Sil code questions

[Nick]

I am currently embarked on the fool's errand of re-implementing Sil 1.3.0 starting from current Angband code. This thread is to ask questions that I'm hoping someone may answer. Here's the first:

The staff of Light description says it "lights up an area with a radius of 7 squares, plus the entire room if you are currently in one". In fact it lights up a radius of 7, allows the light to spill through walls, but does not light the room - in contrast to, for example, the monster darkness spell which darkens a radius and the room. Does anyone know if this is intentional?

[Bill Peterson]

Please, oh please keep the Angband graphics structure. I tried to make Gervais style tiles for Sil 1.3 but was stymied by the developer's putting ASCII definitions for objects in non-standard places. And the person doing Sil-Q threw away all of the Angband graphics in favor of a new set of tiles.

[Quirk]

The staff of Light description says it "lights up an area with a radius of 7 squares, plus the entire room if you are currently in one". In fact it lights up a radius of 7, allows the light to spill through walls, but does not light the room - in contrast to, for example, the monster darkness spell which darkens a radius and the room. Does anyone know if this is intentional?

I'm afraid the origins of this are lost to the mists of time.

Please, oh please keep the Angband graphics structure. I tried to make Gervais style tiles for Sil 1.3 but was stymied by the developer's putting ASCII definitions for objects in non-standard places. And the person doing Sil-Q threw away all of the Angband graphics in favor of a new set of tiles.

Adapting Sil to use tiles was a bunch of work. I would not expect a simple rewrite of Sil 1.3 to support tiles at all as a number of the design decisions made explicitly break tile support.

Angband default tilesets would in any case be incompatible with Sil as the elements being represented are quite different.

[Bill Peterson]

Originally Posted by Quirk

Adapting Sil to use tiles was a bunch of work. I would not expect a simple rewrite of Sil 1.3 to support tiles at all as a number of the design decisions made explicitly break tile support.

Angband default tilesets would in any case be incompatible with Sil as the elements being represented are quite different.

I beg to differ with you here. I reinstalled Sil 1.3 and the graphics system works, just like it did in the variant (NPP?) that half forked. I made an effort to modify the Gervais tile set and had moderate success. I stopped when I found that half had put some item descriptions in places other than the standard places. To fix the tiles I would have had to modify his code and I had no motivation for that.

I checked and in your first release (release 7) the graphic still worked, but after that you disabled the menus, and in 1.5 you had eliminated the original Angband graphics entirely, in favor of your home grown method.

I'll grant that I seem to be the only one at all interested in finding tiles for Sil, and I don't have the motivation to maintain other than the Gervais set. But now that Sil 1.3 is stable, I may take another stab at fixing it. If Nick follows through and converts Sil to the Angband code base I'll certainly support that.

[Quirk]

Originally Posted by Bill Peterson

I beg to differ with you here. I reinstalled Sil 1.3 and the graphics system works, just like it did in the variant (NPP?) that half forked. I made an effort to modify the Gervais tile set and had moderate success. I stopped when I found that half had put some item descriptions in places other than the standard places. To fix the tiles I would have had to modify his code and I had no motivation for that.

I, meanwhile, have spent a good deal of time over the last year and a half adding tile graphics back into a game that was designed quite deliberately not to have them. From the Listen skill (replacing characters with *) to combat printing damage numbers over tiles, from glowing weapons to special artifact character glyphs, from unalert monsters being flagged by the ASCII character's background colour to the Rage herb... it is simply impossible to make Sil tiles work without extensive code changes.

Saying the tiles "worked" because there was a menu left over that showed a few Angband tiles in place of the characters suggests that you did not get very deeply into this. And that's fine! But please believe me that this is by no means as simple as you suppose, and the rewrite to a cleaner code base using modern Angband source will not support tiles unless Nick puts a good deal of Sil-specific work in to make it do so.

I will reiterate though that the Gervais tiles do not map to Sil items or enemies.

[Pete Mack]

In particular: Do the tiles show glowing weapons when their slays are nearby?

[Quirk]

Yup, the Sil-Q tiles support this:





Examples for both the main screen and inventory screen.

I didn't do this for the player tile itself, though this might have been useful, as the ASCII doesn't do this. Maybe in the next version.