Nightlies

[Timo Pietilä]

When Aule got in trouble from Iluvatar for creating the dwarves, he picked up a "great hammer" and was about to destroy them with it, but they cowered away, showing that Iluvatar had already given them independent thought. I'm guessing the Angband weapon was based on that hammer.

I think that was not mean to be any specific weapon type just hammer of great size.

I just don't like "great hammers". 8d1 just doesn't make sense to me when everything else has at least some degree of randomness in them.

[Nick]

I think that was not mean to be any specific weapon type just hammer of great size.

Agreed (filler).

[Magnate]

Hi

You do sound like Tony Blair!

Is there an easy way for us to find out what key measures will make the game harder in the next couple of releases?

Well, the best I can do is point you towards http://trac.rephial.org/wiki/DifficultGame, which is a list of stuff that *might* get into the next couple of releases - but as with all OSS projects there's no guarantee that the volunteers available will complete all of it. Note that that page does not show closed tickets, so it only shows stuff which is not yet done. So the closer we get to 3.3, the less useful that page will become ...

[Timo Pietilä]

Well, the best I can do is point you towards http://trac.rephial.org/wiki/DifficultGame, which is a list of stuff that *might* get into the next couple of releases - but as with all OSS projects there's no guarantee that the volunteers available will complete all of it. Note that that page does not show closed tickets, so it only shows stuff which is not yet done. So the closer we get to 3.3, the less useful that page will become ...

I think there is one major thing missing which I thought we had pretty good consensus that it should be done: weaken the detections.

By weakening the detections you increase the sense of wonder, which is one thing preventing boredom. Both items and monsters and also spells, in particular clairvoyance which currently reveals way too much. IMO it should be just "map entire level" -spell. With or without illumination. No item detection with it. Rods of detect treasure should be reverted back to detecting only treasure, no items (or make it much much rarer and deeper item with longish recharge rate, somewhere deeper than 2000').

[Derakon]

You mean rods of detection?

Another thing that should probably be done is to separate "player has seen this tile" from "player knows what this tile is". That would prevent the player from knowing about monster movements by seeing doors open, walls disappear, items get picked up, etc.

[Timo Pietilä]

You mean rods of detection?

Hum. Good point. Warriors need reliable method of detecting monsters and rods of detection gives that, so it can't be deeper. However if rod of detect treasure is moved this deep detection trumps it. 1000'ish then?

Also don't give up info about item flavors, only that you see potion or scroll or wand and so on. Squelch should not remove these until you see that it is squelchable.

One thing old angband had was inability to "l"ook anything past your LoS, maybe that is something that should come back.

I'm not sure if ESP should reveal true type of the monster or not.

[Magnate]

I think there is one major thing missing which I thought we had pretty good consensus that it should be done: weaken the detections.

That would be this paragraph:

"There is also a debate to be had around reducing the information available to the player, with the aim of making them work harder for stuff. We have already hidden non-standard damage dice until a weapon is picked up. We could also hide the exact flavour of potions and scrolls which are outside LOS (one of Timo's f-k-was-better issues). We could also make object detection fail to reveal items in vaults until @ is inside. Etc. Needs more thinking."

It's just underneath the first table on the page. FWIW I completely agree with your views on detection and the need to rebuild that sense of wonder and excitement. But takk has yet to pronounce on it, and we will need to be very careful to avoid encouraging note-taking.

[Timo Pietilä]

That would be this paragraph:

"There is also a debate to be had around reducing the information available to the player,
....
object detection fail to reveal items in vaults until @ is inside. Etc. Needs more thinking."

It's just underneath the first table on the page.

Gah. You are correct. I don't know how I missed it (well, maybe writing things at 2.19 AM has something to do with it).

[Magnate]

Gah. You are correct. I don't know how I missed it (well, maybe writing things at 2.19 AM has something to do with it).

Don't worry, I knew it would be better if we had a separate section for it with a table of tickets, but the problem is that the tickets aren't quite right - they're a motley collection of things people have thought over the past four years, and don't really capture what we want to do on this.

EDIT: I went ahead and created a section anyway. We can always add more coherent tickets.

[Taha]

Latest nightly (feb 20) won't allow me to move with the keypad, and gives some parse error on loading my preference file. It also changed (corrupted?) my savefile so no older version can open it.

I upgraded on death, and have a backup of my hard drive to restore the monster memory, so back to the old version with no huge loss.
________
WildonGirl

[Derakon]

I just use a potion of life levels to regain a lost level, and my drained DEX got restored. Intended?

Also, are potions of restore stat gone entirely? I don't think I've seen them at all. Are we expected to rely entirely on leveling and potions of gain stat to restore lost stats?

[d_m]

Latest nightly (feb 20) won't allow me to move with the keypad, and gives some parse error on loading my preference file. It also changed (corrupted?) my savefile so no older version can open it.

I upgraded on death, and have a backup of my hard drive to restore the monster memory, so back to the old version with no huge loss.

Could you send me the savefile in question, or post it here or to trac? Takkaria made some pref changes a bit ago that may have done this.

Unfortunately as a dev my savefiles often break, so sometimes I miss things like this.

I will try to fix this--but for now anyone playing nightlies should probably back up important save/pref files.

[d_m]

I just use a potion of life levels to regain a lost level, and my drained DEX got restored. Intended?

Also, are potions of restore stat gone entirely? I don't think I've seen them at all. Are we expected to rely entirely on leveling and potions of gain stat to restore lost stats?

Yes.

Takkaria introduced a change so that drained stats are restored on level up, and also removed the restore stat potions. I think Potions of Life have always restored stats though.

To be clear: in the nightlies you are expected to gain stats, eat mushrooms of restoration, and drink the relevant potions (stat, augmentation, *enlightenment* and life). I think rods of restoration were removed but those would (presumably) also work, as would artifacts with the restoration ability.

EDIT: It's probably implicit, but I should say that if this mechanic is a disaster then I expect Takkaria will revert it. But so far it's seemed fine (to me). I think the goal was to eliminate reason to randomly recall to town all the time.

[Derakon]

I'm not complaining (yet, anyway); just wanted to make certain that the dearth of restore potions was intended. It certainly makes that robe of Permanence in my house more worthy of consideration, what with all the Dreads wandering around...

Labyrinth levels seem to favor tossing a half-dozen uniques at you. This doesn't really seem tenable. If I'm going to fight a unique that's remotely in-depth, I want to be quite certain that I won't get disturbed in the process.

[d_m]

I'm not complaining (yet, anyway); just wanted to make certain that the dearth of restore potions was intended. It certainly makes that robe of Permanence in my house more worthy of consideration, what with all the Dreads wandering around...

Labyrinth levels seem to favor tossing a half-dozen uniques at you. This doesn't really seem tenable. If I'm going to fight a unique that's remotely in-depth, I want to be quite certain that I won't get disturbed in the process.

Glad the restore change has been OK so far. I think as long as it doesn't have some terrible unforeseen problems it will be a net positive (and make stat drain more interesting).

As far as labyrinths go, I was a little bit afraid of this. I don't have specific code that tries to place lots of uniques, but by a certain depth there are just a lot of uniques that can get generated.

Is your observation that the labyrinth is just too crowded period? Or just that it has too many uniques? Or that it has too many "hard" monsters? I don't have a ton of control over the "generate-me-a-monster" function but if need be I will try to build a new one that's a bit more tunable.

I think it's OK that labyrinths be hard, and to be levels players try to get away from sometimes, but they probably need some tuning yet...