It's aliiive! Angband replay logger works

[zaimoni]

Interesting. With some minor tweaks, this project could allow running Angband in a "re-recording" mode, similar to what is done (as a hobby of mine) with emulators on old console games at tasvideos.org. The general idea is to make a movie of "perfect" gameplay by emulating the game frame-by-frame and then using savestates to redo any mistakes, manipulate luck, and otherwise optimize things.

Obviously, Angband is inherently frame-by-frame. But savestates could be used to manipulate item generation, critical hits/enemy behavior to a great extent.

Less than you think, though. The RNG state is in the savegame itself, and has been for some time (this predates the Hellband fork so no later than the V 2.8.x series)

So if you want to savescum Smeagol's death drop, and save the turn before the kiling blow:
* Melee always gets you the same drop.
* Shooting an arrow gets you the same drop. If the arrow actually requires a different die roll sequence, then that's a different drop than the first arrow.
* If you don't like any of the death drops for that turn, the only way to get a different death drop is to waste at least one turn.

Zaiband's "we only have one of any kind of armor in the store" display weirdness is to make savescumming armor enchantment as boring as it should be.

I've often imagined what a "perfect" run of Angband would entail -- though there's no one answer, I picture a super-fast ironman dive where seemingly every monster killed drops just what is needed; in the endgame no healing is needed because Morgoth casts only (unsuccessful) brain smashing spells or melees to little avail.

Not sure what the replay value of such an effort would be, but I think it'd be cool.

Great work![/QUOTE]

[Lord Tom]

I think the tool assisted speedrun of Angband would be incredibly boring. Most other video games do not have as much of a luck or random element. The ones that do tend to be extremely uninteresting because they're so far removed from reality.

I.E. There's nothing in the code that prevents you from going down into the dungeon, dropping near a bunch of kobolds or hobbits and having each of them drop potions of !EXP, !AUG, or high level artifacts. However the rarity of that happening is astronomical in a real game. If you're manipulating luck you can do anything.

Agreed that as games go Angband is quite poorly suited to be an entertaining TAS, though mainly because of the lack of audio/visual appeal.

Intellectually, however, I think it would be interesting because as zaimoni noted, for Angband (as for most games), a TAS cannot manipulate luck in an unlimited fashion -- limits of the engine still apply. For Angband, these limits are formidible; it may be possible to manipulate those early item drops you mentioned, but it would require a lot of effort. And, if you succeeded, the question would be -- can someone else do better using fewer or different items, or better boss manipulation or strategy?

Not that any of this will happen; I could well be the only person in the world who would be interested, which is ok. But the question does still nag...what's the fewest possible turns one could complete the game in? 50k? 100k?