Inconceivable!

To be fair, for Nick's purposes, whether changes have made it into the next nightly doesn't matter so much.

Hey it wasn't me - I spent the first several months thinking they were built nightly, instead of every four hours or whatever it is. But at least we can all understand a definition unique to this forum: a version built within four hours of any changes to the master branch of the official development repo. To be fair, I think a month is the longest gap between nightlies since they started being built. It will probably stay that way too ...

I suspect the main source of potential confusion is that normally people expect "nightlies" to include everything that everyone has been working on -- the latest state of all development work, even if that work is incomplete. Because we're using a distributed VCS where each developer can take advantage of source control without worrying about inflicting incomplete work on others, though, this isn't actually happening -- stuff goes out to mainline only when it's dev-stable, and thus mainline gets modified much less often. I suppose you could grab d_m's nightly or Magnate's nightly or takkaria's nightly and get something more recent than what's in mainline, if you really wanted to.

Well, that's simply us (the devteam) being careless with references to unfinished work, I think. To all intents and purposes the nightlies *are* the latest state of all development work - apart from the stuff that doesn't compile yet and/or has bugs rendering it unplayable. As soon as one of us gets a branch to a point where it compiles cleanly and doesn't crash in the first few minutes, it goes into staging. The idea of staging is that we compile and playtest each other's "finished" stuff, which picks up a whole load of embarrassing bugs that would otherwise spoil the nightlies. We have a rule that the person who puts stuff in staging cannot the put their own stuff into the nightlies, though this is occasionally relaxed when things are slow or takk is in a hurry. People could in theory build from the staging branch and help find bugs in it, but we took a decision not to provide builds from it on a regular basis because that would render the nightlies pointless.

There are sometimes branches that are finished but are too radical to go into nightlies without further testing - fizzix's AC changes are the only one that comes to mind, and I'd like to see them in nightlies eventually but haven't had time to playtest them yet. In theory git means that there could be lots of branches like that, but the testing community is small (and largely doesn't compile its own versions), so it's dispiriting to do a ton of work on radical changes and then have nobody use it. So people don't do that very often.

N.B. "nightly" refers to packages that are auto-built and put up at rephial.org for download, and that's only the master branch. To play from staging, or from any individual dev's branches, you'd need to compile it yourself. Nothing to stop you doing that, of course.

Hey guys, still using Derakon's nightly build from February.

I really liked artifacts having a few more dice on some occasions than the base.

What's weird in the build I am using is that with now TWO weapons, the dice changes reverted randomly to base in the middle of the game!

For instance:
1) I had been using Anduril from 3.2.0 and sometime after coming over to the nightly it reverted to 2d5 from 3d5. Fine. I figured it was a change, but I had expected it to be back to 2d5 immediately on my starting up the nightly--it happened some time later tho.

2) I found the Glaive of Pain while using the nightly. It was 9d6. Great. Huge weapon. I've been using it for a while. Earlier today I whacked a bunch of lesser balrogs and the Balrog of Moria with it and it ate them up. Suddenly this eve I start whacking a Dracolisk, and it just isnt crunching through nicely, and I look up and suddenly the Glaive of Pain has reverted to 2d6! Doh!

How can this happen that weapons are changing as I use the program? I didnt update the build at all...

Again, I liked the variety in the game from having some artifacts have more dice than the base.

That's the second time that bug's been reported, so I guess the devs can't ignore it now. ;)

Oh good, someone else noticed it.

p.s. Devs: I **LOVE** the description of the Knights Templar and your diatribe against sanctimoniousness. Keep up that good work. HATE evangelism and sanctimoniousness...

Er, the description of the Knight Templar's been around for years...

I just tried to jump to dlvl 127 with a wizard and Angband crashed. Console says "Assertion failed: (lev < MAX_DEPTH), function apply_magic, file object/obj-make.c, line 596."

BTW I tried to restore the dice of the artifacts with scroll of restore item--didn't recognize them as being damaged LOL. Damaged by the code, not by the monsters/dungeon heh.