[Un] Unangband-0.6.2-wip7 has been released

[andrewdoull]

Hi,

I was hoping to make this a beta release, but there's been enough significant platform changes that will need ironing out before I can confidently call this beta.

Having said that, this version is almost feature complete. I just need to decide how to address some game balance issuses raised by Mikolaj Konarski and Matthias Rudolf. Continued thanks as well to Mikolaj for constant feedback, bug reporting and patches to the code base.

Source code is available at http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangba...2-wip7-src.zip

[Edit] A precompiled windows executable is available at http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangba...2-wip7-win.zip
Thanks to Nick McConnell, maintainer of FAAngband for compiling this for me.

A precompiled OS/X executable is available at http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangba...2-wip7-osx.dmg

I'd really appreciate it if someone could compile a windows executable for me and make this available. I've not tested this release on windows and there are untested changes, primarily with mouse interaction, so a brief sanity check would be appreciated.

Please report any bugs to http://developer.berlios.de/bugs/?group_id=331

### Game Play ###

- Implemented the remaining spells in the player spell lists. Add and update a few spells borrowed from Sangband.

- Druidic monsters now regenerate mana from water and health from living terrain.

- You get additional blows with your weapon while charging: one if you'd
normally get three blows, two if you'd normally get five, and so on.
Only the first blow gets the charging bonus, but all are effective
against huge monsters.

- Huge monsters can now be easily attacked if you are standing on
rubble, trees, vents and other terrain that requires two turns to
climb onto.

- Allow player to select sneaking using the hash key. This currently only prevents your allies from attacking 'unaware' monsters.

- Prevent allies eating too much while they fight.

- Fix allies spying.

- Fix monsters not fighting whilst hidden.

- A large number of other fixes to the allied monster AI.

- Archers now share ammunition between themselves to ensure that the majority of the group has ammunition.

- At the Battle of Five Armies, you should now be accompanied by allied troops. This should make battlefield locations more interesting to fight in; a further revision will occur next version.

- Invisible monsters now 'dance' around the player in melee to avoid being too easily guessable as to where they are.

- Fix long outstanding bugs where you would incorrectly guess flags on items you have.

- Fix long outstanding bugs where monsters would talk about incorrect player resistances.

- Revert to old inaccessible Hobbiton layout. In general, you won't run into any high level uniques in towns, like you used to, until certain key conditions have been met. Similarly, there are very few dungeon uniques you are required to fight. Certain events have much more wide-ranging consequences - hopefully the dungeon descriptions will provide enough of
a warning.

- Allow food / wands / staffs / rods and some rings to appear in piles.

- Decrease the relative frequency of drops of items that appear in piles.

- Allow crowns to appear in the dungeon with a much higher bonuses.

- Armour appears in the dungeon with better bonuses.

- Decrease overall frequency of wands.

- Added 'sub-ecologies' which are collections of rooms which share a common part of the monster ecology.

- Made slowdown at negative speeds smaller. As before, -10 to speed makes normal monsters twice as fast as you are, but no longer -7 does (Mikolaj Konarski).

- Only restock and shuffle shops of the home town, to prevent shopping scumming
(Mikolaj Konarski).

- Beefed up HAFTED a little bit for priests --- with free constant Bless it was too weak
an advantage (Mikolaj Konarski).

- Make Smeagol a more interesting opponent.

- There's no point having monsters that cast invisible never be seen - they may as well just
have INVISIBLE flag. Likewise for blessed etc.

- Significant bug-fixes and improvements to the dungeon generation code to the point where
its pretty much feature complete. "I've just played current V (Farm dungeon) and the dungeon
generation is so much better after your recent work. Rooms, tunnels and even monsters are much
more interesting and not just random, but with a nontrivial pattern that you start to grasp
after several levels."

### User Interface ###

- Limit the player from specifying an amount greater than the number of items that they think
they can purchase in a store (using the listed price).

- Added 'easy_more' option to minimise the number of -more- prompts you have to go through.
Please note this is initial work only and may need some testing / cause some messages to be lost.

- Reverse mouse buttons. Left-button now aims, right button now clicks.

- You can now press 's' while looking/targetting a monster to cycle between monsters of that
race only. You can press 'a' to assault a location with any allied troops.

### Bug Fixes ###

- Fixed bug with weird identification issues with Tom Bombadil's house etc.

- Fix bug with monsters not appearing in towers.

- Fix bug #12237 by requiring a guardian to be killed in order to visit the Paths of the Dead or Lothlorien.

- Fix bug where you could wound monsters with NO_CUTS flag.

- Fix bug where monsters could pick up money.

- Fix bug on OS/X platform with user directories not being created.

- Fix monsters not generating ammo using ADD_AMMO flag.

- Please see the online database for other bug fixes.

[Bandobras]

Originally Posted by andrewdoull

"I've just played current V (Farm dungeon) and the dungeon
generation is so much better after your recent work. Rooms, tunnels and even monsters are much
more interesting and not just random, but with a nontrivial pattern that you start to grasp
after several levels."

I must have been drunk when I've written this. I haven't played V for several years now. If course I meant current SVN version of UN and the Maggot's Farm cellars. (BTW, it would be nice to have some additional description flavour for the dungons: Farm cellars, Bree sewers, Troll cave/lair (or however it was called in The Hobbit), etc. I guess it will be there in quest descriptions when we have quests.)

Anyway, congrats about the new version and, to save space, for wip7a, too.

[Daven_26d1]

I compiled the new version earlier on today and from what I've seen, Its looking pretty hot. I tried Un a few versions ago, and while it had much to recommend, I just couldn't get into it enough to reap the rewards. (I stopped after a bit of a sulk when my most promising character suffered a somewhat arbitrary death inside a shop).

The new release seems much more "together" and much easier for a new player to find their feet. I can tell from the word go that I'll be playing Un in my next few spare evenings, partly as this thread has peaked some interest in me, so I'll offer some real feedback when I've delved deeper, but for now I guess I can just say "Well done!" and "Keep 'em rolling!" =]

[Big Al]

Looking good!

One bug: The new easy_more feature seems to break in the message recall screen (^p) - if the message is longer than a line, you can't see all of it (you only see the the first line).

[andrewdoull]

Originally Posted by Big Al

Looking good!

One bug: The new easy_more feature seems to break in the message recall screen (^p) - if the message is longer than a line, you can't see all of it (you only see the the first line).

That's not a bug - its a feature.

Its straight from Angband in fact. You can scroll left and right to see the rest of the line...

Andrew

[Big Al]

Never mind then thanks, I thought that I had tried that - the controls only mention 'p' and 'n' for older and newer respectively (as well as escape), but not the left and right controls.

[Daven_26d1]

*In Hobbiton, when attacking a Hobbit Gentleman:-
"You wound the Hobbit Goodwife!"
"The Hobbit Goodwife dies!"
"The Hobbit Gentleman Corpse disappears from sight!"

(or maybe there is a cross-dressing sub-plot I haven't found yet!)


*in Bree, when storing items at the Prancing Pony I seem to need to be able to buy them to pick them up, although I don't get charged. For instance, I currently have 7 gold, so I can only retrieve my arrows 7 at a time, and when I try to pick up my spellbook, game reports "You can't afford that item."

Sorry if these have already been reported.

[andrewdoull]

Originally Posted by Daven_26d1

*In Hobbiton, when attacking a Hobbit Gentleman:-
"You wound the Hobbit Goodwife!"
"The Hobbit Goodwife dies!"
"The Hobbit Gentleman Corpse disappears from sight!"

(or maybe there is a cross-dressing sub-plot I haven't found yet!)

Its actually a cross-dressing morality hack. A large set of monsters can appear in one of two genders. However, its a hack that doesn't extend to their corpses, yet (There's a couple of flags I could use for this purpose: IDENT_FIXED springs immediately to mind). It also doesn't extend to the monster list code yet.

The morality part: I felt more comfortable with leaving male corpses than female...

*in Bree, when storing items at the Prancing Pony I seem to need to be able to buy them to pick them up, although I don't get charged. For instance, I currently have 7 gold, so I can only retrieve my arrows 7 at a time, and when I try to pick up my spellbook, game reports "You can't afford that item."

Sorry if these have already been reported.

Reported and fixed in SVN code.

[ekolis]

I can't seem to download the Windows version - I get an "object not found" error at both berlios mirrors

[Nick]

Originally Posted by ekolis

I can't seem to download the Windows version - I get an "object not found" error at both berlios mirrors

I've just updated this about half an hour ago, and I'm getting the same thing - my guess is that berlios is just being a bit slow. Unless I've done something stupid, but surely that's not possible.