Cthangband 6.1 Release

[Dean Anderson]

I've patched a few bugs in Cthangband 6.0. Here's a link to the new version:

Cthangband 6.1 Installer

The change list is:

• Fixed bug where items/spells that did "Detect All" were stopping after the first type of thing they successfully detected, rather than continuing to call the other detection functions.
• Fixed bug in character viewer where "Shots per Round" and "Blows per Round" were showing incorrect values.
• Fixed bug where unidentified ammunition wasn't re-stacking when being picked up again after having been fired.
• Fixed obscure bug where a particular combination of recalling and taking the stairs in different dungeons could result in a town temporarily containing the wrong shops.
• Pets will now *actually* follow you from level to level. Usually.
• New journal page added, listing current pets.
• Fixed bug where selling a pile of items would tell you it was giving you the money for all of them but would actually only give you the money for one of them.
• Characters now begin the game weilding their starting equipment (finally!)
• Fixed bug where you couldn't dismiss pets if you had no mutations or racial powers.
• Arrows now have a greater chance of being recovered after having been fired (75% rather than 50%).
• Failing a sanity loss badly can now result in you gaining a random mutation.

Thanks to those of you who reported some of those.

[Seraphimus]

So let me open with the fact that this is possibly the greatest Angband variant I have set eyes upon, it's well built, has a setting it's easy to Roleplay in, Lots of interesting and unique Races and classes and forms of magic it has a larger world with many goals and objectives (and a wilderness and lots of dungeons) without being overwhelming like Zangband.


And yet, I can't enjoy myself playing it.

There is no documentation yet, I just spent an hour trying to figure out what this "Large number of passive magical abilities" That a chosen one gets and found nothing, I can't even use my go to of "Make a second character and wizard mode them to level 50 and just look" Because Alt-W brings up an "Enter wizard code" Prompt that does nothing, at all, and I have found nothing on why that is or what the wizard code may be. not even in the command list "?" pop-up.

I also just found a weapon that Stops my game between every 4 and 50 turns to ask "Do you want to teleport Y/n?" and I don't even know what part of my weapon it is that's doing this (it's bad enough that I'm tempted to go from the (+9, +5) glaive back to my (+0, +0) Short sword so I can just play uninterrupted, even identifying it revealed nothing and with the lack of a help file or internet documentation I'm kind SOL.

also There are no options, The first thing I do in any angband variant is spend 20 minutes tinkering with the myriad options available to get things the way I like, and yeah a lot of them are superfluous, I think it'd be great to have a real stripped down set of options, would save me a lot of time, but I can't even turn off auto-pickup (which is kind of a deal breaker for me, I hate Auto-pickup in what I will admit is probably a completely unreasonable manner).

Speaking of, Whilst you have a neat Auto-destroy thing I can set-up in my journal stopping to update it every few levels of play when my list of item priorities changes is time consuming and uninteresting, I really don't want to have the game pick-up another flask of oil when I already have 20, or that extra stack of arrows when I already have a full stack, carrying capacity is limited, but those are also things I don't want always destroyed because I might need more later. (or even immediately when something goes horribly wrong with a fire enemy)

I guess I'm just saying that... This work you have created is exceptional, but... Maybe not for me? I'm a sit down and read the manual for an hour before playing a new game kind of guy and you're manual is literally just a few lines saying "Hey, sorry we've not got one" (though the history of the game part was interesting) Also, is the teleporting thing a bug? It's a planar weapon, maybe it's not supposed to ask? Or is it something about me being a chosen one interacting with it weirdly? I tried to wizard *identify* it to find out more but again no luck with wizard commands. It can also be activated to teleport on purpose if that helps.


And Sorry for ranting a bit there, I guess I'm a bit frustrated because of how much I want to enjoy this variant but even with my almost 20 years of experience with angband and it's variants (my dad started me on moria when I was 8) I can't seem to break past that info wall that has me feeling like I'm mostly banging my head on the first 4-5 levels of play over and over again.

I'll likely have to put it down for now and hope the next big update has some more tools and information to help me along. Good luck with your work on this or whatever other projects might be eating your time Right now.

[Gwarl]

Originally Posted by Seraphimus

I also just found a weapon that Stops my game between every 4 and 50 turns to ask "Do you want to teleport Y/n?" and I don't even know what part of my weapon it is that's doing this (it's bad enough that I'm tempted to go from the (+9, +5) glaive back to my (+0, +0) Short sword so I can just play uninterrupted, even identifying it revealed nothing and with the lack of a help file or internet documentation I'm kind SOL.

Not sure if Cth supports this but in some other variants with weapons of this type you can inscribe

.

on the weapon to prevent the behaviour.

[Seraphimus]

Originally Posted by Gwarl

Not sure if Cth supports this but in some other variants with weapons of this type you can inscribe on the weapon to prevent the behaviour.

Huh, Well, I eventually decided to go back and see how long I could last just hitting yes every time it prompted me, was actually rather an amusing game and I made it surprisingly far, enough to convince me to take a deep breath and try again, but I will definitely give that a try next time I find one. I've encountered cursed teleporter items in several variants before but not one like that.

[Dean Anderson]

Originally Posted by Gwarl

Not sure if Cth supports this but in some other variants with weapons of this type you can inscribe '.' on the weapon to prevent the behaviour.

Cthangband doesn't currently have user-inscriptions; only the automatic ones from shops and item feelings. The C code for handling them was archaic and complex (due to a combination of C not having any string handling capabilities and the code dating from a time when every byte of memory was precious) and - since it was a feature I never used - porting it over seemed to be more effort than it was worth.

Of course, there's nothing stopping me from adding a new (and much simpler) user-inscription system now. But again it's something I never used so I've not felt the need so far.

[gimber]

At some point I said "yes" to auto destroy an empty chest. Now it's always destroying that type of chest, even if not empty. I can't find chests anywhere in the worthless options. Is there any way to change it?

[Dean Anderson]

Originally Posted by gimber

At some point I said "yes" to auto destroy an empty chest. Now it's always destroying that type of chest, even if not empty. I can't find chests anywhere in the worthless options. Is there any way to change it?

I think that's a bug. I'm going to have to check the code and how it handles chests, and see if I can improve it in 6.2.

Edit: I've fixed it at both ends. Chests are now included in the "Worthless Items" section of the Journal (you can specify to auto-destroy empty/disarmed/locked/trapped chests of each type there now). Also, chests - like weapons - no longer ask you if you want to auto-destroy similar items if you destroy one. While I was at it, I discovered a bug where examining a chest that was disarmed and unlocked but not yet opened would crash the game so I fixed that too!

[gimber]

Great, looking forward to 6.2!

[Dean Anderson]

Hey, I'm back!

I'm not a regular poster here, so I've only just seen your post. I'll do my best to reply, though - even if you don't read my reply someone else might find it useful.

Originally Posted by Seraphimus

So let me open with the fact that this is possibly the greatest Angband variant I have set eyes upon, it's well built, has a setting it's easy to Roleplay in, Lots of interesting and unique Races and classes and forms of magic it has a larger world with many goals and objectives (and a wilderness and lots of dungeons) without being overwhelming like Zangband.

Thanks!

And yet, I can't enjoy myself playing it.

That's a shame, but most of that is on me, I suppose.

There is no documentation yet, I just spent an hour trying to figure out what this "Large number of passive magical abilities" That a chosen one gets and found nothing, I can't even use my go to of "Make a second character and wizard mode them to level 50 and just look" Because Alt-W brings up an "Enter wizard code" Prompt that does nothing, at all, and I have found nothing on why that is or what the wizard code may be. not even in the command list "?" pop-up.

The lack of documentation is unfortunate, and something which is remedied in 6.2 (which I'm currently working on). 6.2 has much more documentation - rather than a PDF file, it has a bunch of interlinked HTML pages and it has a built-in mini-browser in the game for you to view them with.

The problem was that while I was nearing the end of working on 6.0 (which took me a couple of years and a few false starts because it was a re-write from scratch in a new language) I suddenly realised that it was approaching 20 years from when I released the first version. I then rushed finishing off 6.0 to get it out as a 20th anniversary version - but that meant I didn't have time to go through and re-do the documentation.

As I say, re-doing the documentation is something I am doing for 6.2, since it's got no deadline so it can wait till I'm finished and happy with it.

Having said that, when you look at your character sheet ('C') there are an extra couple of pages on it that show you what abilities you have and where you get them from. Looking at that as you go up levels will show you what abilities you're picking up innately and what gaps you have that need covering by using equipment. Obviously it won't tell you in advance what you'll get - you'd have to actually get a Chosen One to, say, 10th level to find out what they get at that level.

But that's something that will be in the documentation for 6.2.

With reference to your comment about Wizard mode. Yes, that's locked behind a password for two reasons. Firstly, it's supposed to be for debugging purposes, rather than for general use. Secondly, it shouldn't be something that can be accidentally turned on with a keypress or two.

I'm in two minds as to whether or not to leave Wizard mode in the game, to be honest. I need it for debugging; but I can easily mark it so that it only get compiled into debug builds, not into release builds. Whichever way I go, I should go one way or the other. I should either take it out of release builds or put the password in the documentation.

I also just found a weapon that Stops my game between every 4 and 50 turns to ask "Do you want to teleport Y/n?" and I don't even know what part of my weapon it is that's doing this (it's bad enough that I'm tempted to go from the (+9, +5) glaive back to my (+0, +0) Short sword so I can just play uninterrupted, even identifying it revealed nothing and with the lack of a help file or internet documentation I'm kind SOL.

That would be a Planar Weapon. They try to teleport you periodically. Unless you wear something that gives you an anti-teleport ability. They're one of the best weapons in the game, providing you don't mind (or can overcome) that side-effect.

also There are no options, The first thing I do in any angband variant is spend 20 minutes tinkering with the myriad options available to get things the way I like, and yeah a lot of them are superfluous, I think it'd be great to have a real stripped down set of options, would save me a lot of time, but I can't even turn off auto-pickup (which is kind of a deal breaker for me, I hate Auto-pickup in what I will admit is probably a completely unreasonable manner).

Turning off most of the options was something that I did back in version 5.0.0 in preparation for the re-write. There were just far too many of them, and they made the code an order of magnitude more complex than it needed to be.

I'll consider adding some options back in once the code is more settled (I'm still doing major refactoring after the change from a procedural language to an object-oriented one).

Speaking of, Whilst you have a neat Auto-destroy thing I can set-up in my journal stopping to update it every few levels of play when my list of item priorities changes is time consuming and uninteresting, I really don't want to have the game pick-up another flask of oil when I already have 20, or that extra stack of arrows when I already have a full stack, carrying capacity is limited, but those are also things I don't want always destroyed because I might need more later. (or even immediately when something goes horribly wrong with a fire enemy)

Having a limit on how many of a certain item you're willing to carry rather than just a binary yes/no for picking them up is something I've never seen in an Angband variant, and it's an intriguing idea.

Maintenance of your destroy preferences is made easier by the fact that (apart from weapons/armour) when ever you choose to destroy an item the game will offer to add it to your auto-destroy list. So when (for example) you get to the point where a CLW potion is no longer worth the inventory space you don't need to go into the preferences interface and select it for auto-destroy. Instead you simply destroy one ('k') and it will offer to add CLW potions to your auto-destroy list for you.

I guess I'm just saying that... This work you have created is exceptional, but... Maybe not for me? I'm a sit down and read the manual for an hour before playing a new game kind of guy and you're manual is literally just a few lines saying "Hey, sorry we've not got one" (though the history of the game part was interesting)

Hopefully you'll have more luck with 6.2 - if you've not been put off completely.

Also, is the teleporting thing a bug? It's a planar weapon, maybe it's not supposed to ask? Or is it something about me being a chosen one interacting with it weirdly? I tried to wizard *identify* it to find out more but again no luck with wizard commands. It can also be activated to teleport on purpose if that helps.

It's not a bug. It's a feature of Planar Weapons (and nothing to do with your race or class).

And Sorry for ranting a bit there, I guess I'm a bit frustrated because of how much I want to enjoy this variant but even with my almost 20 years of experience with angband and it's variants (my dad started me on moria when I was 8) I can't seem to break past that info wall that has me feeling like I'm mostly banging my head on the first 4-5 levels of play over and over again.

No worries.

I'll likely have to put it down for now and hope the next big update has some more tools and information to help me along. Good luck with your work on this or whatever other projects might be eating your time Right now.

I write tabletop RPGs as well as Cthangband, so I tend to alternate. After releasing 6.1 (which was basically just a bugfix version of 6.0) my next couple of big projects were RPG projects and they took up most of my time for the last few months. I'm back on Cthangband now, updating it to 6.2.