[Announce] Poschengband 7.0.2 released

[CyclopsSlayer]

Originally Posted by wobbly

Chris do you mind looking at reforging sometime? For 320k on an elven cloak I get an anti-teleport cloak. For 420k on an elven cloak +4 search/stealth and si. If you look at the fame requirents for that power level it's not even close to keeping up. Outside of dark lights for ninjas I don't see what it does currently other then turn gold into trash.

Every time I have tried reforging a non-light I end up with something inferior to what I started with.

[wobbly]

The new can't recall from the dungeon if you don't kill the stair guardian is buggy for things like the master lich & shadow lord which blink or teleport. If you kill it too far from the stairs it doesn't work. I've been up & down the stairs from dark caves multiple times trying to kill a guardian that likes to teleport away.

I seriously, seriously question the logic to this decision. A few versions ago I played a shrewd yellow mage sprite (nature/trump). It was a fun & interesting challenge to play a character so scrawny that was always in 1-shot territory or close & had to use it's wits to defeat much bigger enemies. I bypassed most of the dungeon guardians. Took careful attention, maneuvering & clever ideas. Was fun & interesting. A lone big bag of hps breather in an open space is *not* interesting. A guardian like anti-magic cave that sits still while you pelt it with sling shots is also not interesting.

Seriously look at the level where the littlest mages & sorcerers get the hps to take on bigger breathers like a drolem or an AMHD or an Etheral dragon in the open. I don't mind mages being slower to play then big warriors (which quite quickly get the hps to just belt through these guardians). I do mind them having their play killed completely.

Maybe you think it's scummy to bypass the guardians? Personally I think it's scummier to grind till you can just overpower them with raw force.

Edit: The guardian for R'lyeh also teleports away
Edit: mine guardian also blinks

[murphy]

Just a couple of random thoughts about the apparent rift in the PCB fanbase. From the perspective of someone who's gotten plenty of enjoyment out of the game, and by no means an expert at it but certainly an enthusiast.

1. Its an amazing game, and its free. As variants go its hugely popular and deservedly so.

2. Its the nature of open source software that it is easily modified. The developer wants to protect the integrity of the game he created by asking players who mod the game to be transparent about it and call their edited games by a different name. To me that seems like a totally reasonable thing to ask. poschengband has name recognition and a reputation in the band community. Calling a modded game by the name poschengband is kind of a selfish way to reap the rewards of name recognition that was built on someone else's work.

3. If someone hacked the game to the point they had hidden healing staves in their inventory, that really goes beyond modding the game, thats clear cheating. And if they get publicly shamed for it, it seems deserved to me

4. If there's one thing I have found a little frustrating about poschengband its the lack of a communication channel with the developer. I occasionally find a bug and have no idea how to go about reporting it. Sometimes I post it here in the forum, sometimes I put it on git, but I've never gotten any acknowledgement either way that the issue has been addressed or even seen

5. Maybe the communication problem even factors into the players interest in modding the game. Players find bugs and come up with feature ideas, and if there's no feedback channel to voice these issues then its kind of a logical step to start tinkering with things yourself

6. But then again, when most of the feedback you get is people finding flaws, I'm sure that gets frustrating. If the developer stays out of the public just so he doesnt spend all his time interacting with critics, that seems totally understandable.

The game is a masterpiece, thanks once again for all the work that went into it

[Gwarl]

Originally Posted by murphy

Calling a modded game by the name poschengband is kind of a selfish way to reap the rewards of name recognition that was built on someone else's work.

I kind of want to point out that this is an inevitablility of band variants.

Most of what makes up poschengband was inherited from hengband, and most of the rest re-implemented from reposband, a re-implementation of posband, most of which was reimplemented features from tome and drangband. There are a huge amount of non-hengband things in poschengband, but an even larger amount of hengband things.

Most of what made up hengband was inherited from zangband. There were a huge amount of non-zangband things in hengband, but an even larger amount of zangband things.

Most of what made up zangband was inherited from kangband. There were a huge amount of non-kangband things in zangband, but an even larger amount of kangband things.

Most of what made up kangband was inherited from angband. There were a huge amount of non-angband things in kangband, but an even larger amount of angband things.

And of course angband itself was built over moria.

Chris has done some great work on poschengband, and has done a great job of improving it with features copied from vanilla. Vanilla has also taken things from poschengband. He deserves all the credit he gets. But it should be clear that it isn't his masterpiece, it's it's a legacy of a community of developers adding masterpiece to masterpiece for decades. As someone who's working with poschengband now, I'm seeing comments everywhere signed by Topi Yllinen, Leon Marrick, Ben Harrison, Robert Koeneke and others. We wouldn't have this legacy of variant soup if it weren't for Chris of course.

[Derakon]

Huh, I could've sworn that Kangband and Zangband were contemporary variants and cross-pollinated each other. But this is something like twenty years ago so my memory may well be fuzzy.

But yes, well said.

[Gwarl]

Originally Posted by Derakon

Huh, I could've sworn that Kangband and Zangband were contemporary variants and cross-pollinated each other. But this is something like twenty years ago so my memory may well be fuzzy.

But yes, well said.

They were. I was simplifying for rhetorical value.

[murphy]

Sorry if I was unclear. I didnt mean to say the code has only one author, but rather, that this code was released under a unique name, rather than using the same name as its predecessors. My impression is that chris wants to retain creative control of releases under the name poschengband, which seems like a reasonable thing to request

[debo]

Originally Posted by murphy

2. Its the nature of open source software that it is easily modified. The developer wants to protect the integrity of the game he created by asking players who mod the game to be transparent about it and call their edited games by a different name. To me that seems like a totally reasonable thing to ask. poschengband has name recognition and a reputation in the band community. Calling a modded game by the name poschengband is kind of a selfish way to reap the rewards of name recognition that was built on someone else's work.

I'm certain that "mods" would be named more often if it were easier for oookers to set up their own variant ladders. (This isn't a slight to pav, he's already done a ton of work to set up what we have now.)

Chris also took exception to "variants" that simply undid or ignored some of his changes, though, so there would be conflict even if these "modded versions" were to be labelled.

Originally Posted by murphy

3. If someone hacked the game to the point they had hidden healing staves in their inventory, that really goes beyond modding the game, thats clear cheating. And if they get publicly shamed for it, it seems deserved to me

clouded did not do this.

Originally Posted by murphy

4. If there's one thing I have found a little frustrating about poschengband its the lack of a communication channel with the developer. I occasionally find a bug and have no idea how to go about reporting it. Sometimes I post it here in the forum, sometimes I put it on git, but I've never gotten any acknowledgement either way that the issue has been addressed or even seen

5. Maybe the communication problem even factors into the players interest in modding the game. Players find bugs and come up with feature ideas, and if there's no feedback channel to voice these issues then its kind of a logical step to start tinkering with things yourself

6. But then again, when most of the feedback you get is people finding flaws, I'm sure that gets frustrating. If the developer stays out of the public just so he doesnt spend all his time interacting with critics, that seems totally understandable.

If I were chris, I would go mad with all of the bug reports / requested changes that are made just on these forums alone.

Poschengband gained a lot of momentum in its early days in part because of how responsive chris was to including bugfixes or new content made by players. Even now, despite his disconnectedness, poschengband gets more changes more frequently than even Vanilla does, which is pretty incredible.

[Mocht]

Am I reading the "generate.c" file correctly, do drops depend on the diligence virtue
It also looks to me that the rate at which new creatures spawn on a level depends on the patience virtue

[Atopian]

When it comes to virtues, your options are either learning a bunch of deeply non-intuitive relationships (even by the standards of roguelikes) then significantly modifying your playstyle accordingly...
...or deactivating virtues.

Obviously by my presentation of the issue I favour the latter.