Competition 63

[Nick]

Attention players: Vanilla dumps starting 3.1.0 no longer contain name of your character.

Max Depth, on the other hand, has just been altered to fool the parser. pav, could you fix?

[Nick]

I installed 3.1.0 to try out the competition, but I'm having no luck getting Elen to load. I've copied the 63 savefile over my 1000.username file, tried to open the file using the -uElen option... no luck.

The -uName option should open your 1000.Name savefile, and is not needed when Name is your username. I suspect you may be looking in the wrong place for savefiles, too - mine are in .angband/Angband/save/

[pav]

Max Depth, on the other hand, has just been altered to fool the parser. pav, could you fix?

Fixed for future uploads.

[buzzkill]

I hadn't thought of that - that really would be cool. The angband comps could draw a lot of inspiration from the annual nethack devnull competitions, but you'd naturally need to adapt it so that it wouldn't be necessary to play on an online server

What I'm suggesting isn't a coordinated start time or any type of simultaneous play (and certainly wouldn't reqire a server), beyond what the competition is now. Just a simple real-time timer added to the save files and dumps. I assuming that you could somehow hook into the OS clock. If not, it wouldn't even have to be very accurate (if that would be an issue). Even if it was off by a minute per hour it wouldn't be a big deal.

It might also be enlightening (or not) to see exactly how much time one (or another) spends developing a character.

[Donald Jonker]

What I'm suggesting isn't a coordinated start time or any type of simultaneous play (and certainly wouldn't reqire a server), beyond what the competition is now. Just a simple real-time timer added to the save files and dumps. I assuming that you could somehow hook into the OS clock. If not, it wouldn't even have to be very accurate (if that would be an issue). Even if it was off by a minute per hour it wouldn't be a big deal.

It might also be enlightening (or not) to see exactly how much time one (or another) spends developing a character.

Right, I understood that. What I was originally suggesting was something along the lines of an online coordinated time thing. I was impressed by your much simplified and much better idea of an internal clock in each copy of the game.

[Yoric]

The -uName option should open your 1000.Name savefile, and is not needed when Name is your username. I suspect you may be looking in the wrong place for savefiles, too - mine are in .angband/Angband/save/

That directory doesn't exist for my install. I'm going to remove everything and try a strict local install instead. Thanks for the help!

[chem]

Is "fastest winner" the first person to post a winner? Or is it fewest turns? The comp page says fewest turns, but an old suggested by Donald that you seemed receptive to: "This probably won't be popular, but you could do a real-time race to the finish: first person to win from the time the contest starts gets the gold" was otherwise.

Still wondering about this ;/

[Nick]

Is "fastest winner" the first person to post a winner? Or is it fewest turns?

It's fewest turns. I went with the simple thing, in the end.

[rdermyer]

Unconnected stairs! I suppose it was just a matter of time before I was forced into that. The idea behind them (not gameplay-wise) is that you enter a level, wander around for a while and then come-to, or notice something cool, and then the player kicks in?

[Big Al]

Maybe Morgoth just skimped on building materials for the stairs - they always collapse behind you.

[Zikke]

Or maybe your character needs to go on a diet and not break the stairs.



Fatty. ^_^

[PowerDiver]

Unconnected stairs! I suppose it was just a matter of time before I was forced into that. The idea behind them (not gameplay-wise) is that you enter a level, wander around for a while and then come-to, or notice something cool, and then the player kicks in?

In a non-persistent dungeon, especially one where the number of ways down is larger than the number of ways up, no physical interpretation of stairs can be made to make sense. Think of them as random level teleporters, and monsters don't follow because they know they won't be teleported to the same place you are sent to.

Whether the receiving end needs to be another level teleporter isn't clear, and there is room for a gameplay option to describe that.

[takkaria]

Yup, no box. I thought no one will be foolish enough to remove character name from the dump files. Well, seems Takka managed

Oh, I'm hurt. I moved the top of the character screen up by one line to make room on the flags screen for more flags, but forgot to update the chardump code. Oops.

[Jungle_Boy]

Since this is a just started character is it legal to just continue using the same savefile and quickstart new characters? This would save you from having to delete and copy savefiles everytime you start a new character.

[Nick]

Since this is a just started character is it legal to just continue using the same savefile and quickstart new characters? This would save you from having to delete and copy savefiles everytime you start a new character.

(Thinks...how do I not betray my ignorance of quickstart...) "That's a good question. What do other people think?"