NarSil 1.4.0

[Nick]

The third release of NarSil is now available for Windows, MacOS, and as source from the release page; savefiles from 1.3.x will not work with 1.4.0.

There are two main gameplay changes in 1.4.0:

1. ID has been replaced with Angband style rune-based ID. The ability Lore-Keeper has been replaced with Item Lore, which gives immediate knowledge of non-worn items; Lore-Master works pretty much as before.
2. Player perception of the dungeon level is based solely on what they have seen/felt. An example: if a door was closed when the player last saw it, it will remain closed on the map even if it has been opened by a monster, and will only update once the player sees it in its open state. This is not as big a deal in NarSil as it is in Angband.

The nightly version appearing on angband.live has reflected these changes already; the good news is there will be no more savefile breaks on the nightly branch for some time now.

I'll be doing bugfixes on this, and so there will be a 1.4.1 at some point, but I currently have no planned features to add. Likely there will be in the future, but currently I'm focusing on getting a playable version of Beleriand (based on this version of NarSil) out - and I currently think next year is a realistic goal for that

[Infinitum]

Nice! I'll check it out later.

[Infinitum]

Minor feedback: Visibility windows are still unlabeled. Also having the equipment, inventory, monster memory and log windows preset would probably present less of a hurdle to new players. Not having a UI out of the box feels pretty rough as far as polish goes.

[Infinitum]

Orc Archers still don't seem to chase you to different rooms. Also, how does the rune system work? Equipped an unmarked pair of gauntlets and got parry, without them ID'ing as swordsmanship gauntlets (or giving any indication that they're conferring the ability)?

[Infinitum]

You see a Pearl Ring.
You feel more perceptive.
You have learned the property of perception.
You are wearing a Pearl Ring (tried) (c).

Seems.. wrong, somehow.

[Nick]

OK, thanks for trying it out and for the reports. I think both those should have fully identified, and in fact I thought I'd specifically fixed rings of perception. You should be able to use the knowledge menu '~' to see what runes you know, and it should show perception. Abilities should be learned on wielding. All of this is a work in progress

[MITZE]

How is the ID-for-experience system supposed to work with Rune ID? It doesn't seem like you get exp for IDing flavors of anything other than actual consumables, nor do you appear to get exp for IDing individual runes as far as I've observed (webserver nightly).

[Nick]

I will have to check this, and I'm currently out of action for the next couple of weeks (away from my dev machine and in fact my country). But thanks for playing and raising issues

[backwardsEric]

How is the ID-for-experience system supposed to work with Rune ID? It doesn't seem like you get exp for IDing flavors of anything other than actual consumables, nor do you appear to get exp for IDing individual runes as far as I've observed (webserver nightly).

From a quick look at the code, there should be:

1. 100 experience from the character picking up from a pile containing an artifact that hadn't been touched before.
2. 100 experience from successfully using a horn, potion, or staff if the effect was not known before.
3. For amulets and rings, the character will get 100 experience once per kind of amulet or ring when all the runes on the amulet or ring are known and the something triggers player_know_object() for the amulet or ring. The latter happens when player enters a grid with the amulet or ring or the ring or amulet is in the character's grid, pack, or equipment and the character's bonuses are updated or the character learns about any rune or flavor
4. 100 experience from picking up from a pile containing an artifact which hasn't been touched before, isn't jewelry, and whose base kind is automatically generated (not defined in object.txt). It looks like that would only apply to Morgoth's hammer and crown and would be in addition to the experience learned from (1).

Having Item-lore will override (2): the character will get the experience upon picking up from a pile containing the unknown horn, potion, or staff. Smithing an item should learn all the runes on the item so (3) will be triggered upon making a ring or amulet for the first time.

[MITZE]

Among other things (as far as I could tell), smithing doesn't seem to result in the exp rebates that it did in Sil/Q; if you get the required abilities and investment and smith something you don't already know about, you get the item but not the exp for IDing it. From memory, I wasn't getting the extra experience from smithing whether it was jewellery or enchanted equipment; I believe I had tried making crowns of grace, handgear of forging, rings of accuracy, and rings of evasion.

[backwardsEric]

With the current heads for NarSil 1.4 and 1.3, I do see experience rebates for smithing rings of accuracy or rings of evasion. With NarSil 1.4 as it is, there should not be experience rebates for smithing previously unidentified weapons or armor since only flavored items (rings, amulets, herbs, potions, staffs, and horns) give experience upon identification.

The test was done on macOS with the code compiled with 'make -f Makefile.osx OPT="-O0 -g -DUSE_STATS -fsanitize=address -fsanitize=undefined"'. Started with a 1/4/4/5 Feanor with 1500 experience invested in both melee and evasion. Explored 50' to find the up staircase, went up, found the guaranteed forge, spent enough experience to buy 5 points in smithing, bought the Jeweller and Enchantment abilities, and then made a ring of evasion +1 and a ring of accuracy +1.

[MITZE]

Hrm, if that's the case then NarSil might well be harder than original Sil; losing out on 100 exp per ego is not insignificant, that's a couple thousand exp or a varying amount of skill investment (how much obviously depending on where you'd be putting it in combination with how much you already had in whatever) you're missing out on now with that change. It especially makes a change early game, where such experience proportionally makes up a lot of your total (and it consequently makes smithing starts harder).

EDIT: Just confirmed on getting experience from forging a ring of accuracy, a ring of evasion, and an amulet of the blessed realm—guess I just noticed the lack of it when forging ego objects I didn't know about and didn't properly pay attention with the jewellery.

[Nick]

I'd be very happy to hear suggestions on a sensible XP reward regime for NarSil. My feeling for the gameplay is still fairly rudimentary (I still haven't taken wobbly's suggestion of putting some serious play time into it), so it being still unbalanced is not surprising.

[MITZE]

My first instinct suggestion, is that if you don't want to do exp-for-IDing-egos anymore is to change it to you getting exp for every rune IDed—however, I don't know off the top of my head how many egos there originally were in Sil or how many runes there are now (though I suspect there's more runes than egos, and this change would probably be heavily in the player's favor in the case of artifacts, which normally have more runes than normal equipment, and you'd be getting exp from finding the artifact itself on top of the runes).

[Nick]

That does sound like the obvious plan; I'll do counts and see how it works out. Tweaking options could be adjusting the XP gained for runes, or even making it dependent on the rune.