ToME 2.4.0-ah released

[AnonymousHero]

Hi all,

I've tagged and released ToME 2.4.0-ah. Source can be downloaded here: https://github.com/tome2/tome2/tree/v2.4.0-ah (Click "Clone or Download", Click "Download ZIP".)

This being a .0 version and given the extent of code changes, players should probably expect a few bugs. Please report any bugs you find here: https://github.com/tome2/tome2/issues

Changes:

Game:

- Removed traps and related skills. (Thanks to "miramor" for doing
  most of the actual work on this.)
- Removed Alchemist class from ToME module. They were horribly broken
  and encouraged only scummy play. They were also indirectly
  responsible for a lot of items that were junk to every other
  character class.
- Remove Runecrafer class.
- Increased size of the home drastically.
- Fix "far reaching attack" skill. (Thanks to "miramor".)
- Remove pointless player stats such as "gender", "age", "height",
  etc.
- Disallow casting for Posessors when they don't have enought SP.
  (aka "Remove system shock".)
- Magic Mapping now maps the whole level instead of only the display
  region.
- Summoned monsters appear around summoner instead of player.
- Remove various mostly inconsequential options.
- Use PCG random number generator instead of the old custom one.
- Grant player full monster knowledge.
- Theme: Fix final guardian artifact for Land of Mountains.
- Theme: Remove armor restriction for Eagle/Dragon races.

Build:

- Use C++14.
- Use (vendored) "cppformat" for string formatting.
- Use (vendored) "jsoncons" instead of "jansson".
- Produce individual executables for each of the supported platforms
  instead of a single executable.

[Yottle]

Cool! It looks like you have dumped a lot of the dreck that never worked properly.

[AnonymousHero]

Cool! It looks like you have dumped a lot of the dreck that never worked properly.

Yes, indeed.

[Derakon]

These changes all look pretty solid. Glad to see this hoary old goat getting some attention.

[Estie]

Aparently I am the only one who likes alchemists. I saw "removed" and stopped reading there

[Derakon]

Aparently I am the only one who likes alchemists. I saw "removed" and stopped reading there

I tried playing one once, but stopped when I realized that in order to make your own artifacts, you had to scum for a gigantic number of crafting ingredients.

It might be worth seeing if there's some way to retain the Alchemist's other abilities without having the scummy ultimate power and without polluting the dungeon with essences everywhere. The abilities to craft your own egos and to have a failure-free recharging method for high-level devices were both pretty neat. Maybe instead of having essences as separate items, you could use essences directly from items that "contain" them? So you could make a Freezing weapon using a stack of Potions of Resist Cold, because each potion contains a Cold essence. Or you could use wands/staves of the appropriate types as storage batteries.

[Estie]

I have played many alchemists and never made more than 1 or 2 artifacts with each. The ability to blow up your toon out of proportion is there, but as you said, grindy and arguably boring. But 1. it is not the only way to get super toons, there are others in tome, 2. the interesting part about alchemists is actually the start - if you dont mind shopping for "properties", the things you get first make going to different dungeons viable; certainly thats a lot more interesting than the optimal melee start - orc cave to get the 3 guaranteed artifacts - and 3. there may be people who like that, grinding for ages to get 10k hp or such, whats wrong with it ?

As for essences, its a simple thing to automize them, naturally I do it with all non-alchemists from the start. The only changes I would like are weightless essences and indestructable quest essences (if they arent already, I havent tested that).

[EpicMan]

Three cheers for your work on this, AnonymousHero. ToME is one of my favorite roguelikes.

I have played many alchemists and never made more than 1 or 2 artifacts with each. The ability to blow up your toon out of proportion is there, but as you said, grindy and arguably boring. But 1. it is not the only way to get super toons, there are others in tome, 2. the interesting part about alchemists is actually the start - if you dont mind shopping for "properties", the things you get first make going to different dungeons viable; certainly thats a lot more interesting than the optimal melee start - orc cave to get the 3 guaranteed artifacts - and 3. there may be people who like that, grinding for ages to get 10k hp or such, whats wrong with it ?

Alchemist starts are fun because while your character starts out weak and unable to cast spells, but you start with (or able to immediately make) a potion of detonations, which can be thrown to kill a valuable target for multiple levels. It is a very different start than most other race/class combos.

They did add a lot of useless-for-everybody-else items to the game though. Maybe essences should be gained by destroying ego items/jewelry/etc, and make the player sacrifice an artifact to create a new one?

[Derakon]

Maybe essences should be gained by destroying ego items/jewelry/etc, and make the player sacrifice an artifact to create a new one?

Artifacts are in limitless supply, so you should really have to limit the power of the created artifact by the power of the destroyed artifact, or something similar. That sounds hard to balance, but could be pretty fun especially if it meant getting access to the artifact creation skill from the get-go (or at least comparatively early) rather than it not being available until after the player already has a surfeit of artifacts to play with.

Another possibility for essences is that they become some weightless, immaterial, non-inventory-item thing that is tracked separately. Like, when you drain an item, the essences go into an "essence pouch" which you can examine from ~, and essences never appear as items in the wild. Caves of Qud uses this approach for its crafting components.

[wobbly]

Sangband has weightless essences likewise in a pouch. you used to find them near stuff of the same essence. Acid essenses near black dragon spawns. Death essenses near bad potions etc.

[AnonymousHero]

I don't object to an Alchemist-like class on principle, but as it was it was just broken (IMO) and a significant contributor to the TMJ problem. Something like a device-master might be interesting, perhaps. (Yes, I'm also very aware that there are other classes where you can get crazy strong characters, but they usually have a limitations in other areas to sort-of-balance them. They can also be quite tricky and hard to pull off. An example would be a bare-hand possessor in a GWOP/Ancalagon's body which transitions to Anti-magic.)

Alchemy was also a ton (several thousand lines, IIRC) of really messy code. I'm trying to focus on improving the code quality gradually to (eventually) make it a lot easier to implement e.g. new classes (or whatever). A lot of the more niche classes/skills etc. stand in the way of that, so sometimes it's easier to just outright remove it. (I'm also considering removing MUSIC as a spell type since it's only usable by one very niche class, the Bard, and it adds a lot of code complexity.)

[Yottle]

I enjoy playing alchemists occasionally, but for me the interesting part is the early going. Once I learn a few critical recipes like "elven" and "power" it is just a matter of grinding through. Usually I just dump the character and start over. Losing the class is a small price to pay for a more stable and easily maintained game, IMHO.
Personally, I think that Theme showed to best way to add variation to the game. There are many more types of characters, but they are differentiated through different starting attributes and/or gain of attributes at level gain. There are also many more interesting takes on dungeon construction, including some that are challenging even for maxed-out characters. That was all done without adding anything to the underlying code. She didn't use the alchemist class either.

[Gwarl]

Compilation failed spectuacularly. Error log is far too long to post here.

Maybe we could get makefile.std back? Perhaps my gcc is outdated? what's going on?

[HugoVirtuoso]

Compilation failed spectuacularly. Error log is far too long to post here.

Maybe we could get makefile.std back? Perhaps my gcc is outdated? what's going on?

Gwarl, were you trying to compile 32-bit or 64-bit? Mac, Windows, or Linux version? AH will need this info to help out.

[Gwarl]

64bit linux ubuntu

he's been doing ungodly things with c++ and filesystem libraries and who knows how all this works anymore?