Reviving Iso-Angband, an isometric view addon for Angband

[Hajo]

At the moment SVN access is not needed since I haven't changed any of the UnAngband functions yet. And before I do I'll try to ask you how to do it, to be sure it fits to the other UnAngband code and your ideas.

I found a small point that made me a bit sad. Wall paintings disappear after my character has searched the wall and found "nothing interesting". Is this required? It makes interesting rooms look more and more dull after searching the place. I haven't checked the effect with graffity, vines, moss, web and other wall covering things yet.

The graveyards on the early levels have broken bones and broken skulls. I haven't checked deeper in the game yet, but visually bone piles, urns, small altars, tombstones and such would spice up these places

[andrewdoull]

Hi Andrew, while working with Iso-UnAngband, a few ideas came to my mind. How about placing doors in the east and west walls of the the cities, and make those invoke the travel command? I think new players will find this more intuitive than traveling out of a totally wall enclosed town by '<'.

This is deliberate to ensure that the player knows how to travel in the larger wilderness areas. I could adopt the FAAngband approach and have multiple stairs linking the areas, but that would require more work to make the wilderness as interesting as that variant.

The next idea is just for the looks. Hobbitoon and Bree could use some bushes in town. Usually people like some green in town, too.

Undoubtedly. Again, the towns are pretty much placeholders at this stage. Long term (And probably for version 2 of Unangband), the overworld will be generated using some of the techniques outlined in this article. But that will significantly change the way the game plays, and I've got plenty of work to do before going down that path.

I like the room types that I came across and the multitude of floor and wall sorts. Will keep me busy painting for a long while; most impressed I am because I totally lack the right sort of imagination to come up with such ideas by myself. Maybe some day I can even help with some coding of UnAngband or so.

Feel free to come up with suggestions. I think you'll find for the most part my ideas are stolen off much more creative people than myself...

I'm pretty generous with SVN access... it won't be worth giving you access until I've finished up the major patch overhaul I'm doing at the moment.

Andrew

[Hajo]

Hi Andrew, while working with Iso-UnAngband, a few ideas came to my mind. How about placing doors in the east and west walls of the the cities, and make those invoke the travel command? I think new players will find this more intuitive than traveling out of a totally wall enclosed town by '<'.

The next idea is just for the looks. Hobbitoon and Bree could use some bushes in town. Usually people like some green in town, too.

I like the room types that I came across and the multitude of floor and wall sorts. Will keep me busy painting for a long while; most impressed I am because I totally lack the right sort of imagination to come up with such ideas by myself. Maybe some day I can even help with some coding of UnAngband or so.

[Hajo]

This is really a very early work in progress release. It is full of quirks and things that need to be polished and improved, but it is "playable" to some extend.

Click for full size.

Download

=> http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/iso-an...4-iso-wip1.zip (5.2 MB)

I have tried to get as much of the terrain mappings in place, that one can walk around Hobbiton, The East Road, Bree and parts of the first sewers level. There are really a lot of quirks in the display, particularly near or past the level borders, but the basics are in place and work.

Looking and targeting does not work very well, because the screen is only partially updated. I'll look into that, how this can be improved. I had no crashes, but I'd not be surprised if the one or other of my changes turns out to be buggy. I haven't tested shooting or casting spells yet, so that may or may not work.

Also there are a whole lot of missing images and/or wrongly assigned images. Missing images just show up as big colored ASCII letters. Wrongly assigned images show up as whatever they have accidentally been assigned to, and in the worst case will be invisible.

Images and sources are included. A windows executable is supplied, and two start scripts "start_large.bat" and "start_small.bat", as known from the last Iso-Angband releases. I have no idea if it compiles with anything newer than my stone age compiler, and/or on systems like Linux. This should get better though as I make progress with the code. This is just a development snapshot to give an idea what is there, what works and what is left to do (plenty )

[Hajo]

All colors in the past UnAngband screenshots had been calculated modulo 16. With the new 28 colors they look much better.

[Hajo]

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

It was a result of a stray pref file that I had exported, but forgotten to delete or move. After removing it, everything seems to work as expected again.

I've started to edit a number of monsters, and saw that I cannot just copy entries from my old config file, since they all just use 16 colors. I'll also have to check my code to work properly with colors 16-27 which I haven't tested yet.

[Pete Mack]

@Hajo --
Sorry; just that your sig reminded me of this

[andrewdoull]

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

Andrew

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[andrewdoull]

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

Andrew