Sil 1.0.2

[fizzix]

The free attack on approach from Polearm Mastery doesn't seem to count towards increasing your bonus from Concentration. Is this intended?



This is spot-on. Charge would be much less effective if pack monsters and even many uniques didn't politely stand by the doorway for you to skewer them over and over and over.

I'm completely stumped as to what they ought to do instead, though.

Monsters that get a large damage hit (30-40%) should either decide to attack or flee. Attacking monsters should charge into a corridor.

It might help to define a monster state called "bloodlust" or something. In this state, the monster ignores crowd tactics and attacks @ directly. The monster doesn't flee either while in this state.

A monster can enter bloodlust by taking some significant amount of damage (fraction of current HP), significantly wounding @ (fraction of @ HP), seeing a monster of the same race die, or seeing a monster of the same race that is in bloodlust. Some monsters, like archers, should never enter bloodlust. But an orc warrior might enter bloodlust if it sees @ kill an orc archer.

You could have monsters attempt to lure @ in the room with the purpose of sneaking behind @ and blocking the door, but that might be too harsh for Sil, and be more difficult to code. Besides the bloodlust idea does a decent job of giving varied challenges. Charge is still useful, but you have to be a bit more careful of taking on a group of monsters that you can't handle if they all start to come after you.

[WaveMotion]

The free attack on approach from Polearm Mastery doesn't seem to count towards increasing your bonus from Concentration. Is this intended?

I think the early and mid-game is oversaturated with packs using the "avoid corridors AI" and this is partly why charge is so good/overpowered/required.

This is spot-on. Charge would be much less effective if pack monsters and even many uniques didn't politely stand by the doorway for you to skewer them over and over and over.

I'm completely stumped as to what they ought to do instead, though.

[debo]

I was just thinking the other day that if wargs simply lost the ability to break through doors, I would be fine with their current stats

[clouded]

I think the early and mid-game is oversaturated with packs using the "avoid corridors AI" and this is partly why charge is so good/overpowered/required. The reason I take charge is to deal with these packs (I'm sure you know how they react to you moving from inside to the lip of a corridor) because otherwise they take so long to kill and are such a pain. Later on there are still werewolves and cats but they don't seem as omnipresent and the monsters generally are more fun and varied around then.

P.S. I've heard wargs have been toned down a bit in the next version? Oh god thank you, I dread ~500' because of how many you have to wade through.

edit: Oh and another thing: all those monsters flee, you're more likely to kill them before they can with charge.

[half]

WaveMotion & buzzkill: thanks for the detailed information. Some of this sounds undesirable. I'll look into it.

[WaveMotion]

I'm wondering if you could give more information on these, as I'm inclined to believe that everything is working fine here. Looking through the code shows that you can only get the encounter experience if the monster is visible (has the visible flag, and is in LOS) or if it is killed (even if you never see it). I consider this to be working as desired and I'm not sure if you meant anything different to it (nor how it could conceivably be going wrong as the code is pretty clear). I wonder if the fact that invisible monsters in Sil can sometimes be seen explains both of these things.

There are several times where I had a light radius of 1 and no Keen Senses, where I would stop running in a corridor, with no message or creature seen. Moving one more square in the same direction revealed a monster, not necessarily erratic.

For the second bug, I had walked into a room, seen nothing, but my XP counter had increased. That led me to check the room for invisible creatures, which turned out to be clear worm masses.

I notice that when I have multiple creatures acting around me with one of them invisible, the invisible creature can flicker in and out of visibility between the other creatures' actions while I wait for my turn, particularly every time I hit the -more- prompt in a multi-line message. This leads me to believe that the player's perception check for each monster is somehow being run more than once per player tick, maybe every monster action or something. In such a case, there may be situations where the invisible creature would become visible between one of the player's turns and flicker back to invisibility when it is time for the player to act, therefore not showing up on the screen but still counting as seen.

[buzzkill]

[*]Shift-dir walking in a corridor can terminate when the player nears a creature, even if the creature is out of the player's range of sight and hasn't been seen.

IIRC this is a long standing 'feature' going back at least a couple of years. When your character suddenly stops running for no apparent reason, it either means a) edge of trap detection boundary or b) your about to stumble into something invisible, even if you can't see it.

* It may have something to do with the invisible something moving erratically and also faster than you. It steps next to you, interrupting your running, then move away again before you get a chance to act. You never see it happen.

[half]

Found a couple of bugs regarding unseen creatures:

• Shift-dir walking in a corridor can terminate when the player nears a creature, even if the creature is out of the player's range of sight and hasn't been seen.
• The player can get the encounter XP for invisible creatures she hasn't detected yet.

I'm wondering if you could give more information on these, as I'm inclined to believe that everything is working fine here. Looking through the code shows that you can only get the encounter experience if the monster is visible (has the visible flag, and is in LOS) or if it is killed (even if you never see it). I consider this to be working as desired and I'm not sure if you meant anything different to it (nor how it could conceivably be going wrong as the code is pretty clear). I wonder if the fact that invisible monsters in Sil can sometimes be seen explains both of these things.

[WaveMotion]

Found a couple of bugs regarding unseen creatures:

• Shift-dir walking in a corridor can terminate when the player nears a creature, even if the creature is out of the player's range of sight and hasn't been seen.
• The player can get the encounter XP for invisible creatures she hasn't detected yet.

[elliptic]

I just had a crash while going up some stairs on the Sil-run (on this char: http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=13146) and now when I reload the game I am trapped in the NW corner of the level inside an iron wall...

[half]

Lost that character and reusing the save still has the same problem. I'll start a new one. Let me know if you want the save.

Yeah, send it to me: you have my address. That is very odd behaviour and I wonder if it will occur in the Mac version that I use.

[Psi]

Lost that character and reusing the save still has the same problem. I'll start a new one. Let me know if you want the save.

[Psi]

Got a weird one here. Was playing quite happily when the contents of my inventory and equipment windows swapped over. I thought this was a bit weird so I toggled their visibility but nothing changed. I then closed and reopened the game and on reloading my equipment window was correct, but my inventory window flickered from inventory to equipment and stayed as that. Now every move I take is slow and has the inventory window flickering as just mentioned. This means I cannot see when weapons are glowing etc or the weights of stuff on the floor. Very irritating. Is there a button I can press or something to sort this out?

[half]

How exactly does picking locks work? Does it draw on a certain skill, or is it just random?

It is a perception check, opposed against the door's difficulty. There are 7 different strengths of lock, just like in Angband. Come to think of it, I'm not sure why I didn't remove most of those -- surely 3 is enough? Or 1?

[T-Mick]

How exactly does picking locks work? Does it draw on a certain skill, or is it just random?