OK, how do I get started?

[Pete Mack]

@David-
This seems both excessively complicated and unnecessary. There already is a way to convert loot to gold: it is the no_sell option. The amount of gold you get is discounted for the convenience of not having to recall all the time. With squelch and rune ID, the junk quickly disappears from the game--it serves only as a disguise for genuinely useful objects.
Eddie groves (aka powerdiver) got this right. Indeed, eddieband got a nunber of things right. Unfortunately he used the old codebase and it is a huge headache to unify his changes.

One last point: the goal should be to spend more time in the dungeon and less in town. Giving gold a weight penalty does the opposite.

[Gwarl]

Indeed, eddieband got a nunber of things right. Unfortunately he used the old codebase and it is a huge headache to unify his changes.

This sentence does imply however that the source code for a variant I was previously unaware of exists. Do tell.

[DavidMedley]

@David-
This seems both excessively complicated and unnecessary. There already is a way to convert loot to gold: it is the no_sell option.

Well, I may be trying to put a square peg in a round hole. Not everyone likes no_sell, but even with selling on Vanilla does a good job of keeping the hassle of selling stuff in the town to a minimum. Frogcomposband, on the other hand, has no_sell disabled by default and is a bit of a nightmare to fence your loot.

[DavidMedley]

the goal should be to spend more time in the dungeon and less in town.

Scrapping/looting as you go and instantly fencing that stuff upon recall will accomplish this, certainly with selling on. Honestly, I think it could make item management even simpler than no_sell. When I play no_sell I'm still hording a lot of stuff and agonizing over what to keep and what to destroy. If I could quickly get a fair price for something I don't expect to use, that could reduce my inventory agony considerably.

[DavidMedley]

The weight of gold compared to its value will be very low. Silver pretty value dense as well. When you get down to copper you're starting to have similar value-to-weight to your equipment, though.

[DavidMedley]

I'm still hording a lot of stuff and agonizing over what to keep and what to destroy.

Is this a personality quirk of mine, or do other people feel the same?

[wobbly]

This sentence does imply however that the source code for a variant I was previously unaware of exists. Do tell.

It still appears to be here:

https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21ALVh4%5Fpxj53aWRI&id=CDE8AC50859A409%21126&cid=0CDE8AC50859A409

From this thread:

http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=8060&highlight=eddie+band&page=12

[Pete Mack]

Mostly a personality quirk. The only difficulty you should have is choosing which items you might actually use at some point. Whether or not you get a bit of gold for them really shouldn't matter--by the time you are choosing between (near) endgame artifacts, there are plenty of dungeon books to sell.

You might consider adding a museum (aka Mathom House) for things you hate giving up? Some variants have it, but I have never seen the point.

Is this a personality quirk of mine, or do other people feel the same?

[Derakon]

Getting back to your original question, I'd say there's broadly speaking four major kinds of improvements you can make to the game: fixing bugs, improving the UI, refactoring the code, and changing game mechanics / content. The first three are way less controversial than the fourth, to the point that the way you get started is just to clone the codebase, make your tweaks, and submit a pull request. You can do the same for the fourth category, but there's absolutely no guarantee that your changes will be integrated into Vanilla; you also need to do some evangelism to convince the community (and more particularly, Nick, who approves pull requests) that the change is a good idea.

As an example, back in the day one of the potential side-effects of being hit by unresisted Nexus breath was swapping two of your stats permanently. Many players, myself included, felt this was rather harsh, so I submitted a patch a few years back to change it to temporarily swapping all of your stats around. It sat in the pull request queue until Nick revamped the ID system to greatly increase the amount of use-ID players needed to do. Since that included having to get intentionally hit by nexus, possibly multiple times, he also integrated the change to make nexus breath less punishing. But it took a long time for the patch to be integrated.

A change that small wasn't really worth making binaries for to help push my cause. But some of your gameplay changes sound pretty extensive. That's where Gwarl's "make a variant" advice is coming from. You don't have to become a maintainer, you just have to say "hey, I have some ideas that I think could improve the game, I've implemented them, you can try them out here." That gives people the chance to experiment with your ideas, they'll submit feedback, you can use that to further improve them, and all of the people playing your changes will help drive the discussion of whether they ought to be in Vanilla.

[DavidMedley]

You don't have to become a maintainer

Yeah, Gwarl was just explaining that more in-depth to me over at Angband.live. I see the wisdom now.

[DavidMedley]

I submitted a patch a few years back to change it to temporarily swapping all of your stats around.

I really like this change, BTW, and now I know who to thank for it! Reminds me also of the discussion we were having about Drain Life attacks... interesting effects vs just punishing the players in unfun ways

[Pete Mack]

There are many nuisance attacks--one for each stat, one for charges in your pack, disenchantment, and drain life. Not to mention a profusion of hounds, of which only a few species make a credible threat. Why do you find drain life more annoying than the others?

[DavidMedley]

Why do you find drain life more annoying than the others?

We discussed it here: http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=9679

Several people kicked around some ideas. I listed these four problems:
1) IT'S NOT FUN!
2) The monster doesn't seem to derive any benefit. Contrast with Drain Mana.
3) (or maybe 2a) The immediate effect on the player is negligible.
4) Above CL 50 it can be really useless

But others had more interesting ideas on it than I did.

[DavidMedley]

I don't want to derail my own thread, though. I'd be happy to discuss it more in that thread.

[Gauss]

I've been thinking for months about porting the game to python 3. It would vastly improve the game customization and it would be a lot easier to mantain the code IMO.