3.4.0 Release Candidate is available

[Magnate]

So this is *the* Angband ver 3.4? Sounds cool and I'm looking forward to spending some hours gaming Angband this weekend!

It's the first Release Candidate. If it has no bugs at all, then yes it will be 3.4.0. But that's unlikely ;-)

In feature terms, yes it's the 3.4.0 feature set. We're just trying to find any nasty bugs before release.

[Shockbolt]

So this is *the* Angband ver 3.4? Sounds cool and I'm looking forward to spending some hours gaming Angband this weekend!

[myshkin]

One other thing: savefiles and user preference files now live in ~/Documents/Angband/... to be more compliant with Apple standards of directory usage.

[Nick]

The port now permits changing fonts on a window-by-window basis. Font size currently has no effect, as ridiculous_fish's resizing code scales the contents of the window to fill the window (and thus supports arbitrary scaling factors in the x and y directions). A current consequence of this scaling behavior is that it is impossible to change the number of rows and columns in a window. I am still working on adding this behavior. At that point, we will have two uses for the resize mouse operation (scaling the window contents and changing the grid size); do you have any opinions as to which should occur on a simple drag, and which should require something like Command-drag?

IMHO ordinary drag should change the number of rows and/or columns (as Derakon suggests), with command-drag keeping them fixed and changing font size.

Excellent work on this.

[Derakon]

Resizing the window should add rows/columns. I guess the ideal behavior would be to use the selected font size to determine a minimum grid size, and to scale the font up as the window is dragged up until there's enough room to insert a new row or column (thus perfectly filling the window regardless of its size), but that'd just be a bonus.

[myshkin]

In addition we are trying to get a cocoa port running for 3.4.0, so feedback on that would be helpful.

To be more specific, the DMG to which fizzix linked above is a build of the Cocoa port. The Carbon code is still in the source distribution, but we hope to deprecate it for 3.4.0. Here are ridiculous_fish's web page and original pull request for the work. I have made a few additional changes, primarily to add support for the UTF-8 changes in the game engine. A few things you should know about the Cocoa port, if you have not tried it yet:

• The Cocoa port does not support PPC machines or OSes before 10.5. The latter restriction is strict, since the code uses API calls not available before 10.5. It is conceivable that one could get it to run on 10.5 PPC, but the devteam has no ability to test on that platform.
• The port now permits changing fonts on a window-by-window basis. Font size currently has no effect, as ridiculous_fish's resizing code scales the contents of the window to fill the window (and thus supports arbitrary scaling factors in the x and y directions). A current consequence of this scaling behavior is that it is impossible to change the number of rows and columns in a window. I am still working on adding this behavior. At that point, we will have two uses for the resize mouse operation (scaling the window contents and changing the grid size); do you have any opinions as to which should occur on a simple drag, and which should require something like Command-drag?
• All graphics modes, including Shockbolt's new tiles and maximizing the windows to full-screen, and sound should be supported, but I have not tested these extensively.
• I'd like to add in the Open Recent... menu from the Carbon port, but have not gotten to implementing it yet.

Please try it out, and let us know if you encounter any issues.

[fizzix]

The Angband dev team is proud to announce the RC for 3.4.0. You can download the Windows or Mac autobuilds here. As always, source is available from github (Autobuilt RC is be2f579582).

A full list of the changes can be found in changes.txt in the main folder. I'll highlight some of the gameplay changes here.

• Shockbolt's 64x64 tiles
• Stack and quiver size is now max 40
• Fuzzy detection for everything but !enlight and rogue's detect object spell
• New pit types and allocation rates
• Angels are now Ainu (mostly a cosmetic change)
• Deep descent is a delayed effect that will drop you 5 levels
• Less stat points available at character creation
• Monster summons are dependent on summoner and summonee level.
• Various tweaks to monsters (AC, alertness)

In addition we are trying to get a cocoa port running for 3.4.0, so feedback on that would be helpful.

Please report any bugs here.

-Angband Dev Team