4.2.6

[backwardsEric]

Angband 4.2.6 has been released. Source code and binaries for Windows and MacOS can be found at https://github.com/angband/angband/releases/tag/4.2.6 .

This is the last release in Nick McConnell's long tenure as Angband's maintainer. I hope you will thank Nick for his large contributions to the game and wish him well on Beleriand, FAangband, NarSil and whatever else he puts his hands to.

This version includes changes to device activation, many corrections and improvements to the borg automatic player, and several bug fixes. Changes affecting gameplay are:

• Like digging, failure to activate a magical device automatically retries the activation until successful or disturbed. Make utility devices, elemental rings, and dragon armor easier to activate. Devices to slow monsters, wands of fire balls and dragon's flame, rods of fire bolts, and rods of treasure location are now more difficult to activate. Change the activation difficulties for artifacts so they are better aligned with the nature of the activation. Change a constant in the failure rate calculation to tighten the transition from high to low failure rates: effects that change a player's device skill will have more of an impact if the skill is close to the activation difficulty for the device.
• When following a precomputed path (moving to a grid designated by the mouse, targeting interface, or autoexplore commands) automatically open doors or clear impassable rubble and continue moving when the neighbors of the door or rubble are known.
• Object descriptions now include the effect of curses in the displayed hit, damage, and armor class values.
• Messages for detection now distinguish between gold on the floor and other objects (thanks to PowerDiver).
• Objects and spells that used SPOT effects with LIGHT_WEAK or DARK_WEAK now use SPHERE instead so they can not damage the player.
• Change the target handling for a druid's Lightning Strike: do not require a known grid and target the player if the target is given as a direction or is not a passable grid in the line of sight.
• If a necromancer's Command spell is resisted, deduct mana and take a turn (thanks to RegalStar).
• Mithril arrows and shots weigh 50% less; mithril shots ignore acid and fire (thanks to edz314).
• Increase the curse removal power of staves of remove curse to distinguish them from scrolls of remove curse (thanks to Mitze).
• Increase the escorts for Grishn?kh and Golfimbul: both can also have cave orcs as escorts.
• Change the edges of the Cracks of Doom vault so magic mapping clearly identifies the entrances (thanks to Mikolaj).
• Change handling of keymaps so the keymap aborts when the next key does not correspond to a command, a command fails due to a missing prerequisite or to a player confirmation from an inscription check. Rework how directions are extracted from a keymap. Allow for a keymap trigger whose action starts with ESCAPE to break out of many prompts (thanks to PowerWyrm).
• Add an option, autoexplore_commands, to have 'p' move to the player to the nearest unexplored location and modify the existing '>' and '<' commands to move the player to the nearest staircase of the appropriate type when not on a staircase (thanks to memmaker). Whether or not that option is set, add to the looking or targeting interface so '>' or '<' move the cursor to the nearest appropriate staircase from where the cursor was and 'x' moves the cursor to the nearest unexplored location to where the cursor was (thanks to Gwarl).
• The notifications shown when the show_damage option is on now include information about damage due to effects from spells or magic devices. Notifications about damage to the player now take into account damage reduction and invulnerability.

There are a handful of notable changes to the Windows front end (thanks to Klaas van Aarsen):

• With tiles, the map displayed by 'M' now uses the algorithm that Options->Map used. Options->Map has been removed.
• Subwindows can have more than 256 rows or columns without drawing artifacts.

The handling of the SDL2 frontend's menus has been rewritten. Game controller events are now mapped to keystrokes to invoke commands in the game (thanks to Alberto Mardegan).

The changes for the borg automatic player are too numerous to list individually. They correct many crashes, instances where manual intervention was needed to allow the borg to make progress, jumping into lava, or cases where the borg misused a spell (thanks to Adam Goodman, Aodhlin, Jordan Philyaw, and NetBrian).

There is one change that can break compatibility with a game in progress or prevent reuse of a randart file from earlier versions of 4.2: the misnamed FIRE_BOLT72 activation is now FIRE_BALL72. If a game in progress uses randarts and an artifact has that activation, the randart file will fail to load. A workaround is to edit the randart file and replace FIRE_BOLT72 with FIRE_BALL72.

Prebuilt binaries for NDS and 3ds are no longer available. Patches to restore building Angband for those systems are welcome.

[swim]

Christmas comes early! Thanks Nick.

[swim]

The autoexplore is a welcome addition. I've been using it on the dev builds of FAangband. It really helps speed things along, and doesn't take any real choices away from the player.

One thing I will say though, is it would be nice if it could automatically stop when an item appears, the same way it does when a monster appears.

[Nick]

I'd like to thank backwardsEric for doing most of the actual maintainer work for about the last five years (and contributing significantly to FAangband and NarSil). I could not be leaving the game in better hands. I'm thinking of this as his first release.

Thanks also to everyone who has been engaged and supportive over the time I've been maintainer, it has been a great privilege. Special thanks to takkaria for handing over the job to me with grace and lots of help.

Not saying goodbye, I'm not going anywhere

[MicroChasm]

Thanks for all of your work Nick!