22 May 2011 development release

[Magnate]

* Vaults seem to periodically be missing entire rows of blocks, replaced by empty space. E.g. I found a Bubbles vault that was missing its top row, and I know I've found vaults missing rows through the middle. Don't think I've seen any vaults missing columns. It's actually a bit interesting since it breaks up the flow of the vault, but it's still a bug.

I think this is a bug with which d_m is familiar - it seems similar to one he has already dealt with.

* Inspecting an executioner's sword, I was told that with +2 STR I'd get more blows/round. However, I was at 18/210 strength at the time (and 18/160 DEX).

This single feature has given me more headaches than anything else, I think. It's due for a rewrite one day - fortunately the errors are quite rare now.

* I've found several randart weapons with terrible damage but lots of abilities and (only marginally useful) slays. How heavily are non-damage abilities weighted when gauging a randart weapon's power? Most characters can't really afford to use weak weapons even if they give lots of resists, powers, etc.

Well funny you should say that - this phenomenon is occurring precisely *because* the obj-power rewrite made certain abilities half as valuable on weapons (ESP, FA, etc.). Ironically this means that the randart generator currently thinks "oh goody, I can have lots of these and still be within my allocated power rating". The randart rewrite will address this, but not until 3.4.

[Derakon]

'Nother post for more notes!

* Vaults seem to periodically be missing entire rows of blocks, replaced by empty space. E.g. I found a Bubbles vault that was missing its top row, and I know I've found vaults missing rows through the middle. Don't think I've seen any vaults missing columns. It's actually a bit interesting since it breaks up the flow of the vault, but it's still a bug.

* Crossbows and crossbow bolts have exactly the same drop frequency. Is that really intended?

* Charge-for-charge, scrolls of Mapping are much cheaper than staves of Mapping. The staves' only advantage is that they can be recharged by the magic store.

* Inspecting an executioner's sword, I was told that with +2 STR I'd get more blows/round. However, I was at 18/210 strength at the time (and 18/160 DEX).

* If you put a % in a note, then in the message history it gets represented by "220"; however, it shows up properly in the file dump.

* I found a Ring of Speed +20. What. This is by far the best I've ever managed. Ironically I'm wearing a +10 speed ring on the other finger because the only other rings I have are either redundant or aggravating.

* I found a double-height labyrinth, fairly deep down. Nice to break things up a bit. If it's still possible to generate labyrinths with entirely permanent walls, then that probably shouldn't be allowed for the big ones, since they'd be painful to navigate without tunneling.

* I've found several randart weapons with terrible damage but lots of abilities and (only marginally useful) slays. How heavily are non-damage abilities weighted when gauging a randart weapon's power? Most characters can't really afford to use weak weapons even if they give lots of resists, powers, etc.

So here I am, running around at +46 speed unhasted, raring to go kill Morgoth except I still don't have telepathy...

[Derakon]

Er ... you don't need negative pvals to change that. But the answer to your implicit question is that I don't expect to do any work on egos (apart from fixing DSMs) until after 3.3. We're basically bug-fixing and tweaking for 3.3 now, and after that there'll be a whole new discussion about who wants to do what for 3.4 ...

I mentioned negative-pvals because there's a whole bunch of random changes I want to make in one big patch. Of course making certain rods immune to electricity doesn't require negative pvals, but other things I want to do do. I could have phrased this better, I admit.

Good to know the messages will be moved to an edit file. That should be fun.

[kaypy]

Patches accepted! If you can work out how to tweak the existing code to allow it that would be amazing

"would need much more than a simple tweak" translates roughly as "I'm not holding my breath for this to happen" 8-) Truth be told I hand-hacked the .prf file about 4 nightlys ago and then forgot all about it till the wall-graphics thread turned up...

Having had a quick glance over that code, it looks decidedly non-trivial...

* I got a lesser vault at 300' and a potion of Intelligence at 350'. Just lucky?

I think that's the third "or am I just lucky" report, so no, it looks like this build is just MontyHaulBand

Edit:

that would be amazing

OK, its hacky and not particularly intuitive, but it works-ish, which is enough for me to be amazed...
feature-visuals-hack.txt

Is there anything other than a global variable I could hook my lighting toggle to?

[Magnate]

* The new spell messages are certainly more to the point, but IMO they lack flavor and some are rather awkward (e.g. "tries to make you stop moving"). Also, the "conjures up foo" messages for fear/confusion are misleading since they sound like summoning spells. Honestly I liked the previous messages better. I doubt it takes that long to learn which messages correspond to which spells; if nothing else you can always check the monster memory. So I don't think this change was really necessary.

It *was* necessary, but it's only ever been an interim measure, until they are exported to an edit file (ticket #1376).

* Monsters will try to drain my warrior's nonexistent mana, and I'll get messages to that effect. If we want monsters to try, there should at least be a message to the effect that the attempt failed.

If you are playing with birth_ai_learn on, each monster should only attempt this once and should remember that it didn't work the first time. If this isn't happening, that's a bug. I've added a fail message for the next dev version.

* I got a lesser vault at 300' and a potion of Intelligence at 350'. Just lucky?

Let me get back to you on that - we now have a stats module that collects 1.2GB of stats, and we're working on exporting them to a database format so we can query them.

* Artifacts in the equipment list are shown with a lowercase "the". I'd always assumed the "the" was part of the title, so this surprised me a bit. Really trivial either way though.

Has this always been the case? It should be The, but I have a sneaking suspicion that a recent change may have done this by accident.

* Shrieking for help seems to have no effect; monsters in the area remain asleep. Not sure if it still hastes monsters in LOS; haven't checked.

Fixed - thank you. A typo in list-spell-effects.h (it was wrongly tagged as a timed effect, so wasn't getting processed).

* Shards attacks don't seem to be causing cuts even if you lack the resist. I also suspect they're incapable of damaging your inventory.

This was fixed a few days ago when kaypy reported it, but there hasn't been a new dev version since then.

Let me know when we can give negative pvals to ego item definitions; I have a bunch of changes to the edit files I want to make. For example, I'm still annoyed that someone went and made the (already too rare) rod of Trap Location vulnerable to electricity...

Er ... you don't need negative pvals to change that. But the answer to your implicit question is that I don't expect to do any work on egos (apart from fixing DSMs) until after 3.3. We're basically bug-fixing and tweaking for 3.3 now, and after that there'll be a whole new discussion about who wants to do what for 3.4 ...

[Derakon]

Here's my notes so far, on a hobbit warrior currently at 2300':

* The new spell messages are certainly more to the point, but IMO they lack flavor and some are rather awkward (e.g. "tries to make you stop moving"). Also, the "conjures up foo" messages for fear/confusion are misleading since they sound like summoning spells. Honestly I liked the previous messages better. I doubt it takes that long to learn which messages correspond to which spells; if nothing else you can always check the monster memory. So I don't think this change was really necessary.

* Monsters will try to drain my warrior's nonexistent mana, and I'll get messages to that effect. If we want monsters to try, there should at least be a message to the effect that the attempt failed.

* I got a lesser vault at 300' and a potion of Intelligence at 350'. Just lucky?

* Artifacts in the equipment list are shown with a lowercase "the". I'd always assumed the "the" was part of the title, so this surprised me a bit. Really trivial either way though.

* Shrieking for help seems to have no effect; monsters in the area remain asleep. Not sure if it still hastes monsters in LOS; haven't checked.

* Cherubs are ludicrously badass for 1950' (their native depth). Not really relevant to the nightlies, but yeesh! Fast, lots of HP, resist everything, fairly painful spells...

* Crowns of the Magi have Free Action but not See Invisible. That seems a bit odd.

* Shards attacks don't seem to be causing cuts even if you lack the resist. I also suspect they're incapable of damaging your inventory.

Let me know when we can give negative pvals to ego item definitions; I have a bunch of changes to the edit files I want to make. For example, I'm still annoyed that someone went and made the (already too rare) rod of Trap Location vulnerable to electricity...

[takkaria]

There's also no way ingame to edit the bright or dark graphics, but that would need much more than a simple tweak...

Patches accepted! If you can work out how to tweak the existing code to allow it that would be amazing -- terrain lighting is still all a bit messy.

[kaypy]

Another thread reminded me:

The output for the prefs dump for terrain features doesn't give the right indexes.

prefs.c/dump_features needs tweaking:

file_putf(fff, "F:%d:%s:%d:%d\n", [COLOR="DarkOrange"]i[/COLOR], light, attr, chr);

There's also no way ingame to edit the bright or dark graphics, but that would need much more than a simple tweak...

[Magnate]

I'm not talking about flag, base item types shots and bolts, swords, hard armor, dragon armor, shields and helmets/crowns do not burn. Which includes a bit oddity, because from those there are "hard leather cap" and "leather shield" which are leather and "wicker shield" which is wooden, which all should burn quite nicely. OTOH, all of the rest of the items in those groups are metallic (except rounded pebble which is stone), which I guess is the reason they have been giving immunity to fire. (though I'm not sure about dragon armors because they seem to all have ignore_all flags).

Anything Mithril definitely should be immune to fire for consistency reasons. Mithril bolts can lose the ignore fire-flag, they are not vulnerable to fire anyway.

Right, I see. I hadn't realised there was a check elsewhere in the code for what can burn. Now that we have object_base.txt, this can go. All swords can get IGNORE_FIRE in object_base ...

EDIT: doh. This has already been done - that's why the HATES_FIRE flag was created. So in fact things like wicker and leather shields can just be given it. Easy.

[Timo Pietilä]

I checked. The only base items with IGNORE_FIRE are

Mithril arrows and bolts (but not mithril shots)
Ethereal cloaks and slippers
Alchemist's gloves

So the inconsistency is that mithril arrows and bolts ought to lose it.

I'm not talking about flag, base item types shots and bolts, swords, hard armor, dragon armor, shields and helmets/crowns do not burn. Which includes a bit oddity, because from those there are "hard leather cap" and "leather shield" which are leather and "wicker shield" which is wooden, which all should burn quite nicely. OTOH, all of the rest of the items in those groups are metallic (except rounded pebble which is stone), which I guess is the reason they have been giving immunity to fire. (though I'm not sure about dragon armors because they seem to all have ignore_all flags).

Anything Mithril definitely should be immune to fire for consistency reasons. Mithril bolts can lose the ignore fire-flag, they are not vulnerable to fire anyway.

[kaypy]

Of course, most metal items are weapons or hard armours, which are unaffected by fire by default...

[Magnate]

I would say that metal items should be immune or at the very least much less likely to be damaged by fire.

This would be a very big change, making fire damage much much less of an issue. That's not to say it shouldn't happen, of course.

Also I've never understood why equipment you are wearing get merely damaged by elements, but when they are on the floor they get destroyed in one hit. It should be affected in the same way regardless of whether it is worn or not.

This is a fair point - but this is only one of a large number of inconsistencies between the treatment of the same object in different places (floor, worn, your pack, monster inventory).

[TJS]

I checked. The only base items with IGNORE_FIRE are

Mithril arrows and bolts (but not mithril shots)
Ethereal cloaks and slippers
Alchemist's gloves

So the inconsistency is that mithril arrows and bolts ought to lose it.

I would say that metal items should be immune or at the very least much less likely to be damaged by fire.

Also I've never understood why equipment you are wearing get merely damaged by elements, but when they are on the floor they get destroyed in one hit. It should be affected in the same way regardless of whether it is worn or not.

[Magnate]

It is metal. Anything metal should ignore fire, as no other metallic gears burn except apparently gauntlets and boots. Bodyarmor, shields and helmets made from metal ignore fire I think (can't remember for sure just now and too tired to check).

I checked. The only base items with IGNORE_FIRE are

Mithril arrows and bolts (but not mithril shots)
Ethereal cloaks and slippers
Alchemist's gloves

So the inconsistency is that mithril arrows and bolts ought to lose it.

[jens]

Suggestion
- When turning off the option "Color: shimmer multi-colored things"
- Show the thing in it's original color only, otherwise it's easy to confuse it with something else.

- No matter if the option is on/off, show it in original color on the overhead map. Would remove the need to redraw the overhead map, and would help with the problem that Timo (and I) have with the overhead map flickering and slowing down the game. If the option is on, the overhead map flickers every time the monsters switch color, if the option is off it's the same, i.e. the overhead map flickers every turn, so running is slow, and resting more so.