tweaking the game to my liking

[Grotug]

Erm.. as a code-ophobic person, (<-2 INT> I'm afraid) I'm wondering if it's possible to change what shows up in the stores (I'd like to bring back the days when nothing was guaranteed to be in the stores) and also change the depth when ?phase door scrolls, teleportation scrolls and teleportation staves start to show up as well, and how often they show up.

I'd also like to bring back spikes for jamming doors and maybe some other legacy things that were removed ages ago. And maybe tweak randomized range for teleportation rings to make them a bit more useful (and maybe increase the teleportation range as well). I know how to change some things in the text files, but not sure if the above can easily be changed. I might also want to give rings of escaping a randomized range of +2 to +4 speed.

[Pete Mack]

You can change store contents (incl. guaranteed items) via lib/gamedata/store.txt

Putting back jammed doors is harder

[Nick]

Thank you for starting this thread, I'm going to use the opportunity to advertise (answers to your actual questions at the bottom).

One of my main purposes with the rewrite that resulted in versions 4.x was to make Angband easier to modify. There are 45 different data files in the lib/gamedata folder, and most of them have at least some changes that can be made without messing up the game.

You could, for example, put an entry in monster_base.txt for "lawyer", then create a fleet of individual monsters of this type - corporate lawyer, criminal lawyer, tax lawyer - in monster.txt. Their melee (blow_methods.txt and blow_effects.txt) and spells (monster_spell.txt) would have to be drawn from the existing ones as they have code to support them, but the pieces can be put together any way you like.

It would also be possible to create whole new classes and add their details to class.txt (in fact, there is a file old_class.txt which if renamed to class.txt will give the pre 4.2 classes). You could probably even create a new magic realm in realm.txt to draw their magic from (I haven't tested this; you would at least need to use one of the names of the existing book types as in object_base.txt).

There is a section in the online documentation on this.

Answers to actual questions:
- as Pete said, store.txt enable you to completely revamp the contents of the stores. The black market and the home are special, and you need to leave the store: line alone, but otherwise you could turn the bookseller into a ring shop if you wanted (if you want to change its name, that's in terrain.txt).
- objects can be modified in every respect - depth they show up and rarity are in the alloc: line. For range of teleportation rings you need to modify the teleportation curse in curse.txt - currently it teleports a distance of 40 every 1d100 turns. Range of teleportation scrolls and staffs is currently M60, which means 60% of the furthest distance to the edge of the level; you could change the percentage or make it a fixed or randomised (XdY) distance. For rings of escaping, change the SPEED[2] to SPEED[1+d3].
- adding objects is do-able, but if you do it with a live character the savefile won't load. The issue with spikes is that the code to do jamming of doors has been removed.

[wobbly]

Modifying what the stores stock is easy in theory, but from my experience its actually fairly easy to cause crashes.

I'll take a closer look sometime, I suspect the issue I had last time I played around here might of been the store trying to pack more items then it had room for. Mostly I just remember it being a little finicky to adjust.

[backwardsEric]

I'll take a closer look sometime, I suspect the issue I had last time I played around here might of been the store trying to pack more items then it had room for. Mostly I just remember it being a little finicky to adjust.

A change in 4.2.5 plugged one source of crashes in store_create_item() caused by the store not having room to store the new item.

[Grotug]

Thanks for the replies everyone! I have lots of follow up questions But will only post two for now. 1. Is it possible to have the teleport range of scrolls and staves be M60 (60% of the level) but a variability to that range by say 16 squares on either side of that figure?

Would writing the following code work?:

dice:M60 -16+1d32

2. Can I add more lines to potion of Surprise? It would be fun to add !Brawn and maybe !Augmentation. If I were to add !Augmentation, would I need to duplicate the other lines a bunch of times to make the Augmentation occur much less often? I actually used batform from a remaining !surprise potion to get out of a sticky situation. I kept it just in case. I had surmised it probably would have the same effect as the first surprise potion because it was a stack of 2 surprise potions, but maybe it was coincidence that both potions had the same effect?

[backwardsEric]

Is it possible to have the teleport range of scrolls and staves be M60 (60% of the level) but a variability to that range by say 16 squares on either side of that figure?

Would writing the following code work?:

dice:M60 -16+1d32

It would have to be

-16+1d32M60

, but the current implementation of the teleport effect (it ignores the number of dice and sides from the effect's dice expression, and the distance from the percentage, which is not strictly of the level size but is of the maximum distance from the teleport start location to one of the level's edges, overrides rather than sums with the distance from base, -16) means you would not get the behavior you want:

-16+1d32M60

would have the same result as

M60

. The existing teleport effect already randomizes the distance somewhat (one fourth, rounded down, of the result from the dice expression is either added (1/2 chance) or subtracted (1/2 chance) from the result of the dice expression.

2. Can I add more lines to potion of Surprise? It would be fun to add !Brawn and maybe !Augmentation. If I were to add !Augmentation, would I need to duplicate the other lines a bunch of times to make the Augmentation occur much less often?

Yes. You would need to increase the number in the "dice:5" line immediately after the "effect:RANDOM" line to match the number of effects you had added; otherwise the potion would choose one of the first 5 effects at random and then always use the additional effects. As you guessed, duplicating lines is currently the only way to get a non-uniform distribution for "effect:RANDOM".

I actually used batform from a remaining !surprise potion to get out of a sticky situation. I kept it just in case. I had surmised it probably would have the same effect as the first surprise potion because it was a stack of 2 surprise potions, but maybe it was coincidence that both potions had the same effect?

It was just coincidence (1/5 chance that a surprise potion gives you the same effect as the last one you used). The effect is chosen randomly when the potion is used and not when the potion is created.

[Grotug]

Thanks backwardsEric! Unfortunately the game won't load after the changes I made. :-/ I'll have to redo my changes and make just one change at a time.

[Grotug]

Can I do an alloc line twice to have different level of occurrence deeper you get? Otherwise, umm.. did I do this right?

name:Surprise
type:potion
graphics:!:d
level:10
weight:4
cost:0
alloc:10:10 to 15
alloc:4:16 to 55
pile:25:2
power:0
effect:RANDOM
dice:58
effect:TIMED_INC:SCRAMBLE
dice:20+1d20
effect:SHAPECHANGE:bat
effect:DRAIN_STAT:INT
effect:DRAIN_STAT:WIS
effect:TIMED_INC:STONESKIN
dice:20+1d20
effect:TIMED_INC:SCRAMBLE
dice:20+1d20
effect:SHAPECHANGE:bat
effect:DRAIN_STAT:INT
effect:DRAIN_STAT:WIS
effect:TIMED_INC:STONESKIN
dice:20+1d20
effect:TIMED_INC:SCRAMBLE
dice:20+1d20
effect:SHAPECHANGE:bat
effect:DRAIN_STAT:INT
effect:DRAIN_STAT:WIS
effect:TIMED_INC:STONESKIN
effect:RESTORE_STAT:STR
effect:GAIN_STAT:STR
effect:LOSE_RANDOM_STAT:STR
dice:20+1d20
effect:TIMED_INC:SCRAMBLE
dice:20+1d20
effect:SHAPECHANGE:bat
effect:DRAIN_STAT:INT
effect:DRAIN_STAT:WIS
effect:TIMED_INC:STONESKIN
dice:20+1d20
effect:RESTORE_STAT:STR
effect:GAIN_STAT:STR
effect:LOSE_RANDOM_STAT:STR
effect:TIMED_INC:SCRAMBLE
dice:20+1d20
effect:SHAPECHANGE:bat
effect:DRAIN_STAT:INT
effect:DRAIN_STAT:WIS
effect:TIMED_INC:STONESKIN
dice:20+1d20
effect:RESTORE_STAT:STR
effect:GAIN_STAT:STR
effect:LOSE_RANDOM_STAT:STR
effect:TIMED_INC:SCRAMBLE
dice:20+1d20
effect:SHAPECHANGE:bat
effect:DRAIN_STAT:INT
effect:DRAIN_STAT:WIS
effect:TIMED_INC:STONESKIN
dice:20+1d20
effect:RESTORE_STAT:STR
effect:GAIN_STAT:STR
effect:LOSE_RANDOM_STAT:STR
effect:TIMED_INC:SCRAMBLE
dice:20+1d20
effect:SHAPECHANGE:bat
effect:DRAIN_STAT:INT
effect:DRAIN_STAT:WIS
effect:TIMED_INC:STONESKIN
dice:20+1d20
effect:RESTORE_STAT:STR
effect:GAIN_STAT:STR
effect:LOSE_RANDOM_STAT:STR
effect:GAIN_EXP
dice:200000
effect:RESTORE_STAT:STR
effect:GAIN_STAT:STR
effect:RESTORE_STAT:INT
effect:GAIN_STAT:INT
effect:RESTORE_STAT:WIS
effect:GAIN_STAT:WIS
effect:RESTORE_STAT:DEX
effect:GAIN_STAT:DEX
effect:RESTORE_STAT:CON
effect:GAIN_STAT:CON

[Nick]

Can I do an alloc line twice to have different level of occurrence deeper you get? Otherwise, umm.. did I do this right?

You can only really have one alloc line - if you have a second, it will just overwrite the first. The rest looks OK, except I count 61 effects not 58.

[backwardsEric]

As you guessed, duplicating lines is currently the only way to get a non-uniform distribution for "effect:RANDOM".

What I said there is not quite true. There's constructs like this, using nested random effects:

effect:RANDOM
dice:8
effect:BOLT:NETHER
dice:16d8
effect:RANDOM
dice:6
effect:RANDOM
dice:5
effect:BOLT:COLD
dice:12d8
effect:RANDOM
dice:3
effect:RANDOM
dice:2
effect:RANDOM
dice:1
effect:BOLT:DARK_WEAK
dice:8d8

where the distribution would be 1/8 for the nether bolt, 7/40 for the cold bolt, and 7/10 for the dark bolt.

[Pete Mack]

I could swear that multiple allocation lines were once possible, for things like !Aug and !Exp

[Nick]

I could swear that multiple allocation lines were once possible, for things like !Aug and !Exp

They were indeed, but quite a long time ago.