Feelings about recent "development"

[Magnate]

Right comparison should be Caspanion right before it in the file. It needs to be less rare than that to be useful, OTOH it doesn't have anything other than RES_POISON for early use, and deeper you want something better anyway. Maybe if you add DEX-bonus or something like that...

Too tired. Need to sleep ZZZZZZZZZ

Yes - with my change to 25:25 to 100 it's now the same depth as Caspanion and more than twice as common. It should see a reasonable amount of use, without being a no-brainer.

I've committed all your other changes - except for elven boots, where I'd already boosted the speed pval to 3+d6 following a suggestion from Derakon - they should really dominate plain speed boots in almost all cases (and they're much much rarer). But everything else has gone in as you typed it - so no more Palantir, Evenstar or Fury weapons ...

EDIT: Er ... except the DSM egos, which I had already fixed with a new set. See what you think and we'll re-open this one.

[kaypy]

Really? Why have you used it? It has no useful abilities except poison resistance if you don't have any other source for it but you usually do have more than one source for that before you find Himring and also much better/useful bodyarmors collected.

I've taken on Morgoth in Himring... (hmm was it in V or some variant?) Anyway, while I wouldn't *rely* on the high resists, RNeth and RChaos are both very nice to have. RNeth in particular tends to be hard to come by, and is one of the biggest breaths. Sure, it wont guarantee you wont take full damage, but probabilistically it keeps the heal-or-die point further away for longer.

[myshkin]

Too tired. Need to sleep ZZZZZZZZZ

Timo, you really shouldn't sleep next to all those hounds.

[ChodTheWacko]

1) Fully stable/playable build. This is 3.2
2) Functionally locked build for bugfixes ONLY. And required balance fixes. (the leather shoes bug - stuff blatently wrong).
3) The pre-alpha build for testing new features and stuff not ready for prime

No - though it has been discussed on a few occasions when the nightlies have been buggy. The basic problem is that we are a small team - between two and eight of us are active at any one time, and that's not really enough personpower to manage three different builds.

I have a possibly stupid question.
Is 'staging' supposed to be #2, and the dev build #3?
If not, what is staging exactly?
Wouldn't that be the logical solution?

We don't need to have a build for #1, really.
If people want to pull baseline 3.2 or whatever #1 is, they can just pull the appropriate git label (or whatever you call it)

- Frank

[Nick]

I have a possibly stupid question.
Is 'staging' supposed to be #2, and the dev build #3?
If not, what is staging exactly?
Wouldn't that be the logical solution?

Currently, there are (in theory) three levels of stability:

1. Latest official release - currently 3.2.0
2. Nightly builds (actually automatic build from the master branch on github whenever it changes)
3. staging branch on github, which is where the devteam first propagate changes; typically they will play this branch a bit and then when there seem to be no showstopper bugs push it to master

This all works pretty well, but what is missing is a series of regular, official bugfix releases. 3.2.0 was released 6 months ago, and it would have been a good idea to have at least one release since then to fix the obvious bugs. As I understand it, the devteam plans to do this after 3.3.

[Magnate]

I have a possibly stupid question.
Is 'staging' supposed to be #2, and the dev build #3?
If not, what is staging exactly?
Wouldn't that be the logical solution?

We don't need to have a build for #1, really.
If people want to pull baseline 3.2 or whatever #1 is, they can just pull the appropriate git label (or whatever you call it)

The tag - yes, they can just do "git checkout 3.2.0", but of course the .0 builds are aimed at people who don't use git, which is why they're up on rephial.org

As Nick said, we don't yet have an equivalent of your #2, which is remiss of us. We are definitely going to do this for 3.3 and beyond, and they will be 3.3.1 etc. Anyone using git will be able to pull these from a "bugfix" branch (which doesn't exist yet) at any point (e.g. in between 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 being released).

We do have #3, which is the "master" branch, from which the dev versions (formerly "nightlies") are built. We will aim to keep producing these approximately weekly for beta testers.

The staging branch is none of your #1-3. It's simply a branch for merging together changes before they go into the master branch for the #3 builds. It's very useful to the devteam because we catch a large number of bugs that would render the dev builds unplayable (sadly not all of them ...). But it's not much use to anyone wishing to actually *play* the game, because unless you play incredibly quickly something will break before you finish your game. It's solely a testing branch and should be regarded as alpha quality only.

[Timo Pietilä]

Timo, you really shouldn't sleep next to all those hounds.

Adding some text that forum accepts this...

[Timo Pietilä]

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.

Next version with a bugfix. Removing special artifacts without removing the matching base object from object.txt caused assertion error in knowledge menu. Himring restored because apparently people still use it, just with less rare than it was and native at 2000' (poison depth).

[d_m]

The staging branch is none of your #1-3. It's simply a branch for merging together changes before they go into the master branch for the #3 builds. It's very useful to the devteam because we catch a large number of bugs that would render the dev builds unplayable (sadly not all of them ...). But it's not much use to anyone wishing to actually *play* the game, because unless you play incredibly quickly something will break before you finish your game. It's solely a testing branch and should be regarded as alpha quality only.

That said I have managed to win on the staging branch (only once)--usually the character either dies during careless testing or occasionally I have to blow away the savefile.

[Magnate]

Next version with a bugfix. Removing special artifacts without removing the matching base object from object.txt caused assertion error in knowledge menu. Himring restored because apparently people still use it, just with less rare than it was and native at 2000' (poison depth).

Hmm. I had already committed your previous version to staging - but instead of commenting out the Palantir and Evenstar, I had simply commented out the allocation lines so they are never generated - a different way of solving the same problem. Yours I suspect is better because it wouldn't leave an unknown amulet flavour at the end of the game ...

[jens]

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.

I have an issue with these changes...

The ego item:
Lantern of True Sight, with:
F:RES_BLIND | SEE_INVIS

This is, compared to the artifact lights, a very powerful item. In some cases maybe even the most powerful light source. This means that for the largest part of the game (or the whole game) I need to continue using a lantern, with the hassle of filling it up with oil, and keeping oil in my inventory. This is a part of the game I am always happy to leave behind when I find the Phial. Besides I won't be able to squelsh lanterns... I'd like to remove this, or possibly further improve it with NO_FUEL.

Oh, and by the way, a side effect from 'removing' the Palantir. Randarts still use the Palantir when designing artifacts. I haven't checked if that design is also allocated, but do randarts check the allocation of the original artifact?

There is also a definition in src/defines.h for ART_PALANTIR that is not used anywhere. Not a new issue, but seemed apropriate to mention it ;-)


It would be nice to add another artifact light source, can people think of apropriate names for this?

[Timo Pietilä]

I have an issue with these changes...

The ego item:
Lantern of True Sight, with:
F:RES_BLIND | SEE_INVIS

This is, compared to the artifact lights, a very powerful item.

That has been into edit-files for some time now. It isn't used (commented out).

[kaypy]

If you have to make a difficult decision about whether to use it, then it is perfectly balanced.

Oh, but it appears to be commented out, so not actually in the game at the moment...

[jens]

Sorry Timo for implying it was your change... You claimed to have added 1 item, and I saw two additions, so I guessed you added two items. I now checked the actual commit, and it's Magnate who added the lantern.

If you have to make a difficult decision about whether to use it, then it is perfectly balanced.

Oh, but it appears to be commented out, so not actually in the game at the moment...

The lantern is in the game in staging, not yet in the nightlies.

It's not a difficult decision, I will always choose the lantern (until I have RES_BLIND covered somewhere else). The problem is that it will increase tedium, and obsoletes the Phial and the Star.

[Magnate]

Sorry Timo for implying it was your change... You claimed to have added 1 item, and I saw two additions, so I guessed you added two items. I now checked the actual commit, and it's Magnate who added the lantern.

The lantern is in the game in staging, not yet in the nightlies.

It's not a difficult decision, I will always choose the lantern (until I have RES_BLIND covered somewhere else). The problem is that it will increase tedium, and obsoletes the Phial and the Star.

Not for most people it won't. The lantern only has light radius 2, and doesn't have an activation. RES_BLIND isn't a no-brainer - blindness attacks are not all that common (especially once you find RES_LIGHT or RES_DARK), and blindness is easy to cure.

Yes, it's powerful, but it does come with the added hassle of needing to carry oil. You choose.