22 May 2011 development release

[Magnate]

I just thought the same. I just lost Mithril gauntlets of Agility +5 to plasma vortex blast because I didn't pick it up (didn't have inventory space, had still three scrolls of ID to burn to the loot from previous fight and one still un-pseudo-ID weapon that was highly unlikely to be better than what I was using at the moment in inventory). I thought that it is immune to fire, but it wasn't.

I thought mithril gear only ignored acid. Has it traditionally ignored fire as well?

[Timo Pietilä]

I thought mithril gear only ignored acid. Has it traditionally ignored fire as well?

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).

[kaypy]

It seems that shimmering critters interfere with the new targeting indicators. And they make hallucination *seriously* disturbing, but that's not necessarily as much of an issue.

Is there some way to make the screen just refresh those critters, rather than redrawing the entire screen each animation frame?

[Timo Pietilä]

It seems that shimmering critters interfere with the new targeting indicators. And they make hallucination *seriously* disturbing, but that's not necessarily as much of an issue.

Is there some way to make the screen just refresh those critters, rather than redrawing the entire screen each animation frame?

I believe that this is the reason for flickering overhead term window. Each time flickering monster changes color, entire overhead screen gets redrawn.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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).

[kaypy]

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

[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.

[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.

[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...

[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.

[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...

[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 ...