FAangband 0.3.0

[Nick]

FAangband 0.3.0, as source and windows binary, is now available from http://angband.oook.cz/faangband/ - please download, play, post dumps, discuss, complain, etc.

Thanks to: Pav for hosting; Si Griffin for discussions and bugfinding help; everyone on angband-dev, especially Andrew Sidwell, Pete Mack and Andrew Doull, for ideas and all the code I've pinched from Vanilla; everyone who has posted ideas and comments to the newsgroup and forums

Changes in a nutshell (more detail below):
- massive code cleanup and modernisation, including wholesale importing of features from Vanilla;
- resistances are now true percentages, rather than the point-based approximation; lots of follow-on changes to this including big changes to ego-items and some things getting vulnerability (negative resistance);
- powering up of randarts, rebalancing so that there are less weapons and more armour, introduction of randart rings and amulets;
- element proofing;
- cleanup of the mouse interface - this is planned to go into vanilla, and I'll post separately about it;
- lots of other small changes.

There is a known issue where the windows port registers a crash on closing the game - I haven't been able to work out why, but the only obvious effect is to pop up an error window. The game still saves fine. I suspect it's a font issue of some sort, and I'm inclined to blame Vista...

Nick.

List of changes:

Code Cleanup/Modernisation
--------------------------
Massive. Started with some cleanups provided by Christer Nyfalt, then moved
on to importing most of the low level code from Angband 3.0.9ish - z-* files,
initialisation, sdl and gtk ports, display modules, compilation process,
Pete Mack's menu code, command menus, squelch, birth process, context help,
file viewing, auto-wielding at birth.


Percentage resistances
----------------------
Resistances are now percentages, applied multiplicatively (which is really
just the old points system with increased precision). 20% resistance is now
the threshold for immunity from effects (so 20% or more RConf will mean the
player can't be confused), except poison which is 80%.

Major overhaul of items, particularly egos as a consequence:

- Armour, shields of Resist Acid, Fire, Lightning and Cold have gone, and of
Resistance now has at least one, usually low, resist, likely to be more as
you get deeper.

- Elvenkind armour (and now shields) now get RBase at least one extra resist,
although that can occasionally be extra in a low resist.

- Rings of protection give a small amount of resistance to at least one element
- cursed ones give vulnerability.

- Armour/shields of Vulnerability are the cursed versions of Resistance.

- The one extra resist of other items (Cloaks of Aman, etc) is treated as for
Elvenkind.

- All ordinary and ego resists are randomised by up to a quarter, so the
nominal 40% base resists on Elvenkind armour each end up between 30% and 50%.

- Artifacts have varying levels of resistance (and/or vulnerability), not
randomised.


Element proofing
----------------
Items can now be proofed against acid, fire, cold and electricity by scrolls
of *proofing - these are deep and fairly rare.

Random artifacts
----------------
Randarts have been overhauled and powered up a bit. Randart rings and amulets
now exist, with some of the rings being potentially very powerful - this is to
make up for the lack of the Rings of Power in FA.

Good (ie not cursed) artifacts may have elemental vulnerabilities.

Mouse interface
---------------
This has been cleaned up a lot, with the hackish clicking on words in prompt
lines replaced by a context-sensitive system of "buttons" (eg [ESC]) on the
bottom line of the screen. I'll post more details of this separately, as the
plan is to include it (or something like it) in Vanilla.

Character screens
-----------------
The character screens (from the 'C' command) have been replaced by a scrolling,
coloured version of the character dump. Player notes have been coded more
cleanly (similar to a proposal in the angband-dev mailing list), and
colourised . Subwindow display of character details are a now a subset of
this.

Resistances -> Powers
---------------------
RBlind and RFear have become powers rather than resists, so random resist
items (like Elvenkind armour) can't get them but random power items (like
Blessed weapons) can.

Odds and Ends
-------------
- Changed some randart names to be more thematically consistent or avoid
standard artifact names.

- elven druids/rangers get their speed bonus in trees rather than on forest
levels now.

- tweaked racial properties, including removing the Dark Elf vulnerability to
light and giving humans evasion rather than a to-hit bonus in their
preferred terrain.

- gave druids some cool new spells, and better HP.

- gave trap setting and martial arts specialties to more classes

- made the "turns to fight" message only appear for monsters going from
frightened to not.

- added more speed to rings of Warfare, added Boots of Elvenkind and Amulets
of Sustenance.

- made catastrophic failure of wand recharge less catastrophic (destroys 2 of
a stack then a roll for subsequent ones rather than the whole stack)

- removed all birth options (maximise and preserve now always on, stat choice
is on the birth screen)

- made rivers weave a bit more

- made sure wilderness vaults are not too close to the player to make instakill
on entering a level less likely

- tidied up options a little

- updated the standard player ghosts (probably avoiding a defamation suit)

- prompt for destroying on pickup

Bugfixes
--------
- Monsters were mostly not trying to break runes of protection (Si Griffin)

- Some high value randart properties (like telepathy) were not possible, and
the randart generation could hang sometimes (Me!)

- some tvals in the Magic Shop were wrong, so the wrong items were being
stocked (Pete Mack)

- made Unlight stealth bonuses update correctly (Dario Saccavino)

- made {cursed} appear immediately on wielding a cursed item (ekolis)

- overhead map in mini-window wasn't working properly (someone - sorry!)

- Underworld had light (Arralen)

- Mountaintops didn't (Si Griffin)

[Slonk]

When I open up the game, all I get is a black screen with a cursor-sized gold rectangle. Cannot proceed from there. I can open up other term windows, but they are blank as well. I'm running WinXP, and grabbed the Windows zipfile.

Edit: It appears to be a font issue. When I set it to 6x12, it worked. Flipping through, it only seems that half of them are working.

[Nick]

Originally Posted by Slonk

When I open up the game, all I get is a black screen with a cursor-sized gold rectangle. Cannot proceed from there. I can open up other term windows, but they are blank as well. I'm running WinXP, and grabbed the Windows zipfile.

*sigh*

It works for me both in Vista and in XP. I vaguely remember having this issue before, and I think it was a font thing. You could try (a) checking the lib/xtra/font folder and seeing whether it has the 8x13.fon file (which is the default) or (b) changing the font from the Window menu and seeing if anything appears.

Any other ideas welcome

[ekolis]

Cool!

Say, the arrow keys don't seem to be working on the specialty screens...

[Slonk]

All of the font files are present. There just may be a problem reading certain ones. The files did take an unusually long amount of time to extract from the .zip.

Another issue, I selected my first character (DE Assasin), and after getting my Term windows all settled, went to select my Specialty. Upon chosing Mana Burn, the game crashed out on me. This may be an issue with my computer, as Windows prompted me to send an error report.

[HallucinationMushroom]

The solution might be as simple as restarting your computer.
I came this same yellow box of doom with T.o.M.E. a few years back, and someone recently had the same problem here on the forums.
Anyway, try restarting... it always works for me when I get the yellow box of doom.

[Slonk]

Thanks! That did the trick. Don't know why, but it did. Time to start sending hordes of random characters to their graves!

[Seany C]

Woohoo - seems to be working fine with XP.

The only mini-bug (?) I've found so far is that the arrow cursor keys don't work in character selection - however, 2 4 6 8 work fine for this...

Right, now to kill off a few more Druids (although the extra HP is noticeable even by CL13) Good work, as always...

[Seany C]

Erm...

>>
Ring of Resist Fire

It makes you vulnerable to fire (38%)
It cannot be damaged by fire.
>>

Does that mean that it's a cursed ring of fire vulnerability or that the description's a bit 'different'?

[Seany C]

Hmm, seems to be a negative ring after all - it's given me a vulnerability to fire. Cunning...