Competition 146

[Nick]

Competition 146 is a (slightly belated) celebration of 10 years of the New Angband (and Variant) competition, instituted by Tony Holmes in August 2003.

The character for this event is a High-Elf Mage in PCangband 1.2, which is the earliest playable version I could get running. It is a Dos executable which runs in 32-bit windows; apologies to those excluded by this. The source code is available on rephial or at the Angband Variant Repository if you want to try compliling it.

Note that everything is in one folder - just whack the savefile in there too, and call it "save".

I'm not sure how well the ladder will deal with dumps; according to PowerWyrm, adding this header:
[Angband 2.4.Frog-knows Character Dump]
at the top of the dump will make it work, so maybe do that. We'll work it out as we go along.

Good luck, and have, um, fun

[PowerWyrm]

"Error during reading of file. -more-
Please try again without that savefile.

Fiddled savefile"

Did you generate the char and then press ctrl-x? What version did you download? I got mine from rephial here: http://rephial.org/release/pcangband-1.2

[PowerWyrm]

Seems to me that the savefile format (Windows) is altered when stored by oook. You should zip the starting savefile to prevent that.

[MattB]

"Error during reading of file. -more-
Please try again without that savefile.

Fiddled savefile"

Yep, me too.

Seems a bit harsh for it to accuse us of cheating before we've even started!

[MattB]

Seems to me that the savefile format (Windows) is altered when stored by oook. You should zip the starting savefile to prevent that.

Looking through the text in the savefile I found an excerpt that looks particularly tolkienian:

ïõððððððððððñòñÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÆÆÆÆÆÆ

I think it's a heavily-armoured dwarf swearing as he falls through a trapdoor.

[Nick]

OK, should work now - I'm not sure what happened the first time.

Also, pav says

I have rigged the Ladder to accept header-less dumps as "Angband 2.4".

He's away from home but still loves us enough to fix our competition

[fbworker]

Still doesn't work. I got the latest {everything}, from the compo page. After a few bumbling starts, I still can't get it to stop thinking that I rigged it. I tried a fresh unzip with the '146' save renamed 'SAVE' and it still thinks I fiddled with it.

[Nick]

All right, third attempt. It seems that the game detects something to do with the age of the savefile; I can download it and it works fine, then I download 5 minutes later and it fails. So we have a new strategy.

The savefile for download is now not a savefile. It is a zipfile of the entire game folder with the correct savefile in the folder. So what you need to do is

1. Download the 'starting savefile'
2. Rename it whatever.zip
3. Unzip it, and just open the game; the competition character should load straight away.
4. If you die (perish the thought!), just unzip again and repeat.

[PowerWyrm]

Did you autoroll the char? I've made tests with chars having 18/70 INT and didn't get far. With 18/20 INT, it will be a nightmare to play a mage in FK...

[Nick]

Did you autoroll the char? I've made tests with chars having 18/70 INT and didn't get far. With 18/20 INT, it will be a nightmare to play a mage in FK...

Yes - with min INT 18 This is also in the original spirit of the competition...

[PowerWyrm]

Well... Frog, Frog II and Frog III didn't live very long and croaked like normal frogs in face of kobolds and such pussies. Frog IV is now clvl9 and has seen dlvl5. I guess with such low mana you need to buy a big puncher (there was a battle axe in 3 which is now enchanted to +2) and melee half of the monsters, keeping your mana for support spells and draining critters.

[PowerWyrm]

Wow, this takes the cake! Mughash just dropped... a broken sword (-2, -3). And before that Bullroarer dropped a dagger (+1, +0). This version seems to generate garbage at shallow depths... Half of the items on the ground are skeletons, empty bottles, spikes and such. Fortunately, no turn count exists in this version... because a char like this will take forever to level.

[PowerWyrm]

OK, should work now - I'm not sure what happened the first time.

Also, pav says

Quote:
I have rigged the Ladder to accept header-less dumps as "Angband 2.4".

He's away from home but still loves us enough to fix our competition

I just found out when submitting an update to my character that the parser reads the "Gold" line instead of the "Experience" line for xp, leading to "a character with higher experience already exists".

[MattB]

I've lost five Frogs this afternoon; one on lvl2, three on lvl1 and one...in the town.
Apparently red 'p's are BSVets - years of playing with tiles leads you to forget things like that!

[Nick]

I just found out when submitting an update to my character that the parser reads the "Gold" line instead of the "Experience" line for xp, leading to "a character with higher experience already exists".

Should be fixed now.