Reviving Iso-Angband, an isometric view addon for Angband

[buzzkill]

There was a time I considered working on a 32x32 tileset for Un, but the sheer number of terrain types and monsters (as well as my chronic non-finishing of projects) scared me off. Good luck with this. ISO-Un sounds (and looks) cool.

[nppangband]

I've been experimenting with UnAngband 0.6.4a a bit, and after some hours of patching I've got the iso view working with it. Most of what this preview shows are replacement images. I have no sand, grass, water or any of the other UnAngbandish terrain features yet. And there are a lot of unassigned images (all the $ and the other character things).

Click for full size.

But I think it looks very promising - I mean there is huge potential here with all the details that UnAngband offers, and I'd like to work more on it. I have emailed Andrew, but haven't received an answer yet. I hope he will be alright with what I'm doing.

Looks amazing. I think UN has 500 terrain types and 1000+ monsters, but this would be a big achievement for Angband.

[nppangband]

And I am drooling over the prospect of being able to add this to NPP. You say this was only a couple hours of coding?

[Hajo]

Yes, for this screenshot I think it's been 5 or 6 hours, including two or so hours just to get UnAngband compiled with my stone-age compiler.

The biggest problem was that the new Angband code can do much more color tricks and I had to learn how this works. Also the "center view on player" option did not quite work as the iso view would have liked. But there are still too many interdependencies that could/should be cleaned up.

Andrew answered my Email and suggested I should look into NPPAngband. At the moment it is really difficult for me to make a choice among the variants, and I seriously can only work on one at a time - but there should be a huge overlap in the needed graphics.

Maybe it's too early right now to try integration with other variants yet, but if you do, I'll try to help. I should clean up my code better though before, and also comment it better.

[Hajo]

I've improvised some weeds/vegetables, a dirt tile, water and overall tried to cleanup the code a bit.

Click for full size.

Town level works now fairly clean and I think it should be easier from now, that the basics are in place.

[Hajo]

I'm slowly working my way to new areas. Added very simple bushes and trees for the east road. I'll detail the images later, at the moment it's still a mix of learning how UnAngband terrain display works, to actually draw the images and also fix quirks and buglets in the iso-view integration.

Click for full size.

No image for cows (Q) yet.

[andrewdoull]

And I am drooling over the prospect of being able to add this to NPP. You say this was only a couple hours of coding?

I had suggested to Hajo that FAAngband was another option, because the FAAngband wilderness areas are beautiful, and Nick is also working on AngbandBase which seemed a good fit for some isometric loving.

I don't have the time at the moment to help Hajo out too much - I'm in the middle of a big patch and don't have much free time at the best of times.

Also Unangband already has an isometric graphics mode... (not that it works).

But I couldn't persuade him otherwise..

[Edit: that's not to say I don't totally appreciate the effort and the result]

Andrew

[andrewdoull]

And anyone excited by the current work may want to look at this old thread.

Andrew

[Hajo]

I feel uncertain now. I wouldn't want to step in competition with already existing display approaches. And DG is a much better graphics artists than I am.

On the other hand, the approaches are quite different.

Then, there is a further problem. My code is not a clean "term" package. It uses tricks to read game data in order to improve the display. It reads the term output, but "enriches" that with data reads from the games structures.

Andrew has been working on a cleaner interface for his iso-view implementation. I'd say his approach should work, and is much more in-line with the way Angband code should be. My code was taken from an old project of mine, and just adapted somewhat to work with Angband.

Still, it is interesting to work with UnAngbad, to learn how it works, and also to paint the images. I feel uncertain now, but I still feel interested in continuing the work. I had been looking for an entertaining project to work on in my free time, and this seems to be one. UnAngband offers a lot of options, and what I have seen so far is both impressive and amazing. But I don't know many Angband variants, so this is not meant in comparison, it's just my personal impression.

FaAngband and NPPAngband I just didn't know before. That is why I haven't considered them. I didn't really make an informed choice. UnAngband was just something I had been following loosely and which had my attention already.

[Hajo]

Seeing that there are like 2900 unassigned items, monsters and terrain features left, it sounds odd to say, "I think I'm nearing a playable version". But I think I have most of the coding basics done now. Most tricky was the wall and door direction calculation, even that I had Andrew's example code from his own iso-view development with the directional thin walls and doors.

There is a problem if the player walks close to a map border. The display just doesn't show as much of the dungeon there as it would have to. I hope I can look into that on Sunday or some day next week. I think that is the last coding thing to solve, though.

My testing character is now in the first level of the Bree sewers, and inspecting walls and the like, to let me update the config files. Many interesting wall features indeed, mossy granite, web covered granite, burnt granite ... I feel a bit hesitant to change the color codes, I think Andrew has some logic in there. I'd like to make the mossy granite green, though. I guess some day I must make a list of things in question and ask Andrew about the best way to do it.

I want to say, thank you Andrew, for creating such a nice thing to explore! I really like all these details in UnAngband, and I have a fun time working with it.

[Nick]

I had suggested to Hajo that FAAngband was another option, because the FAAngband wilderness areas are beautiful, and Nick is also working on AngbandBase which seemed a good fit for some isometric loving.

Thanks, Andrew.

Isometric stuff would certainly be something to go into AngbandBase at some point.

[andrewdoull]

My testing character is now in the first level of the Bree sewers, and inspecting walls and the like, to let me update the config files. Many interesting wall features indeed, mossy granite, web covered granite, burnt granite ... I feel a bit hesitant to change the color codes, I think Andrew has some logic in there.

The logic got a bit stretched thin at some points... the current colour assignment for some terrain predates the addition of 256 colour mode. As a result, some tiles got coloured e.g. purple or orange for 'interesting' as opposed to a more natural colour. Note also that green for living terrain also overlaps with green for acidic terrain, which should be separated out some way. Note also that the terrain.txt comments are incredibly out of date e.g. Unangband now uses 28 colours, and you should refer to the lib\docs\modding.rtf file. (Having said that, this file looks like it may have been corrupted - modding.txt may be more useful. I'll have to regenerate it from the original modding.docx file).

Feel free to make suggestions.

I want to say, thank you Andrew, for creating such a nice thing to explore! I really like all these details in UnAngband, and I have a fun time working with it.

You're welcome. Again.

Andrew

[Pete Mack]

@Hajo--

I have a project problem? I have no project problem. I start a project, I work on it, it fails. No problem

That's because:

Only an expert can deal with the problem,
'Cause half of the problem is seeing the problem.
And only an expert can deal with the problem.
So if there's no expert to deal with the problem,
Actually the problem is twice the problem.

[Hajo]

Pete, I'm not quite sure what you want to tell me.

But I feel stupid right now. I can't seem to remap a monster via a pref file in UnAngband. At the moment I'm pretty sure I have removed all my edits, and still monsters show up with their high bits set.

[... snip much text ...]

Edit: There must be a pref file somewhere, which remaps the centipede and which I haven't caught. I tried to edit monster.txt and give the centipede a different look there, and it still shows up as 0x85:0xe3 I've grepped through all my pref files, but nothing seems to remap the centipede this way ... and if there is no remapping, the original code should show up. If I look at it, I even see the mapping that I gave it in monster.txt, just on the map it still shows up as a 'c' ... confusing.

Edit 2: Lesson learned: The can also be pref files in "user" not only "pref". It works now.

Click for full size.

Next will be to work on more monster and items mappings. Also to solve the drawing problem near map borders.

[andrewdoull]

I suspect if the underlying grid gets the high bit set, the monster on top will always get it set as well...

Andrew