My thoughts upon returning

**Timo Pietilä** · November 23, 2010, 14:19

Originally posted by topazg

Walls - They are #!! Even from back playing on Frog-Knows (my first Angband experience) I have become permanently used to the solid wall images. This now harks back to Moria days, and I find myself really enjoying it. It's silly, it's little, but I like it even if it was done for display compatibility reasons.

Edit font.prf in \lib\pref and remove two # that comment font-win.prf out. In font-win.prf you might want to change permanent wall color to something else. I use
# Permanent rock (dark red : solid block) F:60:26:127 F:61:26:127 F:62:26:127 F:63:26:127

which is light blue.

I also changed floor to have centered dot and invisible traps same (removed the # comment mark from them).

Originally posted by topazg

Uniques being purple - I'm not sure about this one to be honest. I mean, in some ways it's nice to see at a glance, but I'd already gotten used to lagduf being yellow, Grip and Fang being White etc.. it wasn't like it was that hard to identify uniques most of the time anyway. No big deal, I just wonder what the motivation for the change was.

This is fixed in main development version (using my set of colors, uniques use different color than rest of the horde, but still whiteish for Grip and Fang, black for Ancalagon, blue for Fundin etc.), so that should be fixed in 3.2.

Color uniques use in 3.1.2v2 is actually violet (v), purple is now different code (P). Change you see has changed all previously purple non-uniques red, and no creatures are actually purple. Not even purple worm. Be careful with everything red, they might not be what they seem to be.

**fizzix** · November 23, 2010, 14:31

Originally posted by topazg

Randarts - I always play with these on, because I like not having a clue what kit is out there. First winner is more interesting playing with the artifacts because a) it helps to know what the stuff you can get is, and b) it's nice and new the first full time through. After that, I like being in the dark. For all I know there's only 1 rDis item in the game, and juggling items will be a fun part of the game for me. However, I read the nightly thread hinting that at the moment randart code may generate overpowered items - A) is this people's experience, and B) presumably this doesn't make my char too cheaty to have picked randarts?

Randarts seem constantly in flux. I think that they were in a reasonably good state at 3.1.2v2. In the current nightlies they are not overpowered, but they are too common. It's a constant tweaking process to get them right.

**topazg** · November 23, 2010, 15:28

Many thanks both, very useful, though Timo, I'm not changing my #s, I'm getting quite attached to them now

90 minutes later, CLvl 21 on DLvl 17, and going to drop to 18 as it's easier to level up fighting against the hounds. Need to watch out for Nar and umber hulks, and I suppose Shagrat and Lugdush are pretty annoying.

Other than that, there's nothing of great annoyance here that I can remember?

Still no randarts yet ... http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=10811

**Magnate** · November 23, 2010, 23:17

Originally posted by fizzix

Randarts seem constantly in flux. I think that they were in a reasonably good state at 3.1.2v2. In the current nightlies they are not overpowered, but they are too common. It's a constant tweaking process to get them right.

It certainly is. @OP: the problems started when randarts could get +blows or +shots on items other than weapons. I think this was after the release of 3.1.2v2 but I can't remember for sure. You'll know if you find something grotesque like a hat with +3 shots. These have now been toned down so should be ok in 3.2 once I scale back the overall drop rate.

**Magnate** · November 23, 2010, 23:31

Originally posted by topazg

My only comment is the number for magic device seems rather arbitrary without a scale.

It is - it's the %chance shown on each item that's important. Perhaps it would be better to revert this to "good", "excellent" etc. on the char screen.

Shops and prices - Seems to be a fairly thorough pricing overhaul, and a really good one. Buying and selling actually feels more purposeful in the early part of the game, and I've actually found myself shopping for things rather than doing an item dump and return with 2 more WoR.

Excellent, glad you like it. Personally I hate shopping, and quite a lot of people dislike the pricing system (and I admit that speed items are still underpriced, but I will fix that one day), but it's certainly less arbitrary than the old prices.

Uniques being purple - I'm not sure about this one to be honest. I mean, in some ways it's nice to see at a glance, but I'd already gotten used to lagduf being yellow, Grip and Fang being White etc.. it wasn't like it was that hard to identify uniques most of the time anyway. No big deal, I just wonder what the motivation for the change was.

There was quite a lot of debate before it was made. Quite a few uniques were not actually very distinct from others of their race, particularly for new players. There was no consistency in unique colouring: some were a different shade of their race's colour, some where completely different (think orcs), some were multihued etc. Making them all purple (violet, whatever) was an experiment, but it happened to be in the 3.1.2 release (which was clearly advertised as a beta).

Although some people do prefer it, on balance the feedback has been negative so it has been reverted. Timo has supplied a better monster.txt with, I understand, more consistent colouring for uniques (closer to their race's colour but still distinct). My intention is to include an option to set all uniques to a single colour (possibly purple, possibly multihued, but something recognisable) for those who want to use it.

Proportional healing - It's a fantastic change. Finally CLW are really useful (though I'm not so sure about CSW - it seems CLW for spam-healing and CCW for blind/confusion effects are all that's required right now). Will be interested to see how this pans out as my level goes up.

Interesting that you like this - it has been much criticised as making the game easier- especially for mages (who are about the lose the CLW spell to compensate) and with big stacks of CCW in the temple. I don't have a strong view either way on whether healing should be proportional or absolute, but if it stays proportional it should perhaps be a little harder to come by.

**topazg** · November 24, 2010, 00:33

Originally posted by Magnate

Excellent, glad you like it. Personally I hate shopping, and quite a lot of people dislike the pricing system (and I admit that speed items are still underpriced, but I will fix that one day), but it's certainly less arbitrary than the old prices.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of tweaking still to do I'm sure, but for me, it's convincingly better than it was in 3.0.x - I think speed items were grossly overpriced before, so I'm sure a middle ground will work well

Originally posted by Magnate

Interesting that you like this - it has been much criticised as making the game easier- especially for mages (who are about the lose the CLW spell to compensate) and with big stacks of CCW in the temple. I don't have a strong view either way on whether healing should be proportional or absolute, but if it stays proportional it should perhaps be a little harder to come by.

I think CLW maybe 10% instead of 15%, and CCW 30% instead of 25% will at least make mages less effective and healing classes more so. To be honest, taking their spell away won't make much odds when you can buy such large stacks of the things in the temple anyway. If you mean take them out completely, then I think there will be a lot more balancing needed. You can always drop them to 5%, but capped to be at least 20 points or something, making them very useful for the first 8-10 char levels and then less so?

I've not played any late game stuff with the new system, so it sounds like I'm not qualified (yet!) to talk about late-game mage balance.

Can it honestly be worse than the balance we had with !ofRMana and GoI back in the days though, when mages were effectively indestructible?

**topazg** · November 24, 2010, 16:34

Ok, I've gotten about 7.5 hours under my belt now, and fount BoSpeed, some nice elvenkind armour, and a couple of handy randarts. rBase, rPois, rLite, rDark, rBlind, rNthr and rSound are now all covered, so it's kitting up quite nicely. Boots of Speed +10 make a fantastic addition to the char, and slowly approaching 300 HP and over 100 AC. So, CLvl 32 and DLvl 38, and all is good.

However, aside from a question (are !ofHealing more common now?) I also found a bug that crashes the game every time - I'm on a 1920 x 1200 monitor in full screen, and if I try Sense Surroundings in the bottom few rows of the map, it just crashes out. Is this a known bug? Where are the known bugs being tracked?

**d_m** · November 24, 2010, 16:37

Originally posted by topazg

However, aside from a question (are !ofHealing more common now?) I also found a bug that crashes the game every time - I'm on a 1920 x 1200 monitor in full screen, and if I try Sense Surroundings in the bottom few rows of the map, it just crashes out. Is this a known bug? Where are the known bugs being tracked?

Can you please report it at http://trac.rephial.org? That page should have instructions, a link to a search feature, etc.

I have not seen that bug but certain kinds of memory errors show up under Windows but not Linux. Sounds like an off-by-one to me.

**Magnate** · November 24, 2010, 21:09

Originally posted by d_m

Can you please report it at http://trac.rephial.org? That page should have instructions, a link to a search feature, etc.

I have not seen that bug but certain kinds of memory errors show up under Windows but not Linux. Sounds like an off-by-one to me.

Yes. We no longer have any devs developing on Windows, so we are likely to miss Windows-specific bugs. As d_m says, please report it on the trac system, but please check existing tickets first (there is a link on the front page to "all open tickets by keywords" so you can scan it to see if anything looks like your issue).

**takkaria** · November 24, 2010, 22:49

Originally posted by topazg

I also found a bug that crashes the game every time - I'm on a 1920 x 1200 monitor in full screen, and if I try Sense Surroundings in the bottom few rows of the map, it just crashes out.

Do you have a full-screen map display, by any chance?

**topazg** · December 6, 2010, 11:25

Originally posted by takkaria

Do you have a full-screen map display, by any chance?

Yeah, I have just the main window at full screen without addition windows (I prefer the map visibility to the extra info that I can call up anyway with additional keypresses).

It's normally fine, but on 1920 x 1200 it seems that the vertical height of the map is smaller than my screen display, and I think this is the primary cause of the bug somewhere...

**nppangband** · December 6, 2010, 12:06

Originally posted by Magnate

Yes. We no longer have any devs developing on Windows, so we are likely to miss Windows-specific bugs. As d_m says, please report it on the trac system, but please check existing tickets first (there is a link on the front page to "all open tickets by keywords" so you can scan it to see if anything looks like your issue).

I still work in windows. If it is confirmed to be windows-only, I will take a look at it.

My thoughts upon returning

My thoughts upon returning

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment