Feelings about recent "development"

[Antoine]

I think the new strategy (of releasing 3.3.x as bugfix releases, and eschewing betas in favour of dev versions roughly weekly) will be better for everybody.

Good stuff
A.

[Timo Pietilä]

in a normal environment the vast majority of users would stick to the mainline version, with only a small minority playing the dev versions. In this community it's inverted, which IMO has been part of the problem.

I think pace of change is partially the reason for that. Too many things are changing to get ignored and people want to test in order to see if game still is angband and not ToME 5 or somesuch. They know now that in order to get their voice heard about changes they are forced to play the nightly editions and also that there will be so many changes that they can't trust that dev team gets them done right. It forced me to jump into development version. There were no bugfixes for 3.2 except what I did myself, and it started to be obvious that just about everything in the game is being tweaked by reading these forums.

[Magnate]

I don't have that team to back me up. Team that would like to do those changes without tweaking everything. Or time for it.

Then you get to live with what is produced by those who do have the time and inclination to do stuff. You can't have it both ways - complaining about what people produce for free and then saying that you don't have the time to contribute is pretty poor. You can have Angband maintained however you want, if you can do what takkaria has done and bring a team together to do it with you. In another thread I've even suggested how you can contribute without a team and without needing to code: provide us those perfectly balanced artifact.txt, ego_item.txt and object.txt files that you've been complaining about ever since the JLE patch. Ewert provided a new object.txt not so long ago and most of the changes were included. If you won't do that, how about toning down the complaints?

Nobody is forcing you to play the newer versions. You are quite free to think of them as a bad variant that you don't play, and stick with earlier versions.

I declined because I don't believe you would actually do it. It is too much work for any single person. But prove me wrong and go ahead and do it anyway. First thing you need to do is write a console version of the game, because extra term windows give away too much information. If you want more modernized version of it look at sangband. Then deal with colors, targeting, LoS, dungeon generation, monsters, items, item activations, rarities, depths. Pretty much everything has changed.

You have chosen, I think, to misunderstand my offer. My offer was to *work with you* to produce it: I would adjust the current code (which I know reasonably well insofar as it affects gameplay) and you would give me detailed instructions and feedback about what to change to approach f-k's gameplay (which you know and I don't).

But if you wanted to work together with anyone, you would have contributed more than endless carping posts before now.

[Magnate]

I think pace of change is partially the reason for that. Too many things are changing to get ignored and people want to test in order to see if game still is angband and not ToME 5 or somesuch. They know now that in order to get their voice heard about changes they are forced to play the nightly editions and also that there will be so many changes that they can't trust that dev team gets them done right. It forced me to jump into development version. There were no bugfixes for 3.2 except what I did myself, and it started to be obvious that just about everything in the game is being tweaked by reading these forums.

That is a fair cop, and takkaria has said that we will produce bugfix versions for 3.3 in order to avoid this. People who don't want to play dev versions will have progressively less buggy versions of 3.3 to play, until 3.4 is released.

[Timo Pietilä]

In another thread I've even suggested how you can contribute without a team and without needing to code: provide us those perfectly balanced artifact.txt, ego_item.txt and object.txt files that you've been complaining about ever since the JLE patch. Ewert provided a new object.txt not so long ago and most of the changes were included. If you won't do that, how about toning down the complaints?

FYI I have done my part in tuning edit-files. There are changes in them that are my writing. Like monster coloring. Rings of Power activations. I made a lot of suggestions about their powers too, and looking at them it looks like they are (were) pretty much what I wanted them to be.

I could do balancing for the items too, but I bet you for one would never agree with my changes (it reverts a lot what you have done to them). I'm lower in food chain than coders obviously, so I don't expect to get my changes getting integrated into game so why bother doing it?

[Antoine]

FYI I have done my part in tuning edit-files. There are changes in them that are my writing. Like monster coloring. Rings of Power activations. I made a lot of suggestions about their powers too, and looking at them it looks like they are (were) pretty much what I wanted them to be.

I could do balancing for the items too, but I bet you for one would never agree with my changes (it reverts a lot what you have done to them). I'm lower in food chain than coders obviously, so I don't expect to get my changes getting integrated into game so why bother doing it?

You guys should both chill out a bit. There is no need to argue.

You have both contributed a lot in the past and are well respected, and I'm sure will continue to contribute a lot in future.

Timo, if you provided rebalanced item files, I think you might be surprised at how many of your changes were accepted.

A.

[the Invisible Stalker]

I could do balancing for the items too, but I bet you for one would never agree with my changes (it reverts a lot what you have done to them). I'm lower in food chain than coders obviously, so I don't expect to get my changes getting integrated into game so why bother doing it?

You could post the revised edit files. Then anyone could use them, whether or not they are accepted by the dev team. I might even be tempted to start playing V again.

[Magnate]

You guys should both chill out a bit. There is no need to argue.

You have both contributed a lot in the past and are well respected, and I'm sure will continue to contribute a lot in future.

Timo, if you provided rebalanced item files, I think you might be surprised at how many of your changes were accepted.

He would - but he need not be: the number of contributions which have been offered but rejected is miniscule. The only example I can think of is Derakon's push-past-town-monsters patch, which takkaria didn't like. Pretty much everything else anyone has ever written has been incorporated in some form or other (or will be, he says thinking of fizzix's AC work).

I don't make changes because I think I am "higher up the food chain" - I make them because nobody else does and I think they improve things. I am happy for my changes to be superseded by something better, providing it doesn't re-create the original problem. For example, Timo doesn't like most of the changes I've made to standarts. I made them because there was a problem with some artifacts never being used - always being junk when they were found. So I made them either easier to find, or better when found, to solve that problem. My changes weren't perfect, and contributed to "making the game easier", and I've made a second set to address a different problem of "too much off-weapon damage". That problem, incidentally, was identified by Timo, who campaigned for it to be addressed. He didn't provide changes to address it, and nor did anybody else, so I did. I'd be happy for them to be superseded by any changes which improved balance, as long as they didn't add too much off-weapon damage, or turn artifacts back into junk.

The more people who contribute, the better. There is no hierarchy - with the exception of takkaria's final say. If we get so many people contributing that the changes overlap and takkaria has to rule on whose version to use, that would be a good problem to have. Nobody should be put off from contributing - there's no reason to be.

In the same vein, I don't want anybody to feel that setting up a "maintained" version of Angband would be in opposition to the current devteam. On the contrary, I would warmly welcome people doing that, and I think the others would too. If people wanted to come and chat on IRC (#angband-dev at irc.freenode.net) we would provide the help they needed in terms of understanding which changes would support their maintainance goals and how to incorporate them.

@Timo - I honestly don't think I am higher up the food chain than you (or anyone). I don't expect to be feted for my efforts, but neither do I expect hostility. If people don't like them, I'm fine with them explaining why. If they go on to offer an alternative (be it edit file or patch or even just a spec of a solution), that's great. If they don't, I or one of the other devs might make changes anyway. If not, they've had their say and chosen to leave it at that, so they shouldn't go on and on about the same thing over and over again. That's all I'm asking, really.

[dos350]

please, no rage~ timo , im with u on this one , but plz, no rage, remember how u used to tell me ?

[Timo Pietilä]

You could post the revised edit files. Then anyone could use them, whether or not they are accepted by the dev team. I might even be tempted to start playing V again.

I'll try to put something not-too-different together. It will be harder than current set of items, but there are also few things I would like to revise back that just are not possible with current set of things. Main one is confusion resistance, I don't know how to make this common enough to match what I feel balanced, without making game too easy. We now lack several things that did have confusion resistance in old games: Balance, Chaos and Bronze DSM, Blades of Chaos, Thorin. Compensating that without "artificial" workaround-feeling is a bit tough. I would also like to give Thorin some competition, but that also would make game easier...unless I make Thorin a lot rarer than it is now.

[Magnate]

I'll try to put something not-too-different together. It will be harder than current set of items, but there are also few things I would like to revise back that just are not possible with current set of things. Main one is confusion resistance, I don't know how to make this common enough to match what I feel balanced, without making game too easy. We now lack several things that did have confusion resistance in old games: Balance, Chaos and Bronze DSM, Blades of Chaos, Thorin. Compensating that without "artificial" workaround-feeling is a bit tough. I would also like to give Thorin some competition, but that also would make game easier...unless I make Thorin a lot rarer than it is now.

I don't think I understand the point about RES_CONF - why it is difficult to put it back on a combination of items/egos/artifacts which would be balanced? Why not just do what seems right to you and wait for the feedback when it goes into nightlies for testing? (In fact, we can now run stats on it and see whether the total occurrence of RES_CONF is about right for a given depth.)

There's a ton of interesting ego ideas in this thread - it was originally about DSMs, but some would translate very well to other base items. If you wanted to implement any of the code ideas in that thread (like Eddie's PROT_FIRE flag), put them into your edit files and I'll try and code them up when merging them.

There's also the RES_STUN flag, which is currently not used at all and could be gently sprinkled on certain egos/artifacts to allow stun resistance independent of rsound (it's already in the code).

There's also the thread I linked to in my reply to Jens in the Wormtongue thread, which has a load of ideas for using multiple pvals on artifacts.

[Timo Pietilä]

I don't think I understand the point about RES_CONF - why it is difficult to put it back on a combination of items/egos/artifacts which would be balanced?

It just doesn't feel right to just give RES_CONF to items that doesn't have "natural" place for it.

There's also the RES_STUN flag, which is currently not used at all and could be gently sprinkled on certain egos/artifacts to allow stun resistance independent of rsound (it's already in the code).

That's good to know. I need to put that in few places in place of r_sound of items I already edited. Headgear feels most natural for those.

[Timo Pietilä]

I'll try to put something not-too-different together.

First version for items. Not too different, some changes might feel controversial, especially removals of few artifacts (commented out). I also added one item.

Lots of small tweaks, rarities, PVAL:s, things like that.

[Magnate]

First version for items. Not too different, some changes might feel controversial, especially removals of few artifacts (commented out). I also added one item.

Lots of small tweaks, rarities, PVAL:s, things like that.

Cool. Incorporating the ego changes will take a bit of work (I had already committed to staging a bunch of changes to DSM egos), but the object and artifact files shouldn't be a problem.

Will test it out this evening. It might even cause us to produce a new dev version for testing!

[Derakon]

Y'know, I've been waiting for the next version with fixed negative ego pvals to go out before making a thread for changes to the edit files. I have a bunch in mind (rod electricity vulnerability, mixed-blessing egos, new monsters, tweaked artifacts, changed spell messages, and so on) but I wanted to do them all at once. Perhaps that was a bad idea, because now there's competition to get ideas in...