays seem pretty obvious when the player is given the base creature title.

A nit-picky "bug". We should probably review the class "title" names. E.g., Can a necromancer "Summoner" anything?

Why not simply replace 'natural creature' with 'animal'? So Ungoliant becomes an 'evil animal' instead of 'natural evil creature'. Or perhaps 'intelligent evil animal.'

Isn't that because of insects?

Insects are animals.

@Derakon--
So are spiders and centipedes. But they aren't insects. :)

Apologies. I meant to say mushrooms and molds.

Are Huorns and Ents animals?

Molds and jellies are unaffected by slay animal.

Yes that works. Makes the slay correlation more clear.

They are not. Neither are manticores, even though griffin/hippogriff and hydra are. Naga aren't though, so I guess manticore are consistent with naga.

Crash after restart without quitting
 

With the latest nightly version on OS X, I get a segmentation fault when I start a new game without quitting after a previous character died. The previous character had a manually inscribed object in the inventory. The call stack up to play_game() at the point of the crash was:

The attached patch, to reset the number of quarks in use in quarks_init(), seems to be sufficient to prevent the crash.

On Win10 my app also crashes in this spot. Sometimes I scum for a town with good building placement. The first dozen times it lets me restart just fine. But after a while it crashes. Also, any character that I've played for a while causes this crash when restarting after death. Not too inconvenient, since I can open a new instance and load the dead character's file just fine.

I believe this is because daggers are now also throwing weapons.

New builds are up on the nightlies page (source is here) basically merging a bunch of pull requests done by other people:

• A bunch of fixes for the macOS port and other stuff by backwardsEric
• Some tile and class fixes by DavidMedley
• Some spelling and grammar fixes from Spenser Black
• Use of j/k keys for scrolling in help by bacchist
• Fixes to the SDL2 and X11 ports by sanedragon
• A few datafile typos fixed

Wooo! Technically a contributor now :D I hope to add more fixes that are less trouble than they are worth.

Changing the font size in main window causes an immediate crash on OSX. Resizing windows also causes crashes. Let me know if you need more details or I can file a bug.

Congrats, and thank you for your contributions! :)

Thanks for the report. I filed a bug, https://github.com/angband/angband/issues/4250. If the crashes you see aren't coming from abort() called from within get_background_color_index(), then it would be good to either file a separate bug or add the details for your crash to the bug linked above.

There is a new build up now with this fix applied; let me know if it's still crashing.

Looks like it's fixed. Thanks!

New builds are now up on the nightlies page (source is here) with more of other people's changes:

• Fix for issue 4222 (repeating using an item from the floor after recalling would cause a crash) by backwardsEric
• Several macOS issues - better behaviour after restarting from fullscreen, better response to font change, use of correct prefs - by backwardsEric
• Make Gilim and Cantoras flicker by Pete Mack

Note that nightlies don't currently work on angband.live because of a compiling issue.

New builds on the nightlies page (source here) with the following changes:

• Fixes for VS compilation, thanks to Gordon and eastwind (#4236)
• Revert stairs to former allocation rather than always hidden at the end of corridors (except for the stairs the player arrives on) (#4210)
• Correct displayed damage for SPHERE effect - Noxious Fumes being the big example (#4208)
• Make chests and debug summons not always get uniques (#4237)
• Make pack combine after curse removel (#4228)
• Make Alchemist's gloves have a better AC bonus (they needed something now gloves don't hamper spellcasting) (#4221)

New builds on the nightlies page (source here) with the following changes:

• No more "status of weapon" (blessed, too heavy, etc) message spam when digging (#4191)
• Improved town layout (thanks sanedragon)
• Fixes to enable VS 2019 compilation (thanks eastwind)
• Extra projection effects (like cold draining life) now always give a message (#4193)
• Player grid terrain (or web, trap etc if there is one) now shown on the status line (#4192)

Minor oddity: "Your scythe begins to glow" after ?monster confusion. I then swap to a BoC and hit a poor townie to see what happens and get "The glow fades from your Blade of Chaos". But there was no message of the glow being transferred to the BoC.

(Yeah, I know killing townies might be seen as unfriendly. Maybe add a new monster type "lab rat" for the town! And hey, he dropped 24 gold)

Yes, it used to say "Your hands begin to glow", but I thought that it would be better for the weapon to glow. I don't know what to do now.

"Your melee weapons begin to glow" maybe? Since the effect extends to all of your melee weapons.

Switch it to your eyes, maybe? Confusion as a kind of hynotic effect attached to the eyes seems plausible, though why it's conveyed via melee attack then seems a bit odd.

Hands is probably fine though.

"Your hands begin to glow" was passed down to Angband from it's father, Moria, and to Moria from it's father, Rogue. It was possibly the last scroll message to do so. It is very sad to see the line broken. :(

My personal preference would pad out the part on the status line for the current terrain so that status flags to the right of it don't move if the terrain changes. I can work up a patch for that if that would be useful for most players.

New builds up on the nightlies page and angband.live (now working again) - source is here - with the following changes:

• Several more macOS and tile fixes from backwardsEric
• Improvements to Visual Studio compiling by eastwind
• Added compiler flag to fix compiling on angband.live
• Fire immune player is no longer interrupted when running through lava (#4223)
• Items with random resists now automatically ignore the relevant element (#4263)
• Revert the monster confusion message to "Your hands begin to glow" (WARNING: Voovus, the :( will not always work)
• Put terrain.trap at the end of the status line instead of the start to avoid everythign moving around all the time - let's see how that goes

Probably bug, when I wield a lantern of shadows, the "of shadows" part disappears. With both "e" and "I" commands.

Any reason why electric arc doesn't work like an ordinary beam spell? Destroying rods and wands on the floor can be pretty crippling when taking down a bunch of trolls. Currently there is no true beam spell in the town books.

Late to the party on glow suggestions...

What about 'a glow surrounds you'? Or is that effect already in use for something else like blessings?? (that might be why I thought of it, because I'd seen it, lol).

Always wondered how you could tell your hands were gloing inside your elbow-length metal gaunlets....

In the latest nightly: c38a249c4

Missing the (Y or N) choice prompt when creating a character in rebirth screen. Yeah, I know to press Y or N, but didn't it used to say that?

Missing the level feeling indicator on the status line. The level feeling indicator for Monster/Treasure by the numbers, e.g., 8-5, is gone. EDIT: Nevermind on this one. The problem was the new build changes the window sizing and the status line is "below the fold".

Took a look at new stair placement. I'm not convinced this does what you think it does. At least 3 adjacent walls discounting diagonals. That's corridor ends, 1 square rooms & pillar rooms.

I have an alternative proposal. If you want stairs next to a wall, ram them into a wall.

Find square
Look for adjacent wall (not a diagonal)
Check there isn't space on other side of wall
Check not within x distance of stairs
Place on wall

That sounds like it would work well. I'd be happy if this was implemented. Down stairs at least should be easy to find to encourage diving; currently they can be a chore to find

I still think the answer is to remove all restrictions on stair generation--let the stairs go to every tile within the connected dungeon area with equal probability.

The restrictions on stair generation were originally added as a hacky way to ensure that characters would enter a dungeon in a safe position. This was always a poor solution. The correct solution is to have player placement be entirely independent from stair generation.

Level generation would proceed as follows:
1. Generate the dungeon map.
2. Place stairs on the dungeon map at completely random positions.
3. Place the player at a "safe" entry location.
4. If connected stairs is enabled and the player entered the level via stairs, generate an additional stair of the appropriate type at the player position.

I'd build a solution myself and send a commit, except that I don't have enough C coding experience to pull it off without f***ing up.

This would work as well, it's only the 'arriving' stair that was ever the problem, which can be dealt with separately anyway. What I like about placing the stairs next to a wall is that it's slightly easier to find them in dark rooms. And to encourage diving we should make them as easy to find as possible

New builds are up on the nightlies page and angband.live (source is here) with the following changes:

• Light radius 1 monsters are now illuminated correctly (thanks Powerwyrm)
• Morgoth now destroys more walls - noticeable change meant to be in 4.2.0 (Powerwyrm again)
• Code improvements - remove a bunch of possible null pointer dereferences
• Several more macOS improvements from backwardsEric

Nightcrawlers, "serpent of chaoses" (sic) and gorgons in "snake" pits feel out of place...

Commit d10401c reduced the number of books and reverted colors, but also reverted the cool feature that was the reduction of "unwanted" books for casters. Would be nice to have that back so your mage doesn't find countless priest/nature/shadow books.