FrogComposband 7.0.strawberry

[Sideways]

Originally Posted by Mocht

Have the Angband quest rewards been changed
In Poschengband, weaponmasters had a good chance of obtaining class specific weapons this way

Feature request: no selling option

Has the bug with maul, the Mauler skill, been fixed

This one?

Originally Posted by Mocht

I've found a bug
When my mauler was ambushed outside the volcano and he attacked a monster, the monster would move back, say, 3 squares and my character would move forward 3 squares
When I deactivated maul the problem disappeared
Maul did not cause problems earlier but the problem also happens sometimes in volcano
I think it is to do either with the tile the monster or character is on, or with nearby tiles
If there is no lava or whatever, just normal tiles, then the problem doesn't occur

At least it hasn't been fixed by me, so it's probably still there. I'll have a look at it.

Bringing back the no-selling option is on my to-do list.

Rod rarities have not been changed in any way since PosChengband. I'd guess you're seeing random variation (or playing subtly differently in some way that causes you to see fewer low-level rods). Of course, if you need a rod of detect traps, there's always the infamous 1-charge one in the Thalos arena

Angband quest rewards have not been changed, and the code that gives you tailored rewards is still there. But since both PosChengband and FrogComposband accept lots of non-weapons as "tailored", there's a lot of randomness in whether your tailored drop happens to be a weapon, and you can easily be lucky or unlucky.

[Sideways]

Quick poll: how many players would be upset if I made Utgard-Loke resist confusion? (Gwarl has emphatically voted against this, but I want to know if anybody else would object.)

[Gwarl]

This is like the riding thing; nobody else is going to have an opinion because nobody else takes advantage of status effects just like nobody else tries to ride things without playing beastmaster/cavalry/skillmaster (except perhaps bostock now that I've trained him).

Imagine not having opinion! That's a player who doesn't understand the usefulness of confuse.

[HugoVirtuoso]

Found a bug with Mangy looking lepers:
If you use '5' repeatedly for long periods of time against the Mangy looking leper, it crashes the game. In my case, it happened with my Tonberry Skillmaster in Outpost. I can reproduce this if I could get someone to spectate me. (or better yet, Gwarl, if you're reading this - You can go ahead and give Sideways my current FrogComposband savefile [the one that is now named 'Van232' in-game] so he can look for the bug)

I was able to slow down my ongoing OBS recording to see what really happened - this message shows at the top of the screen and then crash:
/home/angbandlive/games/frogcomposband: software bug

[Sideways]

@Mocht: Where do you feel you usually found your first rod of detect traps in PosChengband? Knowing that, I could generate lots of random levels at that depth in both Pos and FrogCompos and see if there's any difference in how many rods of detect traps show up.

[Sideways]

I think I've solved the maul bug: as far as I can tell, that's exactly what maul is supposed to do.

[Sideways]

Originally Posted by HugoTheGreat2011

Found a bug with Mangy looking lepers:
If you use '5' repeatedly for long periods of time against the Mangy looking leper, it crashes the game.

Confirmed and fixed.

[Sideways]

Originally Posted by Mocht

Are you saying that enemies (sometimes) being pushed back multiple squares and the mauler following is intended behaviour

Yes, there's 70 lines of code in cmd1.c that have the sole purpose of making that happen. PosChengband (and by extension, FrogComposband) has a lot of obscure mechanics that are not very well documented, or not documented at all.

-----

Re: the Angband quests, there's a few things that might make a difference.

Firstly: Chris changed the way those rewards work recently. That change was in PosChengband, but if you're thinking of old PosChengband before that change, you might think of it as a difference between PosChengband and FrogComposband. What Chris's change did was improve the quality of those drops but decrease their number; in particular, the second Angband quest is now likely to generate only 1 tailored reward drop instead of 2, and the same is true to a lesser extent of the third Angband quest. Overall the effect of that should be pretty close to a wash - in a trial run I did, the improvement in quality and the decrease in quantity cancelled each other out - but it might give a different feel that you're noticing, and it likely has a negative impact in the specific case of the second Angband quest.

Secondly: GREAT_OBJ, a constant that affects several things about item generation, is more favorable to the player in FrogComposband; but this probably only has a very small effect.

Thirdly: Gwarl added a bunch of early orc uniques in ComPosband that are also in FrogComposband. That might have a negative effect on early quest "rewards", for the following reason: in FrogCompos there's a high chance those early quests will be for some unexciting orc unique that doesn't have guaranteed excellent drops of its own, but in PosChengband you have a higher chance of getting someone like the Variant Maintainer, or Hagen (66% chance of dropping his spear), or even It. In other words, the ancillary drops native to the unique would be slightly more exciting in Pos, and it would be hard for the player to tell those apart from the actual quest reward.

Fourthly: it really is super-easy to underestimate how much randomness there is. In the trial run I mentioned, when I played old Pos before Chris's change, essentially nothing useful dropped on the first ten attempts - and then the next ten times completely turned it around, with artifacts and valuables dropping left and right.

[Sideways]

You've played maulers more than me; but I don't see any problem with it. Maulers get other attacks (Knockback and Scatter) that knock enemies back; it doesn't seem unthematic that they'd have an attack that knocks the enemy back but also allows the player to follow, and the visual image of a mauler charging the enemy and driving it further back with every blow works. It also seems interesting from a gameplay point of view, requiring care but potentially allowing the player to either drive the enemy into more favorable terrain or escape being surrounded by melee-ers in an alternative way to Scatter. That it only works in 8 directions is a bit unfortunate maybe.

[HugoVirtuoso]

As of right now, Gwarl says he has incorporated all of the post-7.0.strawberry fixes, up to the March 20 2018 commit with mentioning a dungeon relocation [spoiler] (as noted on Sideway's GitHub page), into the FrogComposband on Angband.Live.

Mocht:
Hengband is actually still maintained to this day. The latest English version is 2.1.5. The very latest version is 2.2.1 (as noted here), but is in Japanese.