3.2 release candidate is upon us!

[APWhite]

Before you give the final post, the borg would like to have a couple of changes assimilated. We still don't have the screensaver working yet. But the non-screensaver borg needs a few changes to compile correctly.

[takkaria]

I noticed a couple issues with the most recently nightly.

1. I play with the gervais tiles and bigtile mode, (tile width 16x32) it looks like spell effects and shooting are not being displayed correctly. This only happens with bigtile, doubletile, and triple tile. With those options unchecked it displays correctly. Status effects suffer from the same issue in that they do not display in bigtile mode.

2. It looks like there are some highlighted tiles being left near the health bars that are not being redrawn correctly.

This should be fixed as of the nightly id 033d97c, which is due out at 1800 UTC.

[pampl]

EDIT3: Hmm. Quality squelch classes a ring or amulet as bad if ANY of the following are true:
pval <0
+to_hit <0
+to_dam <0
+to_ac <0

... this pretty much guarantees that all mixed-blessing jewelry will always be squelched as bad. Revising this is beyond 3.2, so for now it's enough that it's not covered by squelch worthless. People can avoid quality squelch of rings and amulets in the early game if they want to use the mixed-blessing ones.

Why not make it so ALL of them have to be <=0? That would also let other mixed blessing EQ, like Calris, be unsquelched. I guess that wouldn't fix "Inertia getting squelched though.

[Dean Anderson]

EDIT3: Hmm. Quality squelch classes a ring or amulet as bad if ANY of the following are true:
pval <0
+to_hit <0
+to_dam <0
+to_ac <0

... this pretty much guarantees that all mixed-blessing jewelry will always be squelched as bad. Revising this is beyond 3.2, so for now it's enough that it's not covered by squelch worthless. People can avoid quality squelch of rings and amulets in the early game if they want to use the mixed-blessing ones.

A "quick fix" for 3.2 might be to simply add those four values up and class it as bad if the total is less than 0...

[Jungle_Boy]

I think that is related to the bigtile problem I mentioned earlier, see if it occurs without bigtile or doubletile enabled

[bio_hazard]

Not sure if this is the graphical glitch people are talking about. I'm on the OSX rc, using tiles. I throw a torch at a fleeing scruffy hobbit. The torch hits the hobbit, breaks, but there is a partial image of a torch well beyond the hobbit. This image moves along with my @. It disappears if I change to a different tile resolution (from 8x16 to 16x16), but I reproduced this effect on 16x16.

edit: actually, the phantom images always end up to the left of the @ even if I throw to the right, and disappear if I move up or down (but move with the @ if I move left or right).

[Magnate]

I think that's the "squelch worthless item kinds" setting in the options menu. It seems to have its own opinions about which 'mixed blessing' items count as worthless. At least it's stopped auto-squelching rings of teleportation now.

Oh bugger, I know why that's happening. The object power is coming out as negative so yes, they're being squelched as worthless. I think I can fix this.

EDIT1: Fixed in staging. The squelch_worthless option doesn't check object power, it looks directly at the "cost" field in object.txt - these had been set to 0 for Dog, Mouse and Inertia, so I have set them all nonzero. This won't affect their buy/sell price at all.

EDIT2: Not fixed, dammit. Well, the worthless issue is fixed, but they are still classed as "bad" by quality squelch. Looking into that.

EDIT3: Hmm. Quality squelch classes a ring or amulet as bad if ANY of the following are true:
pval <0
+to_hit <0
+to_dam <0
+to_ac <0

... this pretty much guarantees that all mixed-blessing jewelry will always be squelched as bad. Revising this is beyond 3.2, so for now it's enough that it's not covered by squelch worthless. People can avoid quality squelch of rings and amulets in the early game if they want to use the mixed-blessing ones.

[Nomad]

Possible squelching bug? I've automatically squelched-on-identify a ring of the mouse and also a ring of the dog now, but do not have those set to auto-squelch. Both rings are not marked for squelching in the list of rings, and I have the quality squelch for rings set to "no squelch".

I think I've seen this is 3.1.2v2 also, though most recently this is in the nightly from Dec. 15 (d1a64ee55c).

I think that's the "squelch worthless item kinds" setting in the options menu. It seems to have its own opinions about which 'mixed blessing' items count as worthless. At least it's stopped auto-squelching rings of teleportation now.

[Chud]

Possible squelching bug? I've automatically squelched-on-identify a ring of the mouse and also a ring of the dog now, but do not have those set to auto-squelch. Both rings are not marked for squelching in the list of rings, and I have the quality squelch for rings set to "no squelch".

I think I've seen this is 3.1.2v2 also, though most recently this is in the nightly from Dec. 15 (d1a64ee55c).

[takkaria]

With 4 tilesets (each of which can be stretched in 2 directions) on 5 platforms there are so many issues with the display of various things in tile modes that there is no way we can fix them all. We will try and make sure that macros and inscriptions still work, but little visual glitches will probably have to wait.

I've seen similar redraw bugs on OS X too but nothing that I've reproduced reliably. I rather suspect that the problems are shared-- all the issues seem centred about the tile height option.

[Mimu]

Frames in Angband don't work like that.

The only time constant delay between frames is used is when there is an animation occurring - for example a spell or arrow being fired.

Well, there is a Movement Delay in the options menu in addition to that. What I was suggesting was more like d_m's clarification, giving all actions a worst-case lag. This would be useful if the player preferred all actions to have a slight delay, so you could see @ scooting along a corridor, for example. Of course, the running function skips drawing all frames until the run is interrupted, so no amount of delay would actually show the @ moving. And, to remain true to its console roots, instant feedback may be preferable to gradual movement, in any case. Ah, well.

[d_m]

In any event, any gaming programmer worth his salt will have read an article like Fix Your Timestep and know how to deal with these issues.

Although actually the blending strategy in the article doesn't work in a discrete world like Angband.

The only way you can "conceal" the fact that certain levels have way more computation that needs to be done (besides reducing or optimizing that computation) is to make all actions seem to have lag equal to the worst-case lag, which you could do with a timer (after receiving player input, plan to take at least X ms no matter how fast we finish the loop and just sleep for the remainder).

[Derakon]

In any event, any gaming programmer worth his salt will have read an article like Fix Your Timestep and know how to deal with these issues.

[Dean Anderson]

Hmm. From a programmer's point of view: if you have a constant delay between frames, but during some frames have to process AI for 200 monsters instead of 20, the former is obviously going to be theoretically slower.

This could be partially mitigated by a very simple fix that there's no reason not to throw in: add one extra variable to track how many milliseconds have passed since the last update, and subtract that from the delay per frame (capping at 0 or 1 milliseconds). It would smooth out things somewhat.

Frames in Angband don't work like that.

The only time constant delay between frames is used is when there is an animation occurring - for example a spell or arrow being fired. When that is happening, nothing else in the game is being done or modified; so it's just a case of draw current animation frame, delay, draw next animation frame, delay, and so forth...

When there isn't an animation being used, the game will update a single "frame" - which includes AI processing and other time intensive stuff - and then wait for a keypress before drawing the next one.

Actually, it is still possible to notice a delay in that situation. Let's imagine that you're not holding a key down, but pressing it manually every .5 of a second (500 milliseconds). If the system is running quickly, you might have the following situation (and I've made these numbers up):

Press Key -> 20ms processing -> 5ms screen refresh -> 475ms wait for next key.

But if the system is running slowly, you might instead get:

Press Key -> 270ms processing -> 5ms screen refresh -> 225ms wait for next key.

In either case, the total delay between keypresses is the same, but in the second one there will be a noticeable lag or "sluggishness" in the game's response time.

[Magnate]

Having finished my mage, I think I will start coding stuff (for me ) again. Will try to do it more coordinated in git, so any major changelines are their own forks etc. so if any are liked it is easier to pick them one by one.

I peeked at the current gits, and it seems there are different stuff in taks and angbands gits. Is the angband/master currently (and in the future) considered to be the vanilla proper? So that is the git/branch that I will want to grab to start reapplying previous changes and coding new ones?

Yes, the canonical repository is the master branch of git://github.com/angband/angband - please fork all new work from that.

Takk's personal repo looks a bit different as he is in the middle of major rewrites to both the input layer and tile handling. Neither of these is for 3.2 though.