Reviving Iso-Angband, an isometric view addon for Angband

[Pete Mack]

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

[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.

[Hajo]

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

[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]

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.

[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]

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

[Hajo]

I've added a small trick, the iso-view can now show item stacks. An example with 3 oil flasks - I had nothing else at hand for the test.

At the moment it shows only stacks, not piles of different items. If there are really many items they will be displayed in a grid instead of just a row. I think this will be handy for quickly guessing the count of ammunition or other items that usually come in stacks.

[Derakon]

Neat! What you might consider doing for ammo is making each visual stack be 5 units of ammo, so a stack of 30 arrows would look like 6 quivers, say. Or if you felt particularly clever, have quivers for sets of 5 and arrows for individuals, so 27 arrows would be 5 quivers and 2 arrows.

Just food for thought.

[Hajo]

Some sort of grouping will be good. Thanks for the suggestion At the moment it's very simple - each row is filled up to 8 items and then a new row starts.

So 26 pebbles look like this, which is not very compelling:

Edit: I changed the display to 6x6 tiles for stacks, instead of 8x8. If stacks contain more then 36 items, the code will paint several layers.

[Hajo]

How can I remap UnAngband "regions"? I ran into a "debri" which threw "valuable pottery" at me. It is entered in regions.txt, and to have it display correctly with the iso view I'd need to remap it. At the moment it shows up as a text "*" but at a wrong position because it is drawn as text and not as graphic tile.

Does someone know how to remap such things? I have studied the existing pref files but could not find anything.

[Hajo]

The second work in progress release of UnAngband with the iso view addon. It is still full of quirks and things that need to be polished and improved, but it is "playable" to some extend - a bit more than WIP 1.

Click for full size.

Download

=> http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/iso-an...4-iso-wip2.zip (5.2 MB)

Besides the things that were already in WIP 1, this has gotten some more code fixes, some more images, and some more config entries to actually show the images. There is still a whole lot missing, but I'm confident that it will work out eventually.

From my dev log:

- fixed some display quirks.
- added display of item stacks.
- added hack for region display (will fix later, once I have info on region mapping).
- new picture for "flask of oil", different from potions.
- new tiled floor.
- insect swarm.
- floor with inscriptions.
- tried to configure potions flavors (untested, might have failed)
- tried to configure ring and amulet flavors (untested, might have failed)
- configured the metal type treasures.
- arrow, shot and bolt config.
- cloak config.
- mouse and rat config.

- There are some things in for inscribed and painted walls, but these are likely to change again.

There was more, but I lost track of all the changes ...

[andrewdoull]

How can I remap UnAngband "regions"? I ran into a "debri" which threw "valuable pottery" at me. It is entered in regions.txt, and to have it display correctly with the iso view I'd need to remap it. At the moment it shows up as a text "*" but at a wrong position because it is drawn as text and not as graphic tile.

Does someone know how to remap such things? I have studied the existing pref files but could not find anything.

Region remappings are done using the 'N' prefix. I haven't added any region mappings to the preference files, but if you use the same format as 'K'inds or 'R'aces you should be fine.

Andrew

[Hajo]

Thanks, I'll try that. UnAngband is so full of surprising details

[Hajo]

I noticed that by default all scroll flavors are white '?'. Should I keep that when remapping them, I mean, make them all white scroll images? Would it be better to make them colored? Should I use several scroll images?

Potions already have a lot of colors, but I could remap some with different images as well. Would that be a good idea?

Edit: Are only the edible mushrooms randomized through flavors, or will that randomize the other food types as well? UnAngband has some sorts of food other than rations appearing in the dungeon level, too.

Edit 2: Only the edible mushrooms seem to become randomized. For the moment I keep the comma for the mushrooms, it looks kinda funny.