Beleriand
 

For some time now, in threads like this one and this one, I've been talking about doing a complete revamp of FAangband. And I'm still going to. But I have decided I still want to keep the old one, too.

So, the old FAangband will continue to exist. But there will also be a new variant, Beleriand.

It has a home at github; not much has been done to it yet, but I'm planning to get cracking on it soon.

Although, who knows, I may change my mind again yet :)

Nice. Your new features will break "angbandish" style of the game anyway.

Yes, that was part of the reason. The other part was I was just reluctant to totally break FA for the second time in a year.

If you do decide to go whole hog, consider nerfing teleportation to the point of removing it entirely. Excepting recall, perhaps. IMO it's kind of a cheap method of compensating for difficulty spikes. To take alternatives from other roguelikes, it could be replaced with a wand of digging (which would take you to the underworld in the wilderness) or randomly placed teleport tiles.

Recall is probably the worst thing here, it does not fit into adventure theme at all. Normal teleport can be replaced with invisibility, it can be something like 1d50 turns long, so it will not be completely safe, just like teleportation currently is.

I want to make more contribution to FA/Beleriand.
I have made and tested some changes to FA, that seems good to me and can be added to Beleriand too, also I can find/fix bugz, btw I want to know if some parts of gameplay are planned to be completely changed, so I will not try to balance it.

That would be excellent.

I am (slowly) rewriting a lot of basic stuff for Beleriand, so it won't be worth doing anything with that for a while.

FA, on the other hand, still has bugs, and still needs 1.1.6 features ported forward (like mouse support and working NDS and WinCE (maybe) ports). You have a fork on github, right? If you put stuff in that (preferably do a branch per change) then I can pull it in - including any gameplay stuff you thought was a good idea. That way any fixes that should go into Beleriand I can pull in there, too.

Looking forward to it :)

Hmm, I just try to update my FA 1.2x fork and it fails with some commits, while I have done no changes to it, strange.

Yeah, your fork seems to be in a weird state - might be simplest just to delete it and fork again.

Btw, is FA 1.2x supposed to be something different from 1.16, except for code rewrite and new bugs, I mean any gameplay changes ?

Almost none. There were some incidental changes from the trap layer, and a few places where code adopted from Vanilla has tweaked things slightly; but there were really no planned changes.

Trying to merge my few changes, made after 1.16 with FA 1.26, so you can probably use them, if you like. I also have plans to seriously revisit monster.txt in "make game harder" manner generally by removing pitifull spells from powerfull monsters.

Wow ... this sounds great. Are you planning on a wilderness map that approximates Beleriand's regions? An unreachable Gondolin?

That's exactly what I'm planning - although High Elves will be able to get to Gondolin. It will be a while before I have anything playable, though.

Well, it seems strange things happen with FA126, It does not work correctly on my linux system, while 116 have no problems at all. It seems it cannot create any file, e.g. cannot save game. Maybe I missed something obvious.

Oh, it seems it can create pref files, just not save. Vanilla 3.3.0 have this too.
trivial solution was to replace ANGBAND_SAVE_DIR with "./lib/save", it seems working now.

It also refuses to run in console mode, at least before I run FA116, it seems some pref files are missing or just deifferent.

Can't wait to play :-)

Btw some wilderness locations seems to be buggy, e.g. going south from Eriador town results in strange things, and gruesome bugz.

I did get a segfault related to race probabilities once (I seem to have messed that up somehow), but my pref files and console mode are fine.

I have just run your 1.26 windows binary.
At first it crashes on start, but second time it runs. Also going south form Eriador results in immediate crush. So it seems not only linux bug.

Fixed now - I had my array indices backwards :o

Current plans
 

Largely so I can see it all written down in one place, here are my (fairly unorganised) thoughts on the shape that Beleriand is going to take:

• New constructed world, covering First Age Middle Earth from the ocean to the Anduin and beneath.
• Vast rescaling from FA - a region of roughly 600x900 miles will be covered by game grids of 24x24 feet.
• New travelling system (no more Word of Recall) that has to deal with the vast distances involved.
• Some persistence of the world, and some predrawn landmarks.
• More flexible use of the energy/speed/time system - in particular, diagonal movement will take longer than horizontal/vertical.
• A bunch of new terrain types.
• Big nerfs to digging, summoning, teleporting and spellcasting generally.
• Less immediate healing (HP recovery), more importance to curing (of wounds).
• Major region-dependence of monster generation.
• Stat potions replaced by gradual character growth with experience.
• Reduction of elemental damage caps.
• Random dungeons, more 'three-dimensionality'.
• Generalisation of the FA specialty system to a skill system.
• Removal of pointy penalty, glove/armour effects on mana.
• Mana to have a relationship to confusion/stunning like the HP to damage relationship; all classes will have mana.
• Ghosts won't be able to be physically hurt, but will be able to be bound or dispelled.
• Big changes to the fight with Morgoth (I haven't settled on the detail yet).

This is all going to take some time. In particular, I've just spent most of my spare time for the last two weeks on the world maps, which consist of around half a million grids, each representing a square mile.

pics or it didn't happen

a.

So you basically reduce an infinite world, to some very large, but fixed map ?

The region edit file has the map, region by region. Then on generation each of these region grids will correspond to a 10x10 square of 22x22 chunks of terrain. By comparison, one regular Angband dungeon level is 9x3 such chunks. Terrain will be generated as needed, so the player is always in a 22x22 chunk, which is surrounded by 8 others. Then some of these (yet to be determined exactly which) will be saved off and kept when the player goes out of range, and some will disappear and be regenerated if necessary.

I hope you aren't doing this by typing terrain dots into the file. This is the kind of thing where keeping a PNG file that you modify in a paint program and then convert to text would be ideal -- not least because at the end of it, you have a handy-dandy image of the game world. :)

Interesting set of goals there! I'll be looking forward to seeing how things turn out! :)

By the way, regarding lessening "instant" healing, had you considered healing over time as an alternative? This mechanic is used in Torchlight for the healing potions; a basic healing potion restores 400 HP, but not instantaneously; instead, your HP gradually refills over a few seconds!

Well, yes and no. I originally typed it in at a 7x smaller scale; when I decided to change scale, I wrote a script to replace each grid by a 7x7 square of them, and I'm now adding detail.

Not the most efficient way, I know, but I get a certain satisfaction from knowing the whole thing thoroughly from the ground up. It's kind of a Zen thing.

@ekolis: At the moment, I'm thinking in terms of no healing potions, but we'll see :)

Pure Zen and awesomeness. :)

I've been wondering lately what effect extending a low device failure to scrolls (to reduce escape reliance) & temporary resistance to potions with use (so you can heal in an emergency but not overly rely on it). would have. I'd rather escapes weakened then have a viable strategy completely removed from the game.

You can save random seed, so terrain layout will allways be the same, but monsters/items can be saved for a while and be forgotten, if player goest too far away.

Good point, I may use that trick sometimes. I haven't yet decided exactly how much persistence there will be.

I'd rather have them removed than given a failure chance. It will be less frustrating in the long run. The thing with the potions sounds interesting, though.