Experiences with Frog-knows

[nppangband]

Was there such a time when that slot didn't exist? If there was I have missed that one completely.

Yes, way back in Moria, and presumable in the first stages of Angband, you had a secondary weapon slot, and you could switch weapons with the x command. There was no bowl slot. There were countless instances of people trying to beat an ancient dragon to death with their shortbow, and tryign to tunnel into a greature vein with thier whip. I guess eventually the bow slot was introduced.

[Timo Pietilä]

Yes, way back in Moria, and presumable in the first stages of Angband, you had a secondary weapon slot, and you could switch weapons with the x command. There was no bowl slot. There were countless instances of people trying to beat an ancient dragon to death with their shortbow, and tryign to tunnel into a greature vein with thier whip. I guess eventually the bow slot was introduced.

Yes, but Max Stats was talking about removing that spare weapon slot and instead using macro for swapping weapons as reason for adding extra letter in inventory. That sounded like there was a time between removing spare weapon slot and introducing bow slot where bow slot didn't exist.

[fizzix]

@magnate: regarding junk. I know both you and takkaria have disliked junk. However, I have not become convinced that variable floor terrain is the way to go. Specifically for the squelch reasoning. It's hard to squelch terrain, it's easy to squelch items. Furthermore, as d_m said, there's a difference between junk items littering the dungeon and useless weapons and armor generated from monster drops/vault squares. I'm aware that this debate isn't new, but I don't really think it's been thought of properly since squelch has gained such promenance.

regarding inventory. I think staves are already punitively heavy enough. You can't even carry them with mages. There's something to be said about making the cumbering penalty more severe, especially deeper in the curve. So you can imagine a curve that looks like this:

cumber      penalty
---------------------
<limit      0
0-15 lbs    -1
15-25 lbs   -2
25-30 lbs   -3

where each additional 5 pounds is another point of speed. I think this *could* work. Also the cumbering penalty, is way too much of a function of strength. Mages are a pain in the early game because they can't even carry all their spell books unless they go naked.

But I think there's soemthing very interesting about having space-limited inventories (or both together). So instead of having a hard limit by slot, you're limited by how many total items you have. So 20 potions of CCW take up as much space in inventory as 5 CCW, 5 healing, 5 *healing*, and 5 life. On the other hand, bringing 50 ?phase into the dungeon is no longer feasible.

Of course, rewriting the entire inventory handling takes a much more intrepid individual than myself.

[Jungle_Boy]

@magnate: regarding junk. I know both you and takkaria have disliked junk. However, I have not become convinced that variable floor terrain is the way to go. Specifically for the squelch reasoning. It's hard to squelch terrain, it's easy to squelch items. Furthermore, as d_m said, there's a difference between junk items littering the dungeon and useless weapons and armor generated from monster drops/vault squares. I'm aware that this debate isn't new, but I don't really think it's been thought of properly since squelch has gained such promenance.

What about creating junk that has a flag or some other method of making it so it is not automatically picked up regardless of other pickup settings. Could also add an option to squelch junk if people want a nice clean dungeon. For me the most annoying thing about junk was the way it filled up my inventory when I had autopickup on. If you have junk that cannot be picked up you add flavor without the tedium of cleaning out your inventory.

[Nomad]

I'd prefer flavour junk to be in the shape of more 'dungeon furniture' like chests; things that might have traps on, sometimes turn out to be monsters, or could be smashed or opened to reveal monsters/items. Have skeletons lying around that sometimes come to life if you step too near them, coffins that can be opened and might contain an undead or a treasure, statues that you can sometimes smash to get treasure and other times turn out to be disguised golems, etc.

[Magnate]

I'd prefer flavour junk to be in the shape of more 'dungeon furniture' like chests; things that might have traps on, sometimes turn out to be monsters, or could be smashed or opened to reveal monsters/items. Have skeletons lying around that sometimes come to life if you step too near them, coffins that can be opened and might contain an undead or a treasure, statues that you can sometimes smash to get treasure and other times turn out to be disguised golems, etc.

I also would prefer flavour to be introduced through an approach like this rather than via pointless objects that do nothing and need a special "don't pick this up" flag. But I don't mind stuff like filthy rags and broken swords coming back, since they are occasionally useful. Yes, I'm aware that this is exactly the opposite of what d_m said ... since I'm not motivated to code any of this, it'll be entirely up to whoever contributes the flavour how it's done!

@fizzix: I agree with your general comments on inventory - especially the importance of STR to encumbrance. I don't yet have a proposal for incentivising smaller stacks, other than capping them on a per-tval basis (which seems arbitrary).

[APWhite]

My favorite memory from 2.4 F-K was that I got PDSM from Maggot. Just because of that single act of kindness 15 yrs ago. I am reluctant to kill Maggot in my games today.

[buzzkill]

My favorite memory from 2.4 F-K was that I got PDSM from Maggot. Just because of that single act of kindness 15 yrs ago. I am reluctant to kill Maggot in my games today.

I like to think of it more as a brutal mugging rather than murder. You beat him into submission, take what you want, and leave him for dead (and then he somehow manages to survive).

[Nick]

I like to think of it more as a brutal mugging rather than murder

, officer.

[kaypy]

1) Reach level 11
2) Try out how polymorph works back in those days
3) Teleport away from the Great Storm Wyrm and resolve never to use polymorph ever again

[Timo Pietilä]

1) Reach level 11
2) Try out how polymorph works back in those days
3) Teleport away from the Great Storm Wyrm and resolve never to use polymorph ever again

For some reason I have hard time stopping laughing....

[UglySquirrell]

1) Reach level 11
2) Try out how polymorph works back in those days
3) Teleport away from the Great Storm Wyrm and resolve never to use polymorph ever again

Awesome, big holy s*%& moments are always fun do the ladders allow posting Frog Characters?

[Malak Darkhunter]

just do be curious, are you guying playing this in a dos port, or did you re-compile for windows? I like the older games, I played Moria extensively, but never got to experiment with versions of angband older than 3.0.3, and would like to give it a whirl.

can you recompile that old a version for windows?

[Derakon]

1) Reach level 11
2) Try out how polymorph works back in those days
3) Teleport away from the Great Storm Wyrm and resolve never to use polymorph ever again

No, no, no. See, what you do is, you go stand on the stairs in the town and polymorph townspeople. Then you kill the ones you can and flee the ones you can't via the stairs. Easy experience! Of course the rewards are crap and you'd probably get better results from the dungeon, but oh well.

Modern polymorph is too boring to ever use. Frog-knows polymorph at least had entertainment on its side.

[nppangband]

just do be curious, are you guying playing this in a dos port, or did you re-compile for windows? I like the older games, I played Moria extensively, but never got to experiment with versions of angband older than 3.0.3, and would like to give it a whirl.

can you recompile that old a version for windows?

There should be plenty of windows binaries out there for every one of the older versions, and compiling the source shouldn't be a problem either. It's just "C", after all. Although that was before windows xp changed certain things in how blank spaces (better known as walls in the Angband world) were displayed. Some pref files might need to be edited so the walls appear as '#", but that's about it.