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Indeed. There is always the chance that takk will rip it all out if he doesn't like it, but I'm hoping I haven't done anything too stupid.
I forgot to say: if anyone git-savvy would like to checkout and build from the *staging* branch of http://github.com/angband/angband, and playtest it for a bit, I would be really grateful. The other devs are all quite seriously busy at the moment, and I am a little worried that there are significant bugs I haven't found yet.
The refactors affect object flags and monster spells, so I'm interested in any anomalies, bugs or crashes arising from monsters casting spells or the player IDing or test-wielding any items. (Or just using them - I don't think I've broken any flags, but if your helm of ESP no longer gives you ESP, shout.)
There was a fantastic bug a few commits ago: I got shot by a black orc arrow, and got slowed, paralysed, terrified and confused. That's my kind of bug."Been away so long I hardly knew the place, gee it's good to be back home" - The BeatlesComment
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Heya Magnate, thanks for weighing in. Code cleaning good.
Since I've played a nightly now from Feb as rebuilt by Derakon, I guess I'll add comment:
The things I find strangest (least desirable) are:
1) The way levels are so much smaller and kinda emptier than before--so many fewer rooms--much more space taken by basically walls rather than corridors or rooms.
2) Buy/sell differential in the stores: during play--if I find loot in the dungeon I can't use because I already have better stuff or it just isn't applicable to my class, one satisfaction I can get is by selling it. This is robbed if the store buy/sell differential is too high. I accept some may want to rebalance gold by having things sell for a *little* less cash, but I think it went overboard where you sell a weapon of Holy Avenger for 5000, and can buy it back for 16000. How about pushing a bit back towards the middle?
3) Macros--want 'em back instead of keymaps. I like being able to have a sequence including carriage returns.
4) Hilight character--want this back badly. We need the option to hilight our character in yellow to distinguish from the hordes...Comment
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How are you currently saving and loading keymaps? By default, when you save keymaps, the game will write them to a file named "<your charname>.prf". In that file, you'll see a bunch of entries like
The A: line denotes the action, while the C: line denotes the key(s) used to invoke the action. For your action, you want "R&[Return]". The game will automatically load pref files with the name of your character.Code:A:w0 C:0:X
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No no I know that--my forum title is "rookie" but I've been playing these type games since Moria on a mainframe when you were after the Balrog and the whole game was about finding a source of (R) for the big 4, getting a Holy Avenger, getting some rings of speed, and avoiding a gas breath from an AMHD offscreen. Oh and doing the "Grape Jelly trick" after raising your CON to the max to get good HP. I shouldn't have used 5000 as an example as it confuses you into thinking I didn't know what I was doing--I should have said 5378 or something.
I had 3.2.0 before and a HA would cost perhaps 16K and you could sell it back to Oglign for 15K-ish. I loaded the nightly and suddenly Oglign was paying *WAY* less for everything (but it extended to all the shops--my magic loot was fetching much less from Inglorian too). For the weapons, Oglign, who pays up to 30K, is offering barely over 5K for my HA, and he isn't offering that much for some decent artifacts like Osondir (I do think he still offered 30K for Anduril). I will check and edit here when I get back to town.Comment
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I'm pretty sure the buy/sell ratios got nerfed a lot recently, since the early game had too much cash as-is. Compare the vendors to your average college bookstore and you'll see that you're still getting an excellent deal.
You should try playing no-selling though -- you only get 0AU from selling (so you can use it to ID or maybe as short-term storage) but gold drops are increased. So far reactions I've seen from people trying it has been ~95% positive.Comment
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My suggestion is not to add any gameplay changes, just bug fixes. Fix that shoe problem and that "8" block problem at least and release that ASAP. Then fix other bugs and release 3.2.2. Then 3.2.3 and so on.
I think it is a lot more important to get those fixes in official release fast than to fix them all at once. Maybe add some UI fixes if you have them floating around. Like that "edit visuals in one place, dump them to file from another place" -problem.Comment
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I can tell you for SURE they did--I just observed it LOL--this is what I'm saying. Again--comparing the vendors to reality isn't the issue, it's a matter of how it affects play/enjoyment of the game. I do applaud the change rebalancing the price of small ego weapons--a whip of Slay Undead for instance is now appropriately valued much less than in prior versions.
I saw this option and thought to myself "Now why would anyone choose this?!" Not sure why I like selling stuff so much--I think it's that at least you get *something* for finding cool items even if they can't help you because you have better ones. I think this mode would make the game more bland; fine to have it as an *option*.
Money balance I admit is not really satisfying as yet. Not sure how to deal with it: I think it would improve gameplay to have money jiggered so that it remains an issue later into the game--as it is now, by late midgame, you are too rich for money to be a factor. So I understand the nerfing of the buy/sell ratios was probably an attempt to deal with this...
It seems to me that ideally:
A) In the beginning you remain very limited and have to make tough decisions about what to buy and use
B) Money flow would be such that you have interesting decisions to make as late into the game as possible--this is the tricky part and requires not just an adjustment of the amount of money one acquires from the dungeon and the prices charged and paid for items by the vendors, but also what the vendors can sell. I think the BM was a great addition to the game when it came in because any amount of gold a player accumulates is useless unless he can buy something really good with it--but this is where the adjustment probably needs to be made.
C) Finding rare powerful things is still rewarding, even if the character has no real use for them, by providing the ability to trade them for something else the character may actually need.
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One potential solution:
A) Rejigger the buy/sell ratio of regular vendors to say 1.4 buy/1 sell (i.e. 40% markup) while restricting all regular vendor payout to no more than say 6K; BUT
B) Allowing the BM to pay up to say 250K, but where his markup is say 100-125%.
The character *could* get quite rich, but only with a very big find--the BM should only shell out max cash for the very best 10 or so items, and only ~50K for real killer and rare items (i.e. not something so common as deep spellbooks). Then the BM should occasionally carry very nice items potentially useful to even late stage characters, but only for very large amounts of gold.
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More radically, I don't really see the point of having all these different vendors. How about only 3 vendors: All vendors sell all types of wares with maybe 5 pages of inventory ea., difference being only max payout and markup:
1. A general store which acts like a current regular vendor--he has max payout 6K and 40% markup.
2. A merchant with general more expensive wares, higher max payout of say 30K, and markup of say 100%.
3. Black Market with most expensive wares, higher frequency of carrying *REALLY* nice items, max payout of 250K and markup of 250%
[numbers to be adjusted by playtesting]
Anyway, the trick is to make gold interesting and a viable part of the game for longer *without* making the game easier...Last edited by SSK; April 9, 2011, 16:32.Comment
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Oh and by the way--I am starting to wonder whether this build I got from Derakon has some sort of broken *excellent* object generation:
Within VERY short order after installing (I am talking like clearing 5 or 6 small dungeon levels without vaults) around DLevel 37-40 I have found:
Anduril (lying on floor @39)
Dor-Lomin (young blue dragon @40)
Ring of Speed +6 (Chaos Drake @ 40)
Law DSM of Permanence (!)--never seen this before ever (Mature MHD @ 39)
You guys think this is normal or something broken?Last edited by SSK; April 9, 2011, 16:22.Comment
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I like the post about money needing to be useful all the way through the endgame. I think it would require some sort of supply & demand feature added to it. I've seen other posts on supply and demand on the forum, so I won't repeat any proposed mechanics other than to say I think everything involving the BM should work the same way as the normal stores, but be less in the player's favor. That is, buying fewer items leads to faster and more sever price increases with less impact to that item being in stock. That always struck me as a gold rush town type thing, the adventurer is pumping so much $$ into the economy, prices should go up.
There may be other ways of making money useful all through the game. I've read posts requesting easy buyout so that vendors will recycle their inventory without requiring you to purchase each item one at a time. I dumped about $200K buying out the BM repeatedly on a recent warrior winner trying to up my endgame consumables, which helped, but wasn't fun. Or, maybe when a valuable item shows up in the shop, the character could put a non-refundable down payment on the item to keep it from rotating out of stock for a certain span of time. Then it would serve as a carrot to go get more gold.
Anyway, I really think that providing something to spend money on at all phases of the game should be a guiding design principle. It just doesn't feel right to look at a pile of $$ across the room and say, that's not worth the 10 steps it would take to pick up.Comment
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I do suggest you try it for at least one game making it to around 1000' or so. See how it really goes, instead of just guessing how you think it'll go. If you still don't like it after having tried it, fine; you tried it, you don't like it, it's an option, so you don't have to play that way. But you'd be far from the first to say "No selling? That sounds lame" only to do a complete 180 after having given it a shot.
For me, no-selling means that all those niche items I used to toss are now potential usables -- I don't have to save inventory space for stuff to take back to sell. Thus if I find something I know I'm not going to use, I can just chuck it immediately. I spend more time in the dungeon, I make more use of low-margin items, and as a whole the game feels a lot more streamlined.Comment
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