Roadmap for angband

[Magnate]

More controversial suggestion: remove double resistances completely. Make it binary, you either have it or not.

Current implementation of double-resists reduce even 1600 -point breath rather harmless, I think double-resists are too strong for game. Maybe reduce cap for basic 4 breaths to 1200 to compensate: instead of getting 533 points of damage you get 400. That's less than full-strength nether breath damage with resist worst case, but more than average, and it still kills you instantly if you don't have the resist.

That "fixes" the opaque -problem for new players and somehow cleans the resistance scheme a bit.

There is still the remaining "pet peeve" that high-element resistances are variable and basic four & poison are fixed. This can be hard for newbie to understand. He might want to have high-resist for damage reduction while he in fact doesn't need it and could use better item for that slot.

Well, since we've wandered into this topic, here's my current view:

- variable resistance should go
- all permanent resists should be equal for all elements
- all permanent resists should stack with temp. resist and with each other (for each element)
- permanent resists should reduce damage by, say, 15%
- temp. resist should continue to reduce damage by 1/3

So temp. resist from spells/potions/activations stays exactly the same as it is now. Permanent resistance would be about half as useful for base elements, so you'd need each covered twice - but you could also get better coverage by having more items with resists. (If this is too easy to achieve, we can always lower the resistance from 15% to 12% or 10%.)

IMO this would be much more intuitive and easier for new players to understand - each item with rFoo reduces damage from Foo by the same percentage, regardless of what Foo is. Temporary rFoo is about twice as good at reducing damage from Foo, but doesn't last long.

[Timo Pietilä]

Not at all - this is a very fair point. It just isn't how it works at the moment.

More controversial suggestion: remove double resistances completely. Make it binary, you either have it or not.

Current implementation of double-resists reduce even 1600 -point breath rather harmless, I think double-resists are too strong for game. Maybe reduce cap for basic 4 breaths to 1200 to compensate: instead of getting 533 points of damage you get 400. That's less than full-strength nether breath damage with resist worst case, but more than average, and it still kills you instantly if you don't have the resist.

That "fixes" the opaque -problem for new players and somehow cleans the resistance scheme a bit.

There is still the remaining "pet peeve" that high-element resistances are variable and basic four & poison are fixed. This can be hard for newbie to understand. He might want to have high-resist for damage reduction while he in fact doesn't need it and could use better item for that slot.

[Magnate]

-Insert Controversy-

But Why don't my two rings of fire resistance and my flaming sword and Rfire shield stack resistance, while drinking a potion helps?

oh well. I am prepared to be shot down.

Not at all - this is a very fair point. It just isn't how it works at the moment.

@fizzix: isn't this something that could have its own section in attack.txt?

[sethos]

-Insert Controversy-

But Why don't my two rings of fire resistance and my flaming sword and Rfire shield stack resistance, while drinking a potion helps?

oh well. I am prepared to be shot down.

[fizzix]

- flavourful, context-sensitive help (there's no format for this yet, but anything would be a good start)

One thing that I really think Angband is missing is a description of how much damage resistances reduce and that two items with resist != double resistance, but permanent + temporary does. Those are huge issues that are completely opaque to new players.

I don't think this can be done strictly through edit files, it probably needs some UI improvement. But it's definitely worth thinking about (and I defy anyone to offer a reason why this improvement would be controversial)

[Djabanete]

OK, thanks Magnate and Fizzix. I started with the weapons already but I'll download v4 and see what's in the edit files there.

[Magnate]

OK, I can work with the edit files easily enough (version 3.3.0, yes?), but I'm not sure where to direct any efforts --- is it a question of certain things lacking flavor text and needing text written in, or is it a question of just going around looking for things to improve? And if it comes to "improving" things, are there any guidelines?

Thanks for offering - the general guidelines are "keep with the Middle-Earth feel" and "don't sweat the US/UK spelling stuff" - we're happy with your preference. The more imaginative and atmospheric, the better. Off the top of my head, the places we really need good flavour text are

- base object descriptions (D: lines in object.txt - I would start with the v4 version and see what fizzix has done already)
- affix and theme descriptions in v4 (D: lines in ego_item.txt and ego_themes.txt)
- monster spell messages and side effects (see this post for what's needed)
- improve the messages in list-slays.h
- improve the ID-by-use messages in list-object-flags.h
- better names for Banishment and Mass Banishment (lots of debate!)
- flavourful, context-sensitive help (there's no format for this yet, but anything would be a good start)

[takkaria]

For some reason I feel that 3.1 was the last real release of the game and subsequent releases have all been "work in progress" -beta versions. I guess I now know why I felt that way. 3.2 and 3.3 were a bit sloppy versions, too many changes that had to be reversed and again many changes that no-one had time to really playtest and understand how they affected the big picture.

"Dev team" does too fast job. There are changes coming in every which way without real testing. This leads to chaos and I just plain can't trust that they make a good team to control the development of the game. There should be also players, not coders into ranks of "dev team", and ultimately it should be the community that makes the final decision. This has been seen, even with single maintainer community vote overrules the choice if it is too controversial.

I'm all for fast changes if there is need for fast change, but when there is something completely new then it just plain takes time to see the complete picture. Like introducing add-one, lose-one potion, which in turn changed importance of nexus resist quite badly. I don't think no-one considered that side-effect before it had changed to "fixed feature" of the game. Not that it was bad change, it just has unseen side-effect. These unseen side-effects happen in almost any change. Everything affects everything.

Something small, like change in how rarities were calculated: as side-effect many earlier very rare artifacts were now just rare, not very rare. No-one really understood why, because that change came in without testing, or even discussion should that be done and what are the potential effects of the change. It took really long time before people started to realize that while still being rarest possible, artifacts like The One Ring and Ringil were now a lot less rare and it wasn't just changes in artifact.txt, TMJ -fight or other game changes that caused that.

Test everything. Discuss. Not only between yourself and with terms of code. Include community. There needs to be human-readable explanation of the change. Reasons why and what are the consequences. What else needs to be changed in order to make it work, and what are the consequences of that and so on.

Hmm, I understand your concerns, but I think the V/v4 split will pretty much sort out the pace of change. I hope it will, anyway! The entire point of the split was in response to a portion of the community saying "too much change too fast". The community *are* getting the final say, here. Anyway, I'm not sure there's much to add except to suggest waiting a couple more versions and seeing how things pan out.

[fizzix]

If it's just a total sandbox I don't really mind --- it's just that I wouldn't want to cancel out someone else's efforts or otherwise be counterproductive. Thanks!

I've rewritten some of them for v4, but I don't think they've been included in vanilla. I'm not attached to them, and I think that if you were to write an improved set for vanilla, I'd be fine overwriting the descriptions I've made for v4.

In generals it's probably always best to use the most recent version of the code. In this case, it means downloading a nightly version from rephial.org

[Shockbolt]

What would PR involve?

[Djabanete]

Look in the edit files. Descriptions of weapons and armor. Updated descriptions of artifacts. Better descriptions of spells and spell effects. All these can be done without compiling anything.

OK, I can work with the edit files easily enough (version 3.3.0, yes?), but I'm not sure where to direct any efforts --- is it a question of certain things lacking flavor text and needing text written in, or is it a question of just going around looking for things to improve? And if it comes to "improving" things, are there any guidelines?

If it's just a total sandbox I don't really mind --- it's just that I wouldn't want to cancel out someone else's efforts or otherwise be counterproductive. Thanks!

Edit: Oh I see now that some weapons are completely lacking descriptions. I suppose it couldn't hurt to do some of those.

[fizzix]

I'm interested --- perhaps you could kindly point me in the right direction?

Look in the edit files. Descriptions of weapons and armor. Updated descriptions of artifacts. Better descriptions of spells and spell effects. All these can be done without compiling anything.

[Djabanete]

- flavour text

I'm interested --- perhaps you could kindly point me in the right direction?

[Antoine]

> I think it's really quite difficult to do this.

True but it's probably still an ideal to keep in mind.

> Your examples - the gain-one-lose-one potions and the change to artifact rarities - are perfect illustrations of why we created v4. In many cases it's not possible to know how a change will play out until it's tried

Just so. Of course a change that is bugfree / OK for game balance in v4 may not be in V... but it's a good place to start.

A.

[Magnate]

I think it's really quite difficult to do this. It's often very hard to explain changes which are quite small, and impossible to know all the side effects of changes of any size. And it's not usually the case that we make changes which haven't been discussed - it's more that we subsequently have an idea for implementing a change which has already been debated in one or more threads.

Your examples - the gain-one-lose-one potions and the change to artifact rarities - are perfect illustrations of why we created v4. In many cases it's not possible to know how a change will play out until it's tried, however much it is explained and discussed. So v4 allows this to happen without any damage to V, and it means that changes will only go through into V when their full implications are understood by people who have tested them.

Non-coders are very welcome to join the devteam - there are a number of non-coding jobs that need doing:
- testing
- stats generation and analysis
- help text
- flavour text
- ticket management
- PR
- release management (requires ability to compile but not code)