FAangband 0.3.4

[Nick]

FAangband 0.3.4, as source or compiled for Windows, OSX or WinCE is now available at the usual place.

Many thanks to all the people who have given feedback, in particular (as usual) Si Griffin.

Major changes (more detail below):

- New dragons - winged dragons (replacement for wyrms) are faster and breathe nastier stuff than they used to.

- Morgoth has lost speed and gained spellcasting power, especially summoning.

- Implemented Sangband-style terrain flags.

- *ID* no longer exists.

- Added NPP-style accented characters.

- Added Hugo Kornelis' 'h'andle command.

- Included a "small device" birth option which reduces all view, missile and
spell projection distances by half. This is intended for playing on very
small WinCE devices and (soon, I hope) the Nintendo DS.

- Made amnesia only lose map knowledge, not object knowledge.

There will probably be a while until the next version, as I am going (gulp) to attempt to write a port to the DS. Believe this or not as appropriate.

Nick.

Features
--------

- Reworked dragons. There are now four levels of dragons - worms (roughly as
strong as young dragons used to be), drakes (mature dragons), dragons
(ancient dragons) and winged dragons (great wyrms). Only winged dragons can
fly, and they are faster and breathe nastier stuff than the lower level ones.
There is a new breath element, dragonfire, which is half fire and half poison;
also, storm and ice can now be breathed. Winged dragons are only found in
Angband.

- Morgoth has lost speed and gained spellcasting power, especially summoning.

- Implemented Sangband-style terrain flags - although there is still more
functionality to be added. Each feature now has a description in the
'~' knowledge screens. Other visible changes include traps in trees, and
two types of tree.

- *ID* no longer exists - ordinary ID fully identifies everything. A future
release will rework pseudo-ID.

- Thralls now get waybread instead of regular food.

- Made 'I'nspecting an object print at the top of the regular screen, not load
a special screen.

- Added NPP-style accented characters for the Macintosh, Windows, SDL and x11
ports (but not WinCE or gtk). No accents in random names yet.

- Added Hugo Kornelis' 'h'andle command - 'h' can be used to aim a wand, quaff
a potion, etc etc.

- Made stairs and wilderness paths not take any energy

- Added average barehand damage for druids/martial artists to 'C' screen

- Included a "small device" birth option which reduces all view, missile and
spell projection distances by half. This is intended for playing on very
small WinCE devices and (soon, I hope) the Nintendo DS.

- Added lots more wilderness vaults and imported some new dungeon vaults from
vanilla. Changed wilderness vault frequencies so that vaults specific to a
particular type of wilderness are more common relative to generic ones.

- Made amnesia only lose map knowledge, not object knowledge.

Bugfixes and cleanup
--------------------

- made ARC_ spells work.

- fixed bug that was giving set items the wrong percentage resistance

- randarts and egos no longer get immunities when they shouldn't; the maximum
percentage non-immunity resist for a single item is now 80%. (Arralen, Si
Griffin)

- fixed (yet again...) bug where HP/SP were being lost on saving and reloading.
(Si Griffin)

- did fix from NPP to make tunnelling/immaterial monsters disturb the player
in a more reasonable way. (Si Griffin)

- stopped space from selecting the first menu item - instead it toggles the menu
(as it should have all along). (Eddie Grove, Remuz)

- made some improvements to macros, although keymap triggers still don't play
very nicely with inscriptions.

- birth options are no longer labelled as cheat options in character dumps (Si
Griffin)

- game no longer becomes bizarre when a half-caster attempts to browse one of
the unused books of the correct realm (Si Griffin)

- may have got rid of some excessive beeping (darkDrone)

- fixed x11 default fonts (Bandobras)

- fixed amusing bug where thrall mode had multiple players (me, Si Griffin,
Seany Clayton, HallucinationMushroom)

- removed redundant roff and c_roff printing functions

- dragon scale mail can no longer give vulnerability (Si Griffin)

- "Underworld Town" and related silliness should no longer appear in the
character notes

- replaced hard-coded limits, so that all limits appear in limits.txt (with an
exception for loading artifacts that will need attention at some point).

- pseudo-IDed items now stack consistently

- patched a couple of memory leaks

- fixed incorrect (fro FA) vault encoding in some vaults previously taken from
vanilla - now less food to be found in vaults

- fixed bug with pathfinding through trees and rubble only getting the player
half as far as expected. (Si Griffin)

[Seany C]

Woohoo! Sounds ace - looking forward to seeing (and dieing to) these new dragon types*. I'll miss the Greater Food Vaults (Larders?), though...

* So this means that the toughest wyrmkind in non-Angband locations will be the equivalent of AMHDs now?

[Nick]

Originally Posted by Seany C

* So this means that the toughest wyrmkind in non-Angband locations will be the equivalent of AMHDs now?

More or less - also dracoliches, dracolisks, great crystal drakes, and ethereal dragons (were ethereal wyrms) don't fly. And some of the uniques.

[Remuz]

Sounds nice, trying it now!

There will probably be a while until the next version, as I am going (gulp) to attempt to write a port to the DS. Believe this or not as appropriate.

Hooray! *bows*

[ekolis]

Just a minor annoyance, but when I quit after dying, I get the "FAangband.exe has stopped working..." message from Vista, as if the game had not shut itself down "properly"...

[Nick]

Originally Posted by ekolis

Just a minor annoyance, but when I quit after dying, I get the "FAangband.exe has stopped working..." message from Vista, as if the game had not shut itself down "properly"...

Yes, I thought I had got rid of this one, but it still pops up sometimes. I'll have to have another go at debugging in Windows

[Blackened]

As usual, great job! I am really looking forward to play the game. Unfortunately, I am experiencing some difficulties when trying to compile it under Linux with following settings:

./configure --enable-curses --disable-gtk --disable-x11 --disable-sdl --disable-sdl-mixer --disable-sdltest

As you can see, I am used to play with ncurses only. However, despite the fact I have explicitly disabled it, make process prematurely ends with following error:

make[2]: *** No rule to make target `/usr/include/SDL/SDL.h', needed by `main.o'. Stop.
make[1]: *** [build] Error 2
make: *** [build] Error 2

Just to make sure I am not forgetting anything I have tried to use the same configuration on a previous release and it works well. Indeed, obvious solution would be to build the game with SDL enabled (and I am actually going to do that), but if it is not a feature, I thought it should be probably reported somewhere. :-)

[andrewdoull]

Originally Posted by Nick

- Added NPP-style accented characters for the Macintosh, Windows, SDL and x11
ports (but not WinCE or gtk). No accents in random names yet.

How hard was this to add?

[Nick]

Originally Posted by Blackened

Just to make sure I am not forgetting anything I have tried to use the same configuration on a previous release and it works well. Indeed, obvious solution would be to build the game with SDL enabled (and I am actually going to do that), but if it is not a feature, I thought it should be probably reported somewhere. :-)

Thanks, I'll have a look. I did some playing with the sdl sound, and probably broke something.

[Nick]

Originally Posted by andrewdoull

How hard was this to add?

Not too hard. A grep for xchar (which gets most of the necessary stuff) shows these files:

cmd4.c
main-crb.c
main-dos.c
main-gtk.c
main-ibm.c
main-sdl.c
main-win.c
main-x11.c
main-xaw.c
tables.c
util.c
z-form.c
z-term.c
defines.h
z-form.h
z-term.h

That's in FA; it'll be pretty similar in NPP.

EDIT: You also have to get the right fonts.