5 May 2011 development release(s)

[Spacebux]

Stone-to-Mud Crash.

Magnate, I think this one is for you (apologies if it is not..!):

Your new cavern levels do not have a Perma-wall surrounding the edges of the level. Hence, one can cause havoc (i.e., crashes) when digging or casting stone-to-mud at the edge of the level.


"Failed assertion: oidx <= z_info -> o_max at line 4281 of file object/obj-util.c"

This is the error message that pops up when you tunnel or attempt to remove the wall edge.

-SBux-

[d_m]

Magnate, I think this one is for you (apologies if it is not..!):

Your new cavern levels do not have a Perma-wall surrounding the edges of the level. Hence, one can cause havoc (i.e., crashes) when digging or casting stone-to-mud at the edge of the level.

That is my fault. I will fix it, thanks for reporting it!

[SSK]

There is a new build of the development version of Angband. (I am trying to avoid the term "nightly," for reasons that should be clear.) I've started a new thread for it so that we can retire the very lengthy old one. Changes since the 23 April 2011 build:

• Bug fixes: Curlicues Vault layout corrected; out of depth items can no longer reduce level feelings; out of depth item creation deep in the dungeon no longer crashes the game; ego item creation now recognizes when flags are already attached to a pvals; detect invisible now detects monsters again
• Targetting displays a path from the player to the target.
• Monster drops are created when the monster spawns.
• Level feeling boosts from artifacts and ego items are more consistent.
• The game records more specifically the origin of objects lying on the floor (special room, labyrinth, cavern, pit, vault, rubble).
• Refactoring related to object flags, to the test harness, and to the stats module
• Code cleanup and a function length utility
• Artifact description edits

The teleport other description change is not in the version currently up on rephial (sorry, SSK!), but I do have a change committed, and hope to have that change in a new version on rephial later today.

Thanks for all of the feedback. Please follow up in this thread with any reports you may have.

Been playing a later version I guess

1) The description of the teleport other BOLT is now correct and not misleading. THANK YOU MYSHKIN (BTW my new character hasn't located Eonwe, but just found AULE HELLO! With Dor-Lomin, Dal-i-Thalion, ring o' speed, and other goodies, I think he's going to the bottom--carrying LIBERAL teleport level and some *destruction* now. TO is for losers without beaming). Playing more conservatively as well. I hope he doesn't go bye-bye due to a program bug.

2) Aha! now I understand why monsters are now dropping artifacts on superb levels rather than on-floor.

3) Minor issue: accents in item (artifact) descriptions still don't display right on my Mac version, and lack of spaces between some words has now cropped up. I notice the Mumakil plural and Craban/Crebain singular/plural thing hasn't yet been addressed. Trying to get you a screenshot example: OK attached the description of Dor-Lomin illustrating accent problem as well as spacing problem.

[myshkin]

3) Minor issue: accents in item (artifact) descriptions still don't display right on my Mac version, and lack of spaces between some words has now cropped up. I notice the Mumakil plural and Craban/Crebain singular/plural thing hasn't yet been addressed. Trying to get you a screenshot example: OK attached the description of Dor-Lomin illustrating accent problem as well as spacing problem.

The spaces are my fault; I failed to add them in some cases when I edited the artifact descriptions. Thanks for the report. I've fixed them in development.

I am aware of the plural and accent issues, and fixing them is on my to-do list.

[Derakon]

Here's my comments from my previous character, who was running...hm, not sure what version, but I'll try to trim out stuff that I know has been fixed. Of course, much of this is irrelevant to the nightlies and more just musings on game balance.

* If you have a stack of two different kinds of money, it shows up as &. Seems like money could be consolidated, or just show as the most valuable of the resident types

* Lesser Recharging sucks. At clvl 35 you have odds of 1 in 3.27 of destroying a Wand of Firebolts with 3 charges in it; 1 in 5.26 if it's empty. Those increase to 1 in 8.3 (for an empty wand at that character level) for Greater Recharging.

* When you ignore torches, one of your options is "Ignore: All Wooden Torch".

* The various elemental wands have wildly varying damage ratings. Fireball wands are 2.25x better than lightning ball wands. That seems excessive at some level.

* I've seen numerous times that walls aren't present. E.g. an entire row taken out of a vault (replaced by empty space), or cross-shaped rooms whose inner room has holes in the corners.

* Monsters can teleport into vaults, e.g. via Rift or Teleport Away.

* Comments get truncated when saved to file. E.g. I have a comment "Well, it *was* guarded by water trolls, so I guess I got what". The line limit when writing a comment should be adjusted to suit the line limit in the file, or vice versa.

* The damage boosts for wands from magic device skill should be reflected in their descriptions (if only as "You get a 1.35x multiplier to this damage"). Drain Life and Annihilation are awesome wands -- Drain Life beats everything in Raal's, and Annihilation beats Mana Storm.

* ?Acquirement can generate squelched items (e.g. dungeon books), making it look like nothing happened. Of course, it shouldn't be guaranteed to generate non-squelched stuff...

* Maeglin gives less experience than Khamul. What.

* Recasting Haste Self doesn't reset the duration. Very irritating, since if you cast it awhile back and are about to start a big fight, you need to wait for it to expire before recasting.

* Stone to Mud wakes enemies that it passes through; Trap-Door Destruction doesn't. I guess because StM has the potential to harm enemies?

* Glaurung is able to breathe on me from here. Intended?


* Boots of Elvenkind seem not very worthwhile now for how rare they are, since they consistently have bad speed boosts. More common or more speed (3-6?), one of the two.

* Qlzqqlzuup drops various ordinary items (i.e. not guaranteed good). Intended?

* Being able to cast Banishment renders graveyards and zoos trivially plunderable for their floor items. Of course this is only an endgame mage trick, so I don't know that it's worth fixing. NPP handles this by giving the items to the monsters in the nest, but then there's less temptation to try to clear the thing out.

* Randart names: Iron-Shod Boots of Gondolin; Quarterstaff 'Moron'.

* Morgoth really can't handle permanent walls at all; he got stuck ludicrously easily in a Bubbles vault. I'm guessing this has something to do with wall-eaters ignoring walls for purposes of pathing; shouldn't they not ignore permanent walls?

[Timo Pietilä]

* Glaurung is able to breathe on me from here. Intended?

Asymmetric targeting works both ways. You just got hockey-sticked.

IMO asymmetric targeting is not big problem if it would restrict to grids you really see. Glaurung doesn't see you from that position and you wouldn't be able to see Glaurung if things were reversed, so that should not be possible.

[Magnate]

* The damage boosts for wands from magic device skill should be reflected in their descriptions (if only as "You get a 1.35x multiplier to this damage").

Nice idea - feel free to open a ticket for this. I suspect it's not too hard, though it might take a while to get around to it. Note that if you were playing Sangband or Crawl the designers would say that this is precisely the kind of info players should not have ...

* Maeglin gives less experience than Khamul. What.

Ringwraiths have been overvalued for a long time, and I don't think the original designer (JLE?) knew how tough Maeglin would be. IIRC JLE's monsters were tougher for their xp than most of their predecessors. Ultimately monster xp should be based on monster power, but I want to do a bit more work on power first. (d_m is still keen to implement a situational power rating.)

* Recasting Haste Self doesn't reset the duration. Very irritating, since if you cast it awhile back and are about to start a big fight, you need to wait for it to expire before recasting.

Shucks ;-) It doesn't re-set the duration, but it adds to it - so you can cast multiple times for a longer spell ...

* Stone to Mud wakes enemies that it passes through; Trap-Door Destruction doesn't. I guess because StM has the potential to harm enemies?

Yes, this is WAD. Though in fact I would happily go for all bolt projections to wake all creatures they pass.

* Glaurung is able to breathe on me from here. Intended?

No, I don't think so, but d_m is our LOS guru ...

* Boots of Elvenkind seem not very worthwhile now for how rare they are, since they consistently have bad speed boosts. More common or more speed (3-6?), one of the two.

Thank you - a perfect use for multiple pvals. 1-4 stealth and 3-6 speed sounds fine. I'd even go 4-8 speed, maybe. Most ppl would wear +9 or +10 speed boots in most cases, so they'd still struggle to compete.

* Qlzqqlzuup drops various ordinary items (i.e. not guaranteed good). Intended?

Don't think so - not sure how this happened.

* Being able to cast Banishment renders graveyards and zoos trivially plunderable for their floor items. Of course this is only an endgame mage trick, so I don't know that it's worth fixing. NPP handles this by giving the items to the monsters in the nest, but then there's less temptation to try to clear the thing out.

My suggestion is to crank up the damage-per-monster from banishment. It could again be dependent on monster power - or we could use monster hp in the meantime.

* Morgoth really can't handle permanent walls at all; he got stuck ludicrously easily in a Bubbles vault. I'm guessing this has something to do with wall-eaters ignoring walls for purposes of pathing; shouldn't they not ignore permanent walls?

Agreed. Pathfinding needs some serious love.

[Derakon]

Nice idea - feel free to open a ticket for this. I suspect it's not too hard, though it might take a while to get around to it. Note that if you were playing Sangband or Crawl the designers would say that this is precisely the kind of info players should not have ...

Well, then they can not implement it. Vanilla's been going towards maximal transparency for awhile now, and this is just one more step along that route.

Ringwraiths have been overvalued for a long time, and I don't think the original designer (JLE?) knew how tough Maeglin would be. IIRC JLE's monsters were tougher for their xp than most of their predecessors. Ultimately monster xp should be based on monster power, but I want to do a bit more work on power first. (d_m is still keen to implement a situational power rating.)

Fair enough. It's not a huge deal; just a bit jarring. Uniques don't account for a significant proportion of gained XP anyway.

Shucks ;-) It doesn't re-set the duration, but it adds to it - so you can cast multiple times for a longer spell

Looking at the code, if you aren't currently hasted, then you get 1d(clvl + 20) added to the haste timer. Otherwise you get 1d5. Functionally the latter behavior is useless. I'd rather get "timer = max(cur timer, 1d(clvl + 20))". The goal after all is to guarantee that a casting will last you through the next fight, and the next fight is almost certain to exceed 50 game turns.

...Yes, this is WAD. Though in fact I would happily go for all bolt projections to wake all creatures they pass.

Fine by me. The disparity just generally seems weird.

No, I don't think so, but d_m is our LOS guru ...

Here I'd go for "visible doesn't mean targetable", NPP-style. But that's just me.

Thank you - a perfect use for multiple pvals. 1-4 stealth and 3-6 speed sounds fine. I'd even go 4-8 speed, maybe. Most ppl would wear +9 or +10 speed boots in most cases, so they'd still struggle to compete.

Looking at egos.txt, current Elvenkind is +d6 speed; I think it's just that the only two examples I've found in-game have both rolled poorly. They're rarity-30 while Speed is rarity 24; I don't know how relative rarities affect drop rates but I'd guess they're on the order of four or five times less common than boots of speed. At that rate you're very likely to have found good speed boots by the time you find elvenkind, so it's low odds that they'd be worth using.

What if Elvenkind were more like rarity 14, and gave 3+d3 stealth and d4 speed? As an intermediary step between the "low" boots (FA, Stealth, Stability) and speed boots?

My suggestion is to crank up the damage-per-monster from banishment. It could again be dependent on monster power - or we could use monster hp in the meantime.

I can't really see that making a difference unless trying to use banishment against a graveyard could kill you from max HP...and since graveyards are full of differently-symboled monsters, that could be problematic. Should you die for banishing 10 Black Reavers? What if you want to remove the one in this vault that's letting all the monsters out and Feagwath's on the other side of the level where you haven't seen him yet?

[Max Stats]

Crash using monster recall in very latest dev code

Downloaded from staging branch and compiled just minutes ago (version v3.2.0-820-g49911e7-dirtybash-4.1). By inserting debugging messages, I have traced the crash to the exit of function get_attack_colors in monster1.c but don't know enough about the code to see exactly why it crashes. It is not savefile-related; you can get the crash by starting a brand new character, targeting a townsperson, and pressing "r" to see the monster recall.

[Magnate]

Downloaded from staging branch and compiled just minutes ago (version v3.2.0-820-g49911e7-dirtybash-4.1). By inserting debugging messages, I have traced the crash to the exit of function get_attack_colors in monster1.c but don't know enough about the code to see exactly why it crashes. It is not savefile-related; you can get the crash by starting a brand new character, targeting a townsperson, and pressing "r" to see the monster recall.

Please don't use the staging branch. But that crash should now be fixed ...

EDIT: actually, please use the staging branch all you like - but please don't post about it here, as it will confuse things. If you have a question or comment about anything in staging, please come to #angband-dev on IRC.

[Magnate]

Well, then they can not implement it. Vanilla's been going towards maximal transparency for awhile now, and this is just one more step along that route.

Yup - this is both why I gave up Crawl and why I prefer Joshua's maintainership to Leon's.

Looking at the code, if you aren't currently hasted, then you get 1d(clvl + 20) added to the haste timer. Otherwise you get 1d5. Functionally the latter behavior is useless. I'd rather get "timer = max(cur timer, 1d(clvl + 20))". The goal after all is to guarantee that a casting will last you through the next fight, and the next fight is almost certain to exceed 50 game turns.

Hmmkay. I don't really have a strong view, but I'm inclined towards not making it more useful.

Looking at egos.txt, current Elvenkind is +d6 speed; I think it's just that the only two examples I've found in-game have both rolled poorly. They're rarity-30 while Speed is rarity 24; I don't know how relative rarities affect drop rates but I'd guess they're on the order of four or five times less common than boots of speed. At that rate you're very likely to have found good speed boots by the time you find elvenkind, so it's low odds that they'd be worth using.

What if Elvenkind were more like rarity 14, and gave 3+d3 stealth and d4 speed? As an intermediary step between the "low" boots (FA, Stealth, Stability) and speed boots?

Well, rarity doesn't work like it used to at all. 100/rarity is the number of entries in the ego_alloc table. So elvenkind gets 3 entries and speed gets 4, making speed 33% more common, currently (assuming both are in-depth). I wouldn't be averse to making speed once again the ultimate boots, and making elvenkind more common. IMO speed boots are too common anyway, and ought to go to 50 or 100 (2 or 1 entries). Elvenkind could then stay as is, with d6 about right.

I can't really see that making a difference unless trying to use banishment against a graveyard could kill you from max HP...and since graveyards are full of differently-symboled monsters, that could be problematic. Should you die for banishing 10 Black Reavers? What if you want to remove the one in this vault that's letting all the monsters out and Feagwath's on the other side of the level where you haven't seen him yet?

Wait a minute. I was thinking Mass Banishment. Surely a zoo or graveyard is not trivial to clear using normal banishment because of the number of different species? Plus, there aren't that many floor objects anyway, compared with the number carried by graveyard denizens. And surely they can pick up the floor objects too? You have a point about zoos, since you probably only need to banish Z and M, but IMO there shouldn't be much on the floor of a zoo ... anyway, how about making Banishment fail occasionally on a per-monster basis? So you're 90% likely to get rid of a single critter, but if there are ten Black Reavers you're likely to need more than one cast ...

[Derakon]

Hmmkay. I don't really have a strong view, but I'm inclined towards not making it more useful.

My options here are basically to either a) sleep until haste runs out, then re-cast it, or b) go into combat and hope it doesn't run out at a bad time. Is this really desirable?

Well, rarity doesn't work like it used to at all. 100/rarity is the number of entries in the ego_alloc table. So elvenkind gets 3 entries and speed gets 4, making speed 33% more common, currently (assuming both are in-depth).

Ah, okay. Good to know. I was basing my relative rarities on across-entire-game rates, and Elvenkind boots are native to dlvl 60, which explains the difference I was seeing.

I wouldn't be averse to making speed once again the ultimate boots, and making elvenkind more common. IMO speed boots are too common anyway, and ought to go to 50 or 100 (2 or 1 entries). Elvenkind could then stay as is, with d6 about right.

Fine by me.

Wait a minute. I was thinking Mass Banishment. Surely a zoo or graveyard is not trivial to clear using normal banishment because of the number of different species?

Mages have infinite of both spells, so they can pick whichever they like. I generally prefer Banishment for acting across the entire level and only taking out the specific monster types I don't want to fight -- using Mass Banishment against a graveyard requires you to get close enough to activate the monsters. In fact I don't think I cast Mass Banishment more than once with my last character...and that once was only to remove the {untried} tag. I'd be fine with Mass Banishment's hitpoint cost going up, since in that scenario you have a good idea of how many monsters are in the area of effect.

Plus, there aren't that many floor objects anyway, compared with the number carried by graveyard denizens. And surely they can pick up the floor objects too? You have a point about zoos, since you probably only need to banish Z and M, but IMO there shouldn't be much on the floor of a zoo ... anyway, how about making Banishment fail occasionally on a per-monster basis? So you're 90% likely to get rid of a single critter, but if there are ten Black Reavers you're likely to need more than one cast ...

Fine by me. Again I don't think this is a serious issue, since as you noted there's not all that much in graveyards/zoos anyway.

[Zikke]

My options here are basically to either a) sleep until haste runs out, then re-cast it, or b) go into combat and hope it doesn't run out at a bad time. Is this really desirable?

It seems to me like just resetting the duration to the original duration would maintain game balance and would help avoid irritating wait times. IMO this should be the case for all duration-based spells (like Bless, etc.).

Resetting the duration seems to me to be the most common method in general for other games and probably already fits the mental model of most players as what would happen if they recast the spell. Part of having temporary buffs is having to plan for refreshing that buff if the fight lasts too long.

Just throwing in my opinion.

I'd be fine with Mass Banishment's hitpoint cost going up, since in that scenario you have a good idea of how many monsters are in the area of effect.

I agree that adding more damage to Banishment would really add unnecessary risk of insta-death to the game since it affects the entire level and not just your own detection range. The current damage per monster is balanced about right to account for a pit off in the distance or a unique on the level with minions.

Or you can make it not kill you outright from damage, but reduce you to 0 hp and stun you or hallucinate you for a while, or cause a *destruction* around you if you asplode too many baddies at once.

[buzzkill]

It seems to me like just resetting the duration to the original duration would maintain game balance and would help avoid irritating wait times. IMO this should be the case for all duration-based spells (like Bless, etc.).

This... or make it cumulative, but not to exceed twice the maximum normal duration.

It always bothered me that it was possible to buy a stack of Protection From Evil (for example), read them all while waiting for recall to kick in, and be protected for a long, long time... probably until you're ready to recall back to town again.

[takkaria]

This... or make it cumulative, but not to exceed twice the maximum normal duration.

It always bothered me that it was possible to buy a stack of Protection From Evil (for example), read them all while waiting for recall to kick in, and be protected for a long, long time... probably until you're ready to recall back to town again.

Maybe we should implement lower caps on such effects - at the moment I think it's set at 10k turns... a few hundred should probably suffice, right?