Mr. Wickham the Elf Mage (long)

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Timo Pietilä

Never as it is now. v4 is a variant created for developers to play around and wildly test ideas, it is not a development version of vanilla angband. Very little of it will be in angband anytime soon.

Indeed. It will always be available, but never finished. So you can always try to honour Wickham with an ironman win in v4, and/or in V. Perhaps the ultimate would be to do it in every available version? ;-)

[mightbecactus]

Thanks for that advice guys.

Can I ask a practical question then; what I really want is to play vanilla ironman, but with the difficulty a bit closer to 3.0.9b, like 80% of the way back.

I see from your signature that 3.2 is even easier than 3.3; so which version of 3.1 should I go for? Are there any downsides RE bugs / stability (I notice they all have 'beta' in the label) - or was 3.1 even more difficult than 309?

Cheers
mbc

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by mightbecactus

Thanks for that advice guys.

Can I ask a practical question then; what I really want is to play vanilla ironman, but with the difficulty a bit closer to 3.0.9b, like 80% of the way back.

I see from your signature that 3.2 is even easier than 3.3; so which version of 3.1 should I go for? Are there any downsides RE bugs / stability (I notice they all have 'beta' in the label) - or was 3.1 even more difficult than 309?

3.4.

3.4 is much better than 3.1, 3.2 or 3.3. It still is easier than 3.0.9, but it is more convenient to play without being ridiculously easy, so it is my new favorite of the versions.

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Timo Pietilä

3.4.

3.4 is much better than 3.1, 3.2 or 3.3. It still is easier than 3.0.9, but it is more convenient to play without being ridiculously easy, so it is my new favorite of the versions.

Excellent! Thanks for my new signature - though I'll have to wait until 3.4.0 is final before I adopt it. Good to know we are moving in the right direction.

[wobbly]

Originally Posted by Magnate

Excellent! Thanks for my new signature - though I'll have to wait until 3.4.0 is final before I adopt it. Good to know we are moving in the right direction.

Any guess-timate when that'll be?

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by wobbly

Any guess-timate when that'll be?

Should be shortly after the last major blocker bug found in the release candidate is fixed.

[mightbecactus]

Thanks Derakon; though can I politely ask for those of us who don't know what a blocker bug is or how much goes in to fixing one if that might be weeks? months?

I only ask as Wickham's heir apparent is jumping up and down with anger (and thus will prob get himself killed on lvl 5)

mbc

[Derakon]

Blocker bugs are bugs that block the release of the game. In other words, they're bugs that are serious enough that we wouldn't want to inflict them on non-beta-testers. That's all they have in common, so they can be anywhere from trivial to very difficult to fix depending on what precisely is wrong.

In short, I gave you a useless answer. I don't actually know when 3.4 is due to be released. I think "soon" is accurate though.

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Derakon

Blocker bugs are bugs that block the release of the game. In other words, they're bugs that are serious enough that we wouldn't want to inflict them on non-beta-testers. That's all they have in common, so they can be anywhere from trivial to very difficult to fix depending on what precisely is wrong.

In short, I gave you a useless answer. I don't actually know when 3.4 is due to be released. I think "soon" is accurate though.

I think I can go a little further - there are two remaining blockers in 3.4RC1, both of which cause crashes on Windows (which is still the most popular platform). I don't think they're hard to fix, but we don't have any Windows devs when Blubaron isn't around, so it's hard to estimate exactly when they'll be fixed. But RC2 is, I suspect, likely to be out as soon as they are, and all goes well with RC2 the final 3.4.0 would be out a couple of weeks later.

So we're looking at somewhere around a month or so, I would guess.

[PowerWyrm]

Originally Posted by Magnate

I think I can go a little further - there are two remaining blockers in 3.4RC1, both of which cause crashes on Windows (which is still the most popular platform). I don't think they're hard to fix, but we don't have any Windows devs when Blubaron isn't around, so it's hard to estimate exactly when they'll be fixed.

I suppose you refer to #1654 and #1657. For #1654, I'm on Win7 and I am also able to reproduce the bug when selecting the option at splash screen (strangely this doesn't happen for my variant so maybe I already fixed that when porting the feature).

Maybe I could help here... setting a debug environment for Angband source code should be pretty easy. I'll try to see if I can reproduce the crashes in debug mode this weekend...