Experimental webserver

[Estie]

I have once seen the Borg fight Faegwath with a sling of accuracy and magic shots (not on the server, some years ago). Needless to say that didnt go well.

The ROI status of monsters has dropped dramatically compared to older versions. There was a time where you could expect an artifact or 2 from killing a demon pit, but drop quality has been reduced (not sure when or by what measure exactly). This is most notable with D, but also U.

I believe it treats LOS situations okish, but doesnt take asleep monsters into the equation, so bad things happen when suddenly monsters wake up.
But it doesnt use simple standard routines like waiting around a corner for monsters to approach in single file. This most basic of LOS tricks would improve its performance greatly.

[Gwarl]

It's back up, but without any visible changes. Going to be experimenting a bit on a dummy copy.

Edit fixed the vertical scrolling issue afaict. css issue.

[Estie]

I have (again) tried to get the Borg working on my computer, but Angband 3.4.1 crashes on startup (after character creation), and so does the Borg.

Can this be a 64 bit thing ?

[t4nk]

Hey, I watched borg a little - looks great!

I might end up having to more or less write my own - at which point I may as well be writing an angband-specific frontend in javascript (which I plan on eventually doing).

If you decide to do it, I would be interested in doing the C part (or in helping you to do it, if you want to write C yourself... angband's ui is, um, kind of mindblowing )

[Gwarl]

Hey, I watched borg a little - looks great!


If you decide to do it, I would be interested in doing the C part (or in helping you to do it, if you want to write C yourself... angband's ui is, um, kind of mindblowing )

I already wrote an interface for playing a roguelike with javascript, with mouse support, graphics and a few animations/special effects (my lightning bolts were rather pretty). It's fairly agnostic about how the game logic works in that while it does expect the associated game logic backend to send outputs in a certain format, one could specify another format and leave most functions unchanged.

If you could prepare a frontend with a given mapping of input strings/ints etc to game commands, and then serialize outputs in a sensible way (JSON is convenient but I wouldn't send visible/known terrain that way, probably an octal number), I could then do all the parsing and drawing to the screen with javascript. This could maybe even be still a pty? Like playing angband on a console, type in a code that describes the command you want to send to the game, console echoes serialized gibberish representing updates to known information. The client then still reads/writes to a pty running an angband process the way it's done at the moment, except the rendering is done in the client rather than through curses.

That would be pretty fantastic IMO, shall we discuss here or email?

[t4nk]

I already wrote an interface for playing a roguelike with javascript, with mouse support, graphics and a few animations/special effects (my lightning bolts were rather pretty). It's fairly agnostic about how the game logic works in that while it does expect the associated game logic backend to send outputs in a certain format, one could specify another format and leave most functions unchanged.

Great. I think we can even get Vanilla to use your effects (Vanilla Angband has very sensible event driven architecture).

If you could prepare a frontend with a given mapping of input strings/ints etc to game commands, and then serialize outputs in a sensible way (JSON is convenient but I wouldn't send visible/known terrain that way, probably an octal number), I could then do all the parsing and drawing to the screen with javascript.

Sounds like a plan. Different variants would probably require slightly different frontends (at least stuff like Poschengband, that forked off Vanilla 20+ years ago). But they all use Angband's good old term package (written by Ben Harrison, if I'm not mistaken), so the differences should be minimal.

This could maybe even be still a pty? Like playing angband on a console, type in a code that describes the command you want to send to the game, console echoes serialized gibberish representing updates to known information. The client then still reads/writes to a pty running an angband process the way it's done at the moment, except the rendering is done in the client rather than through curses.

Yes, that sound very good.

That would be pretty fantastic IMO, shall we discuss here or email?

You can contact me at t4nk074 at openmailbox dot org, but I think it would be better to discuss most things here (on this forum) - this stuff might be of interest to other people!
Tell you what, I'll have quite a bit of free time starting at 4th of June, so I can begin working on the new frontend then.

[Estie]

My warrior died to Vecna, I made a dump, but I dont understand how I can access it.

[Gwarl]

Hey, watched you play for a bit yesterday. As far as the dump goes.. that's weird.

So I was looking through the user directories to find the file.

It doesn't exist? And nor do my dumps? All the /user/ folders are somehow empty?

But nevertheless you can see your dump here:

http://angband.live/user/Estie/master/Estie.txt

Which like I say makes no sense because according to my ftp client /public/user/Estie is an empty folder. Hmm.

[Estie]

I have have to say I am not going to play on the server anymore. Between inability to configure keys, delay and a different colour code it is just too painfull. I have to strain my eyes to "read" the screen and am getting a headache after prolongued play, and everything is taking about 3 times as long.

[Gwarl]

I have have to say I am not going to play on the server anymore. Between inability to configure keys, delay and a different colour code it is just too painfull. I have to strain my eyes to "read" the screen and am getting a headache after prolongued play, and everything is taking about 3 times as long.

Can I persuade you to at least keep checking the thread for updates? I should be able to fix most of that, eventually.

[Estie]

Can I persuade you to at least keep checking the thread for updates? I should be able to fix most of that, eventually.

No worries, I am of course going to follow. Its just that right now I need to recover

[Gwarl]

Just set a high score to beat: http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=20794

Now I can get back to working on it. I'll be playing all my games online now to encourage myself to fix things.

[Gwarl]

Starting to think I should be compiling angband into wasm so the executable runs client side and the role of the server is limited to receiving/broadcasting tty streams. You could even put that in an embedded browser so it's just angband wrapped up in a new frontend with built in livestreaming. That's the only way I can think of to solve the latency problem with software.

[Gwarl]

Also since I am not great with the css side of things but I'm fairly sure that's what was screwing up the display, I'm just going to work on the assumption that everyones monitor is 1366x768. If anyone has a smaller monitor like 1024x768 let me know so I can try and handle that case. I'm not going to get into 'responsive design' just yet but supporting slightly smaller screens is probably only twice the work so I'm willing to do it if there's demand for it.

[takkaria]

Also since I am not great with the css side of things but I'm fairly sure that's what was screwing up the display, I'm just going to work on the assumption that everyones monitor is 1366x768. If anyone has a smaller monitor like 1024x768 let me know so I can try and handle that case. I'm not going to get into 'responsive design' just yet but supporting slightly smaller screens is probably only twice the work so I'm willing to do it if there's demand for it.

I think it's worth supporting 1280x768, not least because my laptop is 1280 wide