Sil 1.1

[debo]

I know I've blasted Grotesques with horns of blasting before and they take decent damage... maybe 3 stars? 4? I'll have to try that out with Silent Watchers... that'd be worth lugging voice potions for with my gracefully challenged elves.

Whoa cool! I still haven't tried aiming a ?Blasting up (<) or down (>) yet, although I can guess what the effects will be...

[half]

Whoa cool! I still haven't tried aiming a ?Blasting up (<) or down (>) yet, although I can guess what the effects will be...

You really should try this. Using (>) is meant to be one of the fairly standard escapes in Sil. It completely removes your previous problems, but creates a new set of them, including doing quite a bit of damage to you.

[HallucinationMushroom]

Whoa, really?! Three-dimensional, man. This never would've occurred to me. Now, Nethack, yes... I've gotta try this out.

[Scatha]

Whilst the discussion is on artefacts, how about something like:

Great Helm of Ecthelion [-1,1d3] <+2>
Song, RES_FIRE, RES_FEAR,
Song of Staying

Trying to stay thematic to what I have read about him and also his duel with Gothmog.

Nice. We had wanted a helm for Ecthelion. We'd wondered about somehow trying to explicitly represent the spike, but I think you're probably right not to.

I might suggest changing the item type to either Helm or Mithril Helm -- and that purely because we already have two artefact Great Helms.

[Psi]

Nice. We had wanted a helm for Ecthelion. We'd wondered about somehow trying to explicitly represent the spike, but I think you're probably right not to.

I might suggest changing the item type to either Helm or Mithril Helm -- and that purely because we already have two artefact Great Helms.

Obviously do whatever seems best with it. I considered the spike, but unless you are going to add a headbutt ability, there is little to be gained from it.

[debo]

Obviously do whatever seems best with it. I considered the spike, but unless you are going to add a headbutt ability, there is little to be gained from it.

It grants you the ability: Charge

[HallucinationMushroom]

Nice death spike.

[Fendell Orcbane]

Artifact Bows

I think its kind of odd that Dragon horn bows are better than most artifact bows. I think they should be rebalanced somehow. I mean having to dump an artifact bow for a regular Dragon Horn bow just seems weird. But having said that its really a minor thing. The game still plays well, and archery isn't too popular or at least it wasn't when I used to play Sil more often.

[half]

I think its kind of odd that Dragon horn bows are better than most artifact bows.

Are they? They are obviously at their best for high strength archers, but I'm not sure they are better than shortbows for many of my archers, let alone the artefact bows. I think one of the five artefact bows (Celegorm's) is probably weaker in general, and the other four are competitive or typically better. You often get a lot of extra dice from criticals/poison/flaming arrows with archery, so having those sides or low weight is very useful.

[half]

On 10.6.8, I get, "The application cannot be opened because its executable is missing." However, I am using a case-sensitive filesystem. Renaming .../Sil.app/Contents/MacOS/sil to Sil or editing the Info.plist fixes that problem. Unfortunately, then it simply exits silently.
It appears that the call to GetNewMBar(128) fails in init_menubar(), because Sil.rsrc is a zero-length file. I don't know why the call to Rez is failing to create a valid resource file without reporting any errors.

Thanks so much for this information myshkin! I hope it means we can track down this longstanding bug.

I've fixed the Makefile so that it now creates an executable called "Sil" (instead of "sil") inside Sil.app. I note that on my machine, Sil.rsrc is also a zero length file, but the program works fine. I have to admit that I know nothing about .rsrc files (or anything else about compiling for Mac...). If you have any suggestions, I'd be glad of them. You can download the source from the Sil webpage and have a look -- I've included all the Mac files including Sil.xcodeproj.

Note that there is a Sil.r file in the src directory and also a Sil.rsrc which is not zero length, but seems to be a binary file with old info in it dating back to NPP, suggesting that it is not being used in the build process.

Thanks again for your help -- mysterious quitting on startup on about 20% of Macs is a pretty bad bug and it would be great to eliminate it.

[half]

Started a comedy game in my lunch hour. Found my largest ever stash of !Quickness - netting 12 by 400' and then found the Robe of Celebrindal for the first time ever. Gofigure.

I find it interesting that potions of quickness are still so good in Sil despite only offering a 50% speedup instead of 100% in Angband (and that speed in Sil is capped at a 50% speedup).

[half]

In the description of Silent Watchers it says they are vulnerable to shattering. What does that actually mean? Hit them with a tunneling weapon, trumpet of blasting, _Earthquakes?

They have the STONE flag which means that trumpets of blasting do damage to them. No effect from tunneling weapons (not sure if there should be, but Mattocks and the sharpness Glaive are pretty good against them anyway). The flag also means they turn to rubble on death.

[half]

Whoa, really?! Three-dimensional, man. This never would've occurred to me. Now, Nethack, yes... I've gotta try this out.

Yeah, it is a little Nethackish, but it was one of the main reasons I invented the trumpet of blasting, which was the reason I invented trumpets at all, so it is not an afterthought. The description of the trumpet does tell you about this, but this seems to indicate that people rarely read these.

Does anyone here use trumpets of blasting upwards or downwards? How do you find them?

[Patashu]

I find it interesting that potions of quickness are still so good in Sil despite only offering a 50% speedup instead of 100% in Angband (and that speed in Sil is capped at a 50% speedup).

50% is amazing because:
-50% means you can get consistent free actions on everything normal speed
-Nothing 150% speed can catch you/doublehit you anymore

[clouded]

My main thought about potions of quickness is that they never last an entire fight. I don't care for them that much compared to stat potions, which last forever. Of course, I still use quickness in dangerous situations when I can.