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I've been following this this thread because I could see early on where it would end up. Just as Magnate did, I waited for the proper moment to chime in with what I knew I would be posting from the get go. No offense intended to any particular individual, just the V-process in general.
This is why I don't bother with V. There are variants that do V better V does, and the maintainers aren't nearly as sanctimonious. It's just a shadow of itself cast upon a jagged wall.www.mediafire.com/buzzkill - Get your 32x32 tiles here. UT32 now compatible Ironband and Quickband 9/6/2012.
My banding life on Buzzkill's ladder.Comment
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Thing about being a variant maintainer is, you don't have all and sundry taking potshots at you every time you do (or don't do) anything. The V devs take on the role because they like the game and think they can contribute something. They don't get paid, and they get precious little thanks.
As a variant maintainer, I have it really easy. I get to pinch code from V any time I like, or choose not to; there is no pressure on me, because it's just a variant; I don't have the weight of expectation of 20 years of players coming in and complaining about the removal of their favourite feature; I could go on, but you get the picture.
But be very aware of one thing - variants rely on the existence of Vanilla. It's the gateway drug. If it had folded, or just stopped being maintained, then all the variants would have died off too, and the community would have consisted solely of embittered long-term players sniping at each other.
I'm going to release a new version of FAangband in the next couple of days. It's got some nifty FA-specific features, but it also has a huge amount of improvement to the codebase that's stolen from stuff takkaria's been doing silently to V in the background while the community's been complaining that Slow Descent is not powerful enough or too powerful or what-the-hell-ever.
See? Variant maintainers can be plenty sanctimonious. Now, straighten up and fly right, or I'll rant at you again
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.Comment
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What I take issue with is me posing a query, making a suggestion, and getting trolled to pieces for it.
I know all the developers are unpaid actors waiting to be discovered in Hollywood---hence they sit around and piddle with the code.
Honestly, have the maintainers ever looked around at all the variants and thought - hmmm, what's good / what's bad with VariantA, ... VariantX ? I think it would be a good exercise for vanilla coders to hear what Nick and some of the other variant keepers have come up with.
All this talk of wanting to stick to the core values of historical angband is fine and dandy. But, then again, its not historical angband. We have new dungeon mobs, new dungeon vaults, new mob AI, new dungeon outlays. We've nixed some of the older items - Shards of Nasgil, wands of wall-building, and so on. We nixed the auto-roller. Many things HAVE changed that make this current version quite dissimilar to the older, historical version. If the maintainers were ang-bent on keeping to the core values, we would not be playing 3.4 or 3.5.
Indeed, Slow Digestion meant something much different in 3.0.9 and prior versions. Eating was still something that had to be done on a fairly frequent basis. You cannot tell me that permitting a player to go for 1,699,999 turns without eating is adherence to conservative angband principles. Because it isn't.
Therefore, I posed the question, for those that don't want to be bothered with the eating / digesting process, why not make a Birth Option to set food / no_food. 1 million turns between meals is nearly the same thing anyway. Telling me that we are trying to reduce the number of birth options, so it won't work that way... that's not an answer. That's a way to end the discussion without having one. "Hey, we write the code, so we're just not gonna do it." Magnate, you're a fine fellow, but that's not endearing me to discuss how I feel about the direction the Vanilla developers are taking the code.
Finally - I am not all gripe. I did mention I was quite happily impressed with the new dungeon layouts and the newer mob grouping structures. Yes, it was meant as a compliment.. and, apparently, that got looked over.
And, by the way, setting commonness to 15 on the upper mage books - that is just killer. I can't get a copy of the upper books in my current game. Set it back to 25~35, please.Last edited by Spacebux; June 29, 2013, 05:47.Comment
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Well, I don't write any of the code, so I'm a completely neutral party here. I do have pretty deep software engineering experience and expertise. Adding extra options, especially in legacy code like this, should rightly be regarded as an expensive thing to do, in time, in energy, in maintenance that you're requiring of future developers down the road. It's something that should only be done when there is a really compelling justification. I'm not saying that because I would be doing the work---I wouldn't. I'm saying that because it's what I've learned from 25 years of software development.
Here, what's the argument for adding an option? Food hardly matters at all, in Vanilla Angband. Why have an option for turning on and off something that hardly matters at all? Any of the alternatives for dealing with food would be much better than adding the cost of a new option, in my opinion.
If you regard this as "getting trolled to pieces", when people disagree with you based on their personal knowledge and expertise, I think you're way too sensitive.
What is your own software engineering experience, that leads you to disregard this concern?
Slow Digestion is a lame, essentially worthless power. Even if it reduces your food consumption to zero, it's still a lame, essentially worthless power. That's just because food doesn't matter in Angband. Making it slightly better (but still almost worthless) seems like not a bad idea to me. I don't understand why you care about this or why it bothers you so or why you would prefer 0 consumption/turn with "Stop Digestion" to 1 consumption/turn with "Slow Digestion". What difference does it make?Last edited by DaviddesJ; June 29, 2013, 05:58.Comment
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Calling people trolls doesn't seem very constructive. (Though DaviddesJ apparently likes to argue and seems to be incapable of giving anyone else the last word on anything, but that's neither here nor there.)
I don't think I've seen anyone else in this thread come even remotely close to trolling, but then I like this change, so maybe I'm biased by that
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I'm pretty sure that most of them do look at other games and variants, but when anything remotely contentious is proposed there's always a lot of shouting and complaining that it violates the "vanillaness" of Angband and how "I'll never play it again", etc. etc. It's not an encouraging atmosphere to work in. I don't know if you're a coder, but if you're not it's also very easy to underestimate the amount of effort that goes into porting changes between superficially-similar-but-with-increasingly-divergent games.
It is an answer AFAICT -- the sentence "we will not add a Birth Option for X because we don't want to add further birth options" seems perfectly reasonable to me (no non-sequitur there).
It may not answer your criticism of the change ("slow" => "almost no" digestion), but that's not the question you posed.
(Sorry if this is just more piling on, but maybe the fact that others who aren't involved in the thread already don't quite see things your way may help convince you that people aren't merely trolling.)Comment
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For what it's worth, I for one didn't intend to be antagonistic, and if I came across that way then I apologize. I don't think any of the actual developers here was trying to get your goat.
Features do get stolen occasionally, but please take another look at Nick's post -- oftentimes features that a Vanilla developer wants to include will get shouted down by the community for not adhering to what Vanilla "ought" to be. Some people, like you, are all in favor of a more dynamic Vanilla. Others are incredibly conservative. The devs generally don't like getting shouted at, and most of the more-dynamic crowd are willing to play variants, so Vanilla tends towards the conservative end of the spectrum.Honestly, have the maintainers ever looked around at all the variants and thought - hmmm, what's good / what's bad with VariantA, ... VariantX ? I think it would be a good exercise for vanilla coders to hear what Nick and some of the other variant keepers have come up with.
This is certainly true, and I can't for an instant pretend that modern Vanilla plays anything like old-school Vanilla. Change is inevitable; the real question is how quickly should the game change?All this talk of wanting to stick to the core values of historical angband is fine and dandy. But, then again, its not historical angband. We have new dungeon mobs, new dungeon vaults, new mob AI, new dungeon outlays.
I have no idea what Shards of Nasgil (Nazgul?) are; Wands of Wall-Building vanished when Angband stopped being Moria.We've nixed some of the older items - Shards of Nasgil, wands of wall-building, and so on.
I don't really have a feel for why this is a big deal; as I recall generally using the autoroller amounted to guessing at how good of a character the game would allow you to have (since it rejected characters whose stats were too good) and then leaving the autoroller to run through tens or hundreds of thousands of characters until you got one with the desired stats. That's effectively a more obtuse point-buy.We nixed the auto-roller.
If you just wanted a character with stats weighted in a particular direction (i.e. you want good STR and DEX, but you don't really care how good or what your other stats are), I guess someone could implement a system where you assign, say, 10 points via point-buy, and then get some semi-random modifiers on top of that. The main thing would be to ensure that any automatic random character generation doesn't generate characters that are better than what point-buy can get you; otherwise we're encouraging players to scum for perfect stats, which is boring.
I have no idea why Slow Digestion was changed or even if it was intentional. I haven't seen any other devs comment on this particular thing yet, and I don't know whose commit changed it. I don't think that setting digestion to the minimum possible rate is the right thing to do; at the very least, regeneration and speed ought to still have some effect on your digestive rate.Indeed, Slow Digestion meant something much different in 3.0.9 and prior versions. Eating was still something that had to be done on a fairly frequent basis. You cannot tell me that permitting a player to go for 1,699,999 turns without eating is adherence to conservative angband principles. Because it isn't.
Options sadly are not free. Notwithstanding that the options system is hardcoded to a limit of something like 14 options per page, which we're already running hard into (fizzix had to remove an underutilized option to make room for forced_descent), adding options makes the code more complex and makes balancing tougher since you now have to balance multiple kinds of game. Of course in this particular case it's not exactly a lot of extra complexity, but in general the devs would prefer to have to support fewer options rather than more. I know it's not what you want to hear, but it is the truth.Therefore, I posed the question, for those that don't want to be bothered with the eating / digesting process, why not make a Birth Option to set food / no_food.
Thanks for the complement.Finally - I am not all gripe. I did mention I was quite happily impressed with the new dungeon layouts and the newer mob grouping structures. Yes, it was meant as a compliment.. and, apparently, that got looked over. d_m is responsible for most of the new dungeon layouts, I believe, and fizzix did the new monster groupings.
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Shards of Narsil?
Sounds vaguely familiar but I don't actually remember it being in Angband.
Edit:
Here it is from a 3.08 spoiler:
The Broken Sword 'Narsil' (3d2) (+6,+10)
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It increases your strength and dexterity by 2. It increases your attack
speed by 2. It slays orcs and trolls. It provides resistance to fire.
It is blessed by the gods. It cannot be harmed by the elements.
Level 10, Rarity 4, 3.0 lbs, 2000 AUComment
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@David.
No, actually, you have expressed your opinions here.
Therefore I cannot comment? Because I certainly lack your level of expertise I am not allowed to offer critique?
Precisely. If food hardly matters at all, for those that wish to play without the concept of food at all, put in an option to play sans food. I personally enjoy the added experience of having to keep my half-troll fed.
Ok.
It is not s/w engineering experience that leads me to this concern. It is policy design by the developers that led me to post.
Because it changes the dynamic of the game. Prior versions, even with Slow Digestion, still required the player to stop and eat .. even infrequently. And, gorging oneself was also a concern. The latest 3.5 nightly basically removes the potential of gorging oneself, and incurring a -10 speed penalty, and alters the meaning of "Slow" in Slow Digestion by quite a bit. That's the difference. I don't think I can spell it out any more plainly than that.Comment
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@Derakon
No, no... you were / are among the more cordial here.
Yes. That is one of my points, however. Those same "conservative" voices are the ones also responsible for altering the digestion code to something quite unconservative... in my opinion. Suggestions from the non-classic crowd, such as me, are often labeled as "too neo" or "too radical". Or engender way too much coding effort for such a trivial matter. However, someone somewhere decided to go ahead and alter the code anyway. I guess those changes were trivial and adhered to conservative angband principles. (sarcasm)
A better question would be how are decisions made. Takkaria has the ultimate say as he is primary keeper of the code. But, how do underlings like me voice opinions about how things are decided? Do we even get a vote? Magnate is quite kind to respond to many of my gripes, quips, and disgruntlements. But, other than Magnate & Nick & yourself, I get the impression that most of my time posting here is deemed assinine drivel.
Sorry, I couldn't recall the name exactly. Someone else found it and posted it. These were just samples to point out how the game has changed through the versions.. things that in my mind were classic angband items. I am probably wrong about a few of them. Auto-roller included.
But ... leave that up to the player. If the player wants to be a total dolt and wait for the auto-roller to generate the perfect character (which was impossible due to code restraints for total stat points upon character creation), let them. Why dictate to players how they must behave when they play the game?
The change was intentional. May 5th, Takkaria "Remove Gorged status, and radically improve slow digestion." I did not notice this until recently.
I understand we are dealing with legacy code. I have looked at the code myself. Its not trivial to change. I am well aware of that. Yet, we are still changing the code. Nightlies are still being published. (though not necessarily nightly) I hear a lot about "whoa! that would require coding effort and cost..!" Well, is there a roadmap that has been discussed and agreed upon for Vanilla? If so, how was that done? Whom gets to participate in the discussions and decisions?
I'm happy with many of the things I see coming in Vanilla code development. There are a few items, however, I feel are questionable. Seems like if I question those, I run into permanent wall.Comment
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OK, here's roughly how it works.
takkaria used to be maintainer, but stepped down some time ago and is now just one of the devteam. Who precisely is on the devteam is a bit more complicated. There are 7 people who can change the main Github repository, but one of those has not done anything for ages, and one of them is me (and I rarely do stuff directly for Vanilla). The other five are d_m, fizzix, Magnate, myshkin and takkaria. For every major release, one of them is release manager, and is broadly in charge of what gets done. But any changes are made by somebody (mostly devteam, but often not), and then tested and pulled in by one of the devs. So there is quite a range of contributors; this page gives an idea.
So the best thing you could do if you wanted something to change would be to make your own branch of the code from Github, make the change on your branch, then put in a pull request to get it into the game. Of course, not every change is going to get in; usually things need to be thrown round a bit on the forums first, and then there is discussion among at least a couple of the devs. There is a dev chat at #angband-dev on irc.freenode.net where the devs and an assortment of other unsavoury types hang out; these things usually get thrashed out there.
Of course, if you don't want to/can't/aren't confident to actually program, suggesting stuff on the forums is all you're really left with. For that to work, you need to get a fair bit of support from others in the community, and in particular inspire someone to make the relevant code changes.One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.Comment
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As a general rule, there's no shortage of ideas: rather, there's a shortage of coder time to implement them. So if you want to influence V gameplay, learning to code is pretty much a prerequisite.
A.Ironband - http://angband.oook.cz/ironband/Comment
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