Competition 147

[Nick]

Competition 147 is now available at the competition page; it is a Neoband Half-Troll Pyromancer.

Note that the ridiculous competition 146 still has about 6 days to go.

Also, note that this is the last competition run by me - debo has kindly agreed to take over from here. Thanks to everyone who has played and commented during my tenure, and particularly to pav for his unfailing patience and responsiveness.

[debo]

He's going to need to be even more unfailingly patient and responsive if a plebe like me is going to run the comps as well as you have

Thanks in advance pav!

[half]

Thanks to you Nick! This competition has become a roguelike institution, and plays a very valuable role here in co-ordinating people to try similar things and compare notes, as well as to try different games.

[mrrstark]

I took a quick look, and couldn't find anything in the readme or online help (?) about Neoband's features and modifications. It's also not listed in the variants list on oook.cz. Is there any webpage or summary somewhere?

[Roch]

Originally Posted by mrrstark

I took a quick look, and couldn't find anything in the readme or online help (?) about Neoband's features and modifications. It's also not listed in the variants list on oook.cz. Is there any webpage or summary somewhere?

https://gitorious.org/neoband

Plus a brief description in the news section of the oook home page.

[Therem Harth]

Hi, I'm the Neoband maintainer. Somehow I didn't notice this thread until today, sorry!

Originally Posted by mrrstark

I took a quick look, and couldn't find anything in the readme or online help (?) about Neoband's features and modifications. It's also not listed in the variants list on oook.cz. Is there any webpage or summary somewhere?

Yeah, none of it's documented at the moment (because I have lots of other stuff to do, and documentation isn't as fun as code changes). I'll have to add some docs eventually though.

The main changes are the 5 new bookless caster classes. There are:
- Assassins (kind of like rogues, have powers relating to poison and other nasty things)
- Avatars (holy rollers with buff spells, and some powerful attacks later on)
- Pyromancers (fire wizards, self explanatory)
- Reapers (warriors with some magic powers, also get some HP/SP from killing monsters)
- Sappers (have mostly offensive spells that deal constant damage)

There's also a new race (Aquilans, eagle-people who have intrinsic RCold and feather falling); several new kinds of Orc; increased item density; and very much increased monster density.

Plans for future development include
- Reducing the depth of the dungeon
- Adding even more weird classes
- Adding more monsters, items, artifacts...
- Possibly replacing the stat gain mechanic

I may also experiment with increasing difficulty by turn count, as well as by level (c.f. Nick's thread of interesting proposals).

[Therem Harth]

Also, I know about repeat via 'n' not working for bookless powers. That's a design flaw; the bookless code is terrible (and all my attempts to rewrite it have been even worse).

Ideally I'd reimplement all the bookless stuff using the magic API, such as it is, which would allow use of the repeat key. I would have done that in the beginning too; but I couldn't figure out the API at the time and still couldn't figure it out later, which is why it's all done from scratch using printed menus and whatnot.

In case you can't tell, I'm not a programmer by profession...

Anyway I'm interested in hearing some feedback on Neoband. Particularly what things people hated about it (so that I can fix them).

[Roch]

I don't have anything I hated about it -- the pyromancer was actually nice to play because of the good detection and consistently good offensive spells. The bookless casting was very convenient; the repeat command was I think the only UI issue I saw. Overall the feel was fairly close to Vanilla, which is not a bad thing.

[AnonymousHero]

Originally Posted by Therem Harth

Also, I know about repeat via 'n' not working for bookless powers. That's a design flaw; the bookless code is terrible (and all my attempts to rewrite it have been even worse).

Ideally I'd reimplement all the bookless stuff using the magic API, such as it is, which would allow use of the repeat key. I would have done that in the beginning too; but I couldn't figure out the API at the time and still couldn't figure it out later, which is why it's all done from scratch using printed menus and whatnot.

In case you can't tell, I'm not a programmer by profession...

Don't feel too bad. Programming is terrible. It can also be awesome, but IME you have to seek out the awesome things yourself. They won't just fall in your lap.

Originally Posted by Therem Harth

Anyway I'm interested in hearing some feedback on Neoband. Particularly what things people hated about it (so that I can fix them).

Can't say that I've tried it . Unfortunately too busy IRL ATM. That also means that the ToME C++/UI work is at a standstill, unfortunately.

EDIT: Oh, and, btw, you're doing pretty well for a non-professional programmer. I've seen much worse from professional programmers.

[Therem Harth]

@AnonymousHero: Thanks. Re ToME, I haven't been doing anything with it lately either. Extending it is difficult, unfun, and not high on my list of priorities.

@Roch: that's basically what I'm aiming for; good to know I've had some success with overall feel and tedium reduction.