Angband 3.1.1 released

[takkaria]

So, some six months later, we have a new release. I'm going to call it "Angband 3.1.1", since that seems like a reasonable choice of name. Bear in mind, though, that it's still kind-of a beta, though probably less so than 3.1.0. I offer my unreserved apologies to those whose games were wrecked discovering the numerous bugs in 3.1.0, but there shouldn't be anything on quite that level in this release, and if they do crop up, maintenance releases will be made whenever bugs are fixed.

Special thanks in this release go to: Eddie Grove, Elly, Stefan O'Rear, Mango Juice, Gabriel Cunningham, Chris Carr, Chris Robertson, Peter Denison, Joe Buck, Eric Osheim, Antony Sidwell, tigen, and rhinocesaurus, without whom this release would not have happened. I think this is the highest number of contributors for any Angband release ever, so the game can't be in that bad shape.

To people playing the nightlies, none of what follows will come as any surprise. To those who haven't been, there's some fun in store.

The identify system, previously tweaked in 3.1.0, has been overhauled. The game now allows you to identify items through use instead of using Identify scrolls; this means that you wield unknown items more often and use them for a while until their effects become obvious. For example, wield an unknown sword and attack foes, and you will soon discover its combat advantages. If you wear some armour and it increases your intelligence, the game will remember that. And when you have discovered all of an item's attributes, that kind of item will be automatically known in future. "Identify" is still in the game, but you will need to use it much less than before, and as a consequence, it is more expensive. The game is more fun this way, trust me.

The second change that many will welcome is a reworked squelch system by Eddie Grove, which is quite similar to the one present in his patch of 3.0.9. It allows squelching of more item types independently of each other, as well as squelching unaware consumables.

Another major change that most players will notice is the significantly fifferent pricing that many items have. This is because the algorithm that detemines item prices has changed a lot, and hopefully gives more reasonable prices than before, both because it makes things few would buy much cheaper and because it tries to price generally in proportion to usefulness. This, combined with the two points above, means the emphasis of the game is much less on what you can lug back to stores to sell, and much more on exploration.

For people who play with randarts, you should now find them more interesting and better-balanced.


Download

Windows

http://rephial.org/downloads/3.1/angband-3.1.1-win.zip

OS X

http://rephial.org/downloads/3.1/Angband-3.1.1-osx.dmg

Source

http://rephial.org/downloads/3.1/angband-3.1.1-src.tar.gz

List of bugs fixed

(#29) Gold stolen by monsters is now stored in their inventory.
(#30) Now using a new savefile format (no user-visible change)
(#33) Add BRAND_FIRE to oil flasks and torches.
(#48) Improve the randart code a lot.
(#62) Game is now available entirely under the GPL.
(#63) Dynastic character numbering support
(#328) 'lore' functions now write to subwindows when appropriate.
(#343) Add autosave on level change.
(#352) Probing now reveals attack and spell information.
(#367) Prompt for which ring to replace when wearing two
(#412) Monster list is no longer hallucination-proof.
(#448) Heal spells now identical to potions of same name
(#451) Fix inventory/equipment and message update in store.
(#496) Give wands and staves EASY_KNOW, so they no longer need ID.
(#521, #597, #635) Stop the slow launches and occasional non-launches on Windows.
(#561) 'n', when used to fire missiles, no longer ignores confusion.
(#562) Ego-items are now never squelched as "bad" or "average".
(#572) Make ID-by-use more viable by making monsters summoned from player actions have less energy
(#599) Above 18, stat drain and gain always works in intervals of 10 points
(#613) Prevent {!*} prompting for harmless actions.
(#637) Print messages when monsters crush or push past each other.
(#639) Reset social status to original value with quickstart
(#641) Fix Morgoth artifacts.
(#645) Fix fail rate display wrt amnesia
(#654) Allow pseudo to work whilst resting.
(#661) Prompt for how many items to buy in a store now doesn't get the number in your pack wrong when there's > 99
(#663) Numbers of summoned monsters now match singular/plural message text
(#672) Fix Evenstar activation message.
(#673) Fix description of Identify scrolls.
(#676) Fixed character creation help.
(#675) Fix graphics mode cloak tile bug
(#677) Character history now in character dump
(#679) Mages no longer get told they can learn more spells than they can
(#680) Stop displaying two highscore entries for dead characters.
(#682) Remove the autoroller
(#683) Fix !Berserk Strength being unsellable.
(#685) Scrolls of Create Trap now ID on use.
(#688) Mages once more get a message when they can't learn new spells from a book.
(#690) Item descriptions now take player speed into account.
(#691) Make of Open Wounds similar to ther pval-less rings in that it doesn't need ID.
(#694) Fix dropped rods recharging, and any other rod-related oddities.
(#696) Put character name back onto the dump.
(#698) Added '!' to 'R' prompt to rest until mana or hp are full.
(#700) Stop running one square away from already-visible monsters
(#705) Randart activation messages no longer refer to the original artifact.
(#706) Number of blows on 'I'nspection screen should be correct now
(#709) Don't display the wrong tile in graphics mode at detection boundaries
(#711, #764) Fix descriptions of area-of-effect detection.
(#712) Autoinscribe items in the first inventory slot.
(#717) Make stat potions just a little bit more common.
(#721) Searching bonuses are now displayed as a % increase to match the character screen.
(#722) Fix spoilers and wizard mode cheat info not displaying magical abilities
(#723) Fix support for playing in the terminal on OS X 10.4.
(#724) Critical hit messages come after regular hit messages again.
(#725) *Remove Curse* now removes all curses again.
(#727) Targetting warns when out-of-range
(#729) Random teleportation disturbs the player.
(#730) Mention control+[ANU] in monster recall '/' prompt.
(#733) Curse Weapon/Armour no longer blast your objects completely, they just curse them a bit.
(#734) Stop displaying the store slot bought when purchasing.
(#735) Remove weak pseudo-ID.
(#740, partial #532) Color-code monster melee attacks by how dangerous they are to the current player.
(#741) Stop generating spurious staircases under the player on recall/teleport.
(#742) Mention tunnelling ability in item descriptions.
(#745) Fix a monster movement bug where monster packs would try to "surround" the player without fo st checking that they weren't already.
(#747) ui-birth.c needs to handle going directly from character sheet to sex prompt.
(#748) Allow Rings of Delving to activate.
(#754) Have a go at using a slightly cleverer pricing algorithm for combat gear.
(#755) Fix pseudo-id of branded ammo, so already-known ammo doesn't get pseudo-ID'd.
(#762) Alchemist's Gloves are now wearable by mages
(#766) Scrolls of trap creation now longer crash in town.
(#767) Hitpoint warning now accepts only numbers from 0-9.
(#770) Fix item pickup energy inconsistencies.
(#772) Display searching bonuses for rings of searching in object descriptions again
(#773) General Store now restocks like other stores (e.g. more food will appear without you having to buy out all the food).
(#774) Ego-items with random powers no longer get duplicate powers
(#781) Remove the cap on potions of experience -- they always give 100k XP now.
(#784) Stop dumping squelch settings with other options.
(#792) Arriving on new levels is guaranteed to be safe
(#799) Elessar and Evenstar now show the right recharge times.
(#801) Inscriptions now shown properly in the home.
(#813) Potions of Healing now do what the description says they do, not something much more powerful.
(#814) Don't allow attacking when scared (rather than wasting a turn)
(#830) Fix knowledge menu crash by initialising knowledge commands earlier
(#839) Remove 12% of HP for ex-FORCE_MAXHP non-uniques
(#848) Monster list shows in/out of LOS and asleep/awake
(#849) Drop squelched items after ignoring them
(#864) Stop autoinscriptions from overwriting manual inscriptions
(#865) Weapon descriptions should no longer be too big for a 80x24 screen
(#868) Rings of Escaping have more accurate description
(#874) Update monster list when monsters wake up
(#893) Auto-pickup is no longer disabled when hitpoints are low
Fix bug with rods of treasure location needing ID.
Fix birth_money so that in point-based it still gives you 500AU.
Fix double-resist damage.
Fix pluralisation of 'staves'.
Fix artifact recharge times.
Fix displaying the special rings in the object knowledge viewer.
Fix randart saving/loading.
Add Word of Recall status to the status line.
Make teleport level work in ironman before DL 99, always moving downward.
Allow use of the object knowledge menu for setting up item-kind squelch.
Tone down the frequency of {excellent} items somewhat, and tweak {good} frequency.
Tone down detection area a wee bit.
Remove the 'K' command and instead put a prompt after the 'destroy' prompt.
Weaken PDSM just a tad.
Enchant Armour scrolls ID when reading them, not when they are successfully read.
Tone down Troll Priest HP.
Turn off show_flavors by default.
Include critical damage in the object description's average display.
Make Kavlax 'scary dark like Ancalagon'.
Curses on jewelry only happen with negative-pval items. (temporary)
Only wake monsters on attack if you're not "too afraid to attack".
A few fixes to the visual editor on the knowledge screens.
Add yeeks to the monster knowledge browser.
Make the object knowledge list sort some items by sval rather than alphabetically.
Items trying to be dropped on the floor now attempt to delete the oldest item on that grid that's been squelched.

Unix ports:
Update angband man page.
Get debian packaging stuff working.

Curses port:
(#666) Fix out-of-bounds memory access
(#678) Don't leave terminal colours broken on quitting
Disable ^Y on BSDs, since it clashes with roguelike keyset
Add pseudo-graphics support
Use curses to parse keys, which is more portable and removes the Escape delay.


Invisible code changes:
Once again, the game has seen some large-scale reworking. Mentioned here is only a small subsection of that reworking.
(#513) Refactor the code that prompts for character dump filenames so that it can be overriden by platform-native ports.
(#616) Add support for BSDish makes.
(#664) Refactor brands and slays so they're defined in one place and referenced elsewhere.
(#749) Add an id_only paramater to calc_bonuses().
Significant work on making the game more command-based than keypress-based
More flags now kept in arrays
Make "make clean" remove all object files in the list, to catch files in subdirectories.
Commit the beginnings of a flag-based terrain system; note that it does absolutely nothing as yet.
Make the z-virt defines cast to the right type so that assignment errors can get caught a bit ealier on.
Fix autoconf install errors.
Remove an unnecessary call to getlogin() which was screwing up su'd users.
Dependency generator has to add dirnames itself
Remove "uint" from main-x11.c.
Tweak the OS X makefile to be a little more terse.
Make the game a little bit more borg-friendly.

Debug mode:
Add help file documenting debug mode.
Add a prompt for artifact name when using ^AC with no command count,
Add a prompt for monster name when using ^An with no command count.
Allow tweaking of curses when playing with objects

[Neuro]

My current game is using build r1500. Is my current savefile compatible with 3.1.1?

[nobody]

i had been playing r1502, downloading 3.1.1 now. thanks tak, i can't agree with all the changes you've made, but you've sure as hell made a lot of progress, i don't think anyone can argue with that. playing variants that haven't caught up is somewhat annoying to me now, the improvements really help

[takkaria]

My current game is using build r1500. Is my current savefile compatible with 3.1.1?

Upgrading active characters between versions is never the greatest of ideas. However, things should go OK, except the game will reset all the knowledge you have about all the items in your inventory (a bit like amnesia, except it's much easier to get that knowledge back now).

[takkaria]

i had been playing r1502, downloading 3.1.1 now. thanks tak, i can't agree with all the changes you've made, but you've sure as hell made a lot of progress, i don't think anyone can argue with that. playing variants that haven't caught up is somewhat annoying to me now, the improvements really help

I'd be happy to hear criticisms of the approach; the next release is the "we need to balance things now" release, so stuff like that is valuable.

[takkaria]

What release would be (in)complete without an annoying bug? There was one which meant that use-by-ID didn't interact so well with objects that you active, but it's now been fixed at the version of 3.1.1 available on the frontpage of http://rephial.org.

[Huntington]

I downloaded this to give it a try, but the graphics were awful.

Just kidding. I'm a new Angband player, just picked it up in the last month, and registered just so I could thank you for your work. Your work (and the rest of the team) has gone a long way to making the controls more intuitive (the {Enter} menu was a great learning tool to learn what's possible and their shortcuts for example) for folks like myself who know about the genre, appreciate the idea of it, but were put off by the learning curve. I'm looking forward to the new addition, once my current Dwarf priest has met a grizzly demise - or he crashes Morgoth's tea party. We'll see what comes!

[PowerDiver]

(#599) Above 18, stat drain and gain always works in intervals of 10 points

This was undone in 1535.

My current char had WIS increase from 18 to 18/26 from 1 potion.

[jevansau]

Upgrading active characters between versions is never the greatest of ideas. However, things should go OK, except the game will reset all the knowledge you have about all the items in your inventory (a bit like amnesia, except it's much easier to get that knowledge back now).

Unfortunately, while this is true for carried objects, objects in the home end up in a semi-identified state. Their names are shown, but they have no known properties. Unfortunately, because the names are known they can't be identified. I tried going from build 1514 to 1580 and to 3.1.1 with the same results.

Which build was this change included in?
I might try going to the last clean build beforehand. Otherwise, I'll finish this character first.

Regards,
Jonathan

[chem]

(#62) Game is now available entirely under the GPL.

Hmm, is anyone in the *band community also active in the Fedora community? Could we perhaps get Angband distributed as a RPM? This would significantly expand the potential userbase.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/LicensingGuidelines

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing

[Magnate]

Hmm, is anyone in the *band community also active in the Fedora community? Could we perhaps get Angband distributed as a RPM? This would significantly expand the potential userbase.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/LicensingGuidelines

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing

I'm planning on becoming the Debian maintainer, once I've figured out how to switch the package from --setgid=games to --with-private-dirs. After that I can make an RPM fairly easily with Alien, and I'll be posting here asking for users of RPM-based distros to test it out and report back any problems.

If there is anybody who wants to step up and maintain an RPM from scratch (rather than via the Debian package), let me know so we can keep them consistent.

[sandtrap]

Thank you

Thanks,

Eddie Grove, Elly, Stefan O'Rear, Mango Juice, Gabriel Cunningham, Chris Carr, Chris Robertson, Peter Denison, Joe Buck, Eric Osheim, Antony Sidwell, tigen, and rhinocesaurus

and of course takkaria.

I stayed away from the beta. But I downloaded the release as soon as I saw it.

Thanks for all your work!

[saarn]

nicest Angband yet

Just started playing this last night and see all sorts of nice little changes from 3.1.0 (I especially like the out of range warnings on my missiles) :-). Thought I wouldn't like the pricing changes much, but they actually seem pretty good so far (except $45 torches seem a bit steep).

I think it's also going to take me a bit to get used to the ID by test-- had some boots that were marked [3,-8] {wielded}, went to kill them and got something about squelching excellent but not superb footwear-- I guess the {wielded} means that I don't know everything about the item yet? I was confused enough that I just destroyed them, but maybe that wasn't the right thing to do. Is excellent stuff still necessarily good, or would something like aggravation also make an object excellent?

Anyway, I'll probably figure it all out eventually-- meanwhile I think this is a pretty sweet release and wanted to share my appreciation for all the hard work that's been put in.

[PowerDiver]

I think it's also going to take me a bit to get used to the ID by test-- had some boots that were marked [3,-8] {wielded}, went to kill them and got something about squelching excellent but not superb footwear-- I guess the {wielded} means that I don't know everything about the item yet? I was confused enough that I just destroyed them, but maybe that wasn't the right thing to do. Is excellent stuff still necessarily good, or would something like aggravation also make an object excellent?

Doc is sorely lacking. {wielded} marks that you have put it on, but do not have pseudo yet..

In theory, you could have e.g. boots [3, -8] of free action. In practice, that cannot happen at the moment, but it could become possible at any time. The squelch code cannot figure out the boots are not excellent until they pseudo. If you waited until the boots pseudoed, then it would ask if you wanted to squelch bad boots.

[Magnate]

Just started playing this last night and see all sorts of nice little changes from 3.1.0 (I especially like the out of range warnings on my missiles) :-). Thought I wouldn't like the pricing changes much, but they actually seem pretty good so far (except $45 torches seem a bit steep).

Sorry, that's a bug of mine. Fixed in r1584, which should be built tonight.