Experiences with Frog-knows

[thapper]

I found something I would think is Frog-Knows (named angband-24f-win) here

[Malak Darkhunter]

Originally Posted by thapper

I found something I would think is Frog-Knows (named angband-24f-win) here

That's it but it's unplayable for me, it's in dos terminal window, getting alot of graphical corruption, I might need to make a windows me platform to play these older games.

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by Malak Darkhunter

just do be curious, are you guying playing this in a dos port, or did you re-compile for windows? I like the older games, I played Moria extensively, but never got to experiment with versions of angband older than 3.0.3, and would like to give it a whirl.

can you recompile that old a version for windows?

Funny thing with (very old) Frog-Knows binary is that it runs without problems directly in 32bit XP, but there was some graphics problem with floor so I run it in dosbox.

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Malak Darkhunter

That's it but it's unplayable for me, it's in dos terminal window, getting alot of graphical corruption, I might need to make a windows me platform to play these older games.

Google for dosbox.

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Derakon

Modern polymorph is too boring to ever use.

I've always wondered why this is the case. I presume it's because in order to avoid instadeath it ends up terribly boring. I think this boosts my case for fixing #572 properly - if we could guarantee that a polymorphee would never get a move before @, we could open up the range of possibilities again, because you'd get at least one turn to get away from the Great Storm Wyrm.

[Jungle_Boy]

Originally Posted by Magnate

I've always wondered why this is the case. I presume it's because in order to avoid instadeath it ends up terribly boring. I think this boosts my case for fixing #572 properly - if we could guarantee that a polymorphee would never get a move before @, we could open up the range of possibilities again, because you'd get at least one turn to get away from the Great Storm Wyrm.

I never use polymorph because it seems like any monster I would want to change into something less dangerous is immune to it.

[Malak Darkhunter]

Originally Posted by Magnate

Google for dosbox.

I've used dosbox before and have made directorys for it, but I totally forgot it existed, thank you guys for reminding me, occasionaly I like to mess around with the older games.

[buzzkill]

Originally Posted by Magnate

I've always wondered why this is the case. I presume it's because in order to avoid instadeath it ends up terribly boring. I think this boosts my case for fixing #572 properly - if we could guarantee that a polymorphee would never get a move before @, we could open up the range of possibilities again, because you'd get at least one turn to get away from the Great Storm Wyrm.

Ploymoprh doesn't just happen. A deliberate action must be taken by the player before anything gets polymorphed. Why then, are you as a maintainer, worried about insta-death. It seems that your trying to circumvent player stupidity, which aside from being a fools task makes for a boring game.

Back in the old days, in Rogue IIRC, polymorph always transformed the target into something commonly found somewhat deeper, and therefore likely more dangerous to the player. It wouldn't change an orc directly into a wyrm, not that you couldn't get there by using a whole wand full of charges. Why not revert to something like that.

Here's a pitch: A LoS polymorph trap would be neat.

[kaypy]

I was using the one from
http://rephial.org/release/2.4.fk
or rather, one just this side of frogknows
http://rephial.org/release/pcangband-1.3

1.3 is where non-cardinal targetting got introduced, which was kinda my minimum UI requirement. Macros I can do myself at the OS level.

Public service announcement: ancient versions of angband do not have recovery saves, but do have bugs. At very least manually exitsave-and-restart periodically if you don't want your character do learn why glitches are more dangerous than Great Storm Wyrms.

[Derakon]

Buzzkill: remember that polymorph can happen from chaos attacks too. That's such a rare case that I don't consider it worth worrying about though. And of course we could also have different rules for player-initiated and monster-initiated polymorphs.