Can we change the colour of white wands? Spotting a white dash in a sea of white dots isn't easy. Also a minor display issue, the speed indicator doesn't automatically update when hunger changes.

You got it

New builds are now up on the nightlies page and angband.live (source is here).

Mostly bugfixes, some tidying up after the blackguard changes, and some from backwardsEric to longer-standing bugs.

that's intended behaviour.
If you have a "ring of +2 to everything", then it will display as a ring +2.

In that case it makes some sense, but in case of the amulet you don't know which number referrs to which stat. That makes it difficult to compare them whithout looking at the details.
It doesn't make sense and is somewhat annoying.

Builds updated again to fix a couple of bugs.

How about making Scrolls of Satisfy Hunger also do what they used to do, i.e., correct a gorged status too? So, @ hunger meter would be set at 50% upon reading the scroll, whether that @ was below OR above that number before.

We might want to rename them - scroll of Digestive Equilibrium?

I like the name but I my brain tripped over the imagery of a Hobbit (or Elf/Dwarf/whatever) stringing the words "Digestive Equilibrium" together.

I suppose it's not as bad as "my axe embedded in his nervous system" but...

You can inscribe. I do this frequently, especially to remind myself of resistance swaps. Some variants have very verbose auto-inscription options, and I turn those on, but since vanilla is intentionally streamlined I don't think this option should make the cut.

of Balanced Diet
of Normal Satiation

I'm suggesting these because I could use both of them in RL :D

Plural of Catoblepas is catoblepones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catoblepas

Bug?

You see a Small iron chest (explosion device).
You set off a trap!
There is a sudden explosion! Everything inside the chest is destroyed!
You see a Small iron chest (explosion device).
You failed to disarm the chest.
You have disarmed the chest.
You see a Tulwar (2d4) (+6,+2).
You see a Small iron chest (empty).
You see a Heavy crossbow (x4) (+4,+6).

The Tulwar and crossbow were from the chest.

From the latest nightly.

Looks like it.

Hi! I'm back to Angband after a 20 yr hiatus and its great, I was loving the kobold necromancer because rPoison, so I tried the latest nightly, to get the -1 on light, (in case I find Sting again) and the Miasma hallucinogenic cloud is fun at first, but I used it 4 or 5 times on a group of trolls, and its takes FOREVER to wear off, wihich is a bummer, I think, and the UI is literally telling me they polymorphed (into somewhat scarier creatures) but of course there is also the whacky visual effect, so its hard (maybe too hard) to tell if they really polymorphed. Then I cower in the corner for maybe 200 turns so I can see clearly. hehe I'm kinda laughing about it, but I don't plan ot use Miasma much!

Miasma shouldn't affect the player I think.

Well, it's meant to be in the theme of necros spells which have drawbacks for the player, but I think it's probably a bit overdone. I think character level divided by 2 might be fairer than multiplied by 2.

EDIT: Actually, playing around with it a bit I think about CL/4 seems right.

Yes, it's fine to have some drawbacks, but that one is an early spell, and the necro doesnt have so much offensive tools at that stage. CL / 4 sounds good.

Hi! The hallucination effect is one of the more awesome visual effects in the game so its fun to have some of it, and its literally frightening to the player in the moment, I mean it really raises the stakes in the situation, to have these monsters maybe actually polymorphing (but you can't tell if its just part of the hallucination). And, you cant 100% tell where they are. What that does, for me, is make it extremely tempting to keep casting Miasma over and over until the nasties are gone... so the duration gets stacked. That makes the question of whether to use the spell, a strategic one (in addition to a tactical one) because I have to decide if I'm close to the edge of the map, where I'm basically out of harms way, or will I get into collateral trouble from new comers during my recovery. I think the most fun way to do it, would be to give the player a savings throw, so that at high levels of wisdom (rare among INT based casters) they would mostly be OK ... and also, not have the duration stack, so that a player could cast it multiple times without additional penalty.

So you were only off by a factor of 8?

What if the throwing menus were separated like inv/eq/quiv? Like, you hit v to throw and the first menu it brings up has only things that are made for throwing. If there's nothing on that screen, or if you press left or right, there would be different lists, probably the same inv/eq/quiv lists we already have.

That's an interesting idea.

Then objects (flask of oil, throwing hammer, etc) should have an specific flag in the txt files for this.

There is already a flag for throwing weapons that should work for this.

Playing the nightly (4.2.0 may be the same) and there was a spear under webs. I couldn't find any indication it was there except for the object window and moving over it. Seems like if it's hidden from sight it should be hidden from the object window, or if it's visible in the object window it should be visible on screen or at least to the look command. Or possibly I remembered it was there from before the webs covered it, but I still feel the same principle should apply.

What are the current plans for the next release? ETA, will it be 4.2.1 or 4.3, anything that needs to be in it that's not in yet, etc.

Yes, this is actually kind of tricky, I'm not sure of the best solution.

As for next release - once the nightlies are bug free is the general idea. With the new blackguards I wanted a little time for bugs to emerge and minor changes to be made too. Bugs are down under 20 now, so I think around a month is possible - but it could be longer, or theoretically shorter. And it will be 4.2.1 - the general idea being that 4.2 was a major change, and the 4.2.x series is essentially improvements on that, and maintains savefile compatibility.

Sounds good. Thanks for the update.

Perhaps this is a problem of the android port but I'll report a possible bug here, just in case.

When inspecting Google's Play Console I see that there are several crashes in findpath, from anonymous users.

After trying to dissect the ndk coredump, the ndk-stack tool points me to this line:

The code doesn't check for array overflow. This is a bug in Vanilla ?

I'll try to reproduce the bug.

A bug in this code would not surprise me at all. I'll do a check too.

EDIT: OK, one massive bug found here already. I'm rewriting the whole thing.

Getting a crash with latest nightly, load save file, hit '/', 'E', 'y', 'space'. Crash.

savefile:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/dwhko5lkpam3476/mrfy?dl=0

randart file:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5xgg2d5flz...ndart.log?dl=0

Hope this is enough.

Sorry, what you've given is the randart log file. I need either:

• A file in your user directory (the same one your randart.log was in) called randart.txt or
• A file in the archive directory inside your user directory, called randart_0ff02d87.txt

The Quake spell of the BG destroys the town and leaves the dungeon intact... Sorry, but its funny!

The logic is reversed. effect_handler_EARTHQUAKE

Sorry. It's still happening in my game so lets try again.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jww4it6j8mn77sl/mrfy?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jvksruw44o...02d87.txt?dl=0

Shopkeeper just said to me: "Look at the food bar at the bottom of the screen to see how well fed you are."

Food bar? Is that a tiles thing? Or is it some buffet mode added to the game I haven't discovered. ;)

Update of the findpath bug. Could reproduce the bug a couple of times.

https://i.ibb.co/B3dnsQM/bugfindpath.png

It seems that the ox variable is overwritten by a buffer overflow, or something strange.

OK, the problem doesn't happen for me. It could possibly be an issue with your lore.txt file, but that seems unlikely.

More likely is that some of the code in the symbol query function is dubious; I'm going to rewrite that a bit and we'll see if the next update fixes the problem.

Well, it's really a food indicator, but that makes the hint too long; I was thinking of bar as in progress bar. How does "The food indicator at the bottom of the screen shows how well fed you are." sound?

Well, I've done a complete rewrite of the pathfinding function so it is much more efficient, and I think I have done sufficient bounds checking on the path array. Run behaviour is still a bit odd, so I'm going to have a look at fixing that too, and this should be in an update that I'll push later today.

Confirmed. Probably introduced in the merge.

New builds are now up on the nightlies page and angband.live (source is here). Changes are:

• Proper fix for Leap into Battle
• Make exploding chests explode
• Add special menu for throwing items, brought up by the throw command
• Made shots and pebbles throwing items
• Complete rewrite of the pathfinding algorithm to increase efficiency, make it robust against crashes, and make running to a particular spot actually work properly again
• Fix earthquake bug introduced by me when merging David's blackguard changes
• Tidy up symbol query code a bit, possibly fixing mrfy's crash bug
• Inscription =g5 (also works for other numbers) now limits pickup to a total of 5 in the player's inventory (thanks backwardsEric)

Testing encouraged, especially for the pathfinding, and also to see whether throwing shots and pebbles is OP.

Thanks nick!!!

EDIT: I tried to all caps that, but the system de-capped it!

That sounds better. It's still amusing to me that the shopkeepers often break the 4th (5th?) wall in talking to the player about the game. :)

I'm still seeing the crash with the updated version. Let me know how I can help.

I'm, frankly, baffled. I guess you could give me your lore.txt file too, who knows, maybe there's something weird there. What OS are you using?

Also, big thanks to backwardsEric! He's doing a ton of great work that probably doesn't get the recognition it deserves.

OSX. Yeah still happening, load savefile, hit '/', 'E', 'y', 'right-arrow'. Game crashes.

savefile again:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2iqxso7zipek5vs/mrfy?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7hbqt9bvbb...02d87.txt?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ajgv3fs2rxm0zfo/lore.txt?dl=0

Copy of the crashlog:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0eiocpl967...shlog.txt?dl=0

I can confirm that they really do explode and destroy their contents. :(

Thank you, found it. The immediate cause is a missing line in monster.txt, but probably something needs to be done to make sure missing that line doesn't cause crashes.

Great Earth Elemental is missing the # of hit-points?

No, spell frequency.

I noticed it is recorded as 0 hp too - that looks a bit silly, I guess, but it happens because they can't actually be generated, only shapechanged into.

Just bought some plain old Iron Shots at the store, and they don't combine with the plain iron shots picked up from the dungeon floor. Nothing unknown about them. No difference in their damage. But they are taking up two slots in the quiver instead of only one. A new bug introduced by recent quiver changes?

Yes and no, or rather no and yes. Not a bug, but was introduced by shots and pebbles now getting the THROWING flag. So newly created shots (with THROWING) will not stack with ones created before the change (without THROWING). Once you get rid of all your old shots, the problem will be gone.

Kind of like Apple getting rid of the headphone jack :D

Interesting:
Why is the fire brand so great when throwing?

That looks like it's tripling all bonuses instead of just the damage dice. Don't know if it's intended.

The big problem I have with latest version is that it's almost impossible to play without being Full all the time. As soon as you quaff a few CSW potions you're at 95% satiation and it takes forever to go away.

My "solution" to this has been to target 70-75% fed as "full". Even then it feels like I have to watch my potion usage. Which seems kinda stupid in a game where one doesn't have to worry at all about other bodily functions.

What annoys me is a whole bunch of good artifacts have slow digestion presumably for no other reason then it being a free "something" & slow digestion was massively ramped up because it's not worth having, so there's a whole bunch of nice artifacts with the unremovable slow digestion curse now.

Google reports crashes in this two lines:

mon-lore.c:1666:23 (called from mon-util.c:941:30 after killing a monster)
return &l_list[race->ridx];

mon-attack.c:509:57
bool visible = monster_is_visible(mon) || (mon->race->light > 0);

It seems that some monster doesn't have a proper race. Can it be a shapeshift?

The code at that time was updated to Vanilla revision de9d5e697. I dont know if it was fixed later.

It could be the crash that mrfy reported upthread (and which is now fixed in development), but it doesn't really look like it.

It does look like a malformed monster race, but it's hard to know where the problem has arisen. One of those crashes is in make_attack_normal(), which indicates it was a problem with a monster which was functional enough to be making an attack.

Yes, I think the problem is that I made either an error or a deliberate change that I then forgot in calculating digestion rate; then someone (who shall be nameless) pointed this out, and I "fixed" it. I'll have another look.

Throwing weapons get a kind of launcher-like multiplier; this may need some adjustment, trying to keep two combat systems balanced turns out not to be completely straightforward.

Yes, its very difficult to tell because I dont have a proper report from the player. I will take note of these crashes. Thanks!

Used Leap into Battle spell towards Eol, who was standing next to a falling rubble trap. Triggered the trap. Got hit by a rock. Got stunned. WAS wearing Crown of Serenity (rStun).

Bug or intentional behavior of falling rock traps?

Intentional. And awesome :)

Latest revision crashes when reading unaware scroll of Rune of Protection.

function object_flavor_aware: assertion "obj->known" failed

Yep, this one's reported as #4360.

Do you happen to know if it was read from the floor or the player's inventory?

You can reproduce the bug with debug commands, creating the scroll and reading it from the floor.

Oh and I finally found out why mimics don't match with the money they drop...

In mon_create_drop(), we use drop level to generate the drop:

In mon_create_mimicked_object(), we just use the depth:

Those two will usually not match, so what we "see" is actually not what we "get".

Yeah, it looks like if you replaced that "any" with the type of metal the monster is you'd get that type of precious metal. The value passed in is only used to pick the type if the string doesn't match. So something like
obj=make_gold(level, "copper");
would always create copper coins, but if you found the creeping copper at depth 100 it would be many more copper coins (on average) than if you found it at depth 1.

This would only be a cosmetic change, if I'm reading it correctly.

I tried summoning creeping coins through the debug commands in 4.2.0 and I always got the exact number and type of coin I was supposed to. So, that seems to be working perfectly, actually. I haven't really watched when I'm playing a real game to see if everything matches up then.

Nice, thanks :)

Nick already answered this but Slow Digestion is seriously ruining good artifacts.

I'd remove Slow Digestion from the game altogether but the community probably isn't keen on removals. At least add some mushrooms of purging in shop 1, or something.

In my variant I've added to shop for now:

Or go back to the days when maxing out nutrition had no consequences whatsoever. Really, overeating penalties are a relic of old-school Angband in the same category as potions of death and floating eye paralysis loops, and I don't understand why anyone would want to bring any of these back.

Or just revert the Scroll of Remove Hunger behavior to what it used to be, leaving @ satiated, but not full, i.e., upon reading it sets @ hunger to 50%, whether or not @ was above or below that.

Since it's nearly a year since the beginning of the New Bad Old Days of the current hunger/food system (which brought to an end the Golden Age following the end of the Bad Old Days), I thought I'd just point at my post outlining some of the justification for the current system.

The current problem as I see it is one of balance. My planned solution is to change regen from adding a flat amount of digestion to doubling it, and change slow digestion from dividing digestion rate by 5 to dividing it by 2. We can see how the balance looks then.

These sound reasonable to me, and since no one asked I'll throw out some thoughts of my own.

• Being 100% full should carry no penalty. Going over 100% should be a problem.
• I rather like the idea that your belly can only take so much potion.
• All potions should feed you a small amount, not just some potions.
• When you eat or drink something that would gorge you it should give you a warning and a y/n prompt:
  • Food with no other benefit should say "Some will be wasted" and stop before gorged.
  • Potions and mushrooms should say "This will leave you gorged."
  • If I can't have both, the latter will be fine.
• I don't see any problem with scrolls of Satisfy Hunger bringing your food meter down. Seems better than making players save salt water for 80 dungeon levels, or "jog it off." If this means players get around the finite space in their bellies via magic, well, it's magic. Burning excess calories is on the low end of the miraculous scale.

New builds are now up on the nightlies page with the following changes:

• Fixed a bug which caused crashes in monster lore
• Adjusted digestion rate so that it is doubled by regen and halved by slow digestion
• Pulled in backwardsEric's latest raft of bugfixes and improvements:
  • Fix (at least partial) to crashes from reading Rune of Protection scrolls
  • Plug some memory leaks in my code
  • Deal with the issue where tunneling caused hitpoint drain
  • Refixed a couple of bugs (#4190 and #4334) that I had done an incomplete fix for
  • New system to control the player property display panel in a more configurable way; this was a lot of work

I am actually getting a subwindow-related crash on opening the game with the new build. So I haven't updated angband.live yet; I'll do more testing.

EDIT: Right, small fix pushed, and angband.live updated

I agree with this, all makes sense. To be honest though, I've not had too much of an issue with being gorged, I just make sure that going into big fights like Morgoth I'm no more than 50% full, leaving room for plenty of potions.

To be honest, I think the fact that we're now debating the hunger mechanic means the game is probably at its best ever, with great balance and entertainment. The monster upgrades and changes in 4.2 have successfully reversed the perception that the game was getting "easier", ever since version 3.0 was released (probably a true perception).

Thanks Nick for all the great changes you've made since you took over.

Totally concur; game is better than ever.

From my earlier post, I should have said that all potions should feed you the exact same amount (who wants to have to Inspect for this info?). And I kinda snuck in a name change reversion suggestion: Remove Hunger -> Satisfy Hunger.

Addendum: I also have not had too many problems with gorging. But it can be very punishing.

I agree that the hunger mechanic is better than its previous complete irrelevance. Hopeful that Nick's recent changes improve the hunger balance ever further. Still wish "Remove Hunger" (or "Satisfy Hunger") scrolls could set one to 50%. Just hate wasting a bunch of turns before the final fights for the sole purpose of burning off food so that healing potions won't cause problems.

I think I actually like Sphara's suggestion of making mushrooms of purging appear in the General Store.

Sounds good to me.

Question about the behavior upon reading an unknown scroll. Didn't it used to say "You see no more Scrolls titled IDENTIFIED" rather than what it does now, "You see no more Scrolls titled GOBLYGOOK"?

Remove/Satisfy Hunger doesn't have to go to exactly 50%, either. It always seemed low to me. Especially with the crazy calorie burning druid regen spell.

I think that's a side-effect of the fix to Rune of Protection. I'll have a look.

i too for having little played 4.2.0, find that the current food system is not-well-balanced but ultimately better.
Getting too full helps prevent the spamming of CCW (or, even ?Phase and CLW), however, i think that the gorged penalty should work like so:

1. food and other will top up your hunger meter for a certain amount up to 100%. You cannot gorge on food (if you are at 80% and eat a ration, you go to 100% - obviously IRL you would be in control how much food you eat)
2. the next step requires a soft cap. This means that it takes longer for the hunger meter to go from 100% to 99% than it does from 99% to 98%. In other words, conventional food and scrolls cap you at 100%.
3. drinking potions can put you over 100%; at this point you become gorged, severely gorged, sick, and catatonic. -2, -4, -6, -10. The higher you go over 100%, the longer it takes to come down.

The reasoning here is that you can eat normally until you are sated. Once you are sated, if you force to eat more because you need the HP, you are then punishing yourself with the excessive food, and get into the speed (and why not, combat as well) penalties.

i think this is the best solution and if you disagree you are a dumb poopityhead.

source: am a fatass.



EDIT: obviously Trolls should have a massive advantage here with the hunger meter being shifted up to 150% max cap.

Yes, as Nick suspected it's a side-effect of fix for Rune of Protection: a scroll or potion is removed before computing the effect and learning what the item does.
With the change, the charge from a wand or staff is also deducted before use which means that, for an unknown wand or staff, you won't get the message that was previously printed about the new number of charges.

Could tweak it so that stuff from the pack is handled the old way, but stuff from the floor is handled with special care since that's the case that triggers one of the reported problems with Rune of Protection.

The charges message does still happen, as it is coded following knowledge update.

I think the easiest fix for things that are consumed is to call *_object_for_use() with no message, and then print a specific message in use_aux() after knowledge is updated.

Not just unidentified scrolls, but reading an already identified scroll on the floor gives this:

You see no more scrolls titled "inventum" of Enchant Weapon To-Hit.

It then lets you select the weapon. Canceling the action then says:

You feel something roll beneath your feet.

So you pick it up to read it but then drop it again? I guess that makes sense. Does it also take a turn of time to read but then drop?

While the messages changed for that case, the time taken should not. Both the old version and the new one don't take a turn if the item is not used and no knowledge was gained. If the enchant weapon scroll was not identified when you read it and canceled the action, it would take a turn of time in the new and old versions.

I can confirm this from "nightly" play on Angband.live about 12 hours ago.

I now have this (I believe) completely fixed in development. The solution was to revert the previous fix, and then take out the call to push_object() in effect_handler_GLYPH (in the case of a scroll being used), which was unnecessary because it was done at the end of use_aux() anyway.

Staff of Power worked outside LOS. I don't know how many squares its radius was from me but: I was in a very very long corridor when I started emptying Staff of Power charges at an approaching night mare. It was the only monster in the screen (Telepathy included) but I also got "it barely notices" or "it shudders" messages. Finally Vecna appeared on the screen in that corridor from the distance 0 N 20 W and he was missing one health star.

I have no idea if it is a bug so I don't report it.

EDIT: Oh, and I also found weird that Gilim (ice) and Nan (fire) do not have resistances for their flavor elements.

Does it handle scrolls of teleport level read from the floor? If the level change happens in the effect handler and non-persistent levels are used, the object that represents the scroll no longer exists when the effect handler returns. Also, from the fix for #4131, pushing objects from use_aux() wasn't enough to always place the glyph of warding.

I think this is probably OK.

I'm going to call this one a bug, though.

I'm not sure - I'll test those.

EDIT: Teleport level is fine, but it does bring back #4131. My feeling is that our difficulties here indicate an underlying problem of how the code is approaching this; let me think about it for a bit.

Hello, sorry if this is in the wrong place or has been asked before, I tried to use the search function best i could to check!

I'm trying to play through Terminal on my Mac using the version downloaded with Homebrew, but I'm crashing and getting a message after the title screen saying: "angband: Broken savefile - probably from a development version"

I've tried deleting and reinstalling and stuff like that but to no avail! Wondered if there was an easy fix for this? The download version works fine, so it's no bother, I just like having it all neat and tidy in my console.

Thanks in advance!

Savefiles on Mac are in Documents/Angband/, I believe (or maybe Library/Preferences/Angband/save ? I never had a mac, so I'm just reading this stuff up). Probably you have a leftover one from a previous install.

Savefiles are the files that hold your current characters. They are usually named with your username, without extension, and their content begins with the characters "SaveVNLA" (you can use "head filename -c 8" from the command line to display the first 8 characters of a file's content). They are usually not compatible along different major versions.

It is not clear to me from your description what you are trying to do. Anyway:

1. If you had an active game saved with a previous version and wish to finish playing that character, you will need to reinstall the old version you were using.

2. If you wish to play different characters with two different Angband versions at the same time, you will need to tell them to load different savefiles with the command-line option "-u <savefile>" when running Angband.

3. Otherwise, if you only wish to play the new version, just delete the old savefile and a new one will be created.

OK, I think I finally have a fix for this; it is incredibly ugly, but seems to work in every situation so far. If it survives further testing, it should get pushed in the next couple of days.