V 3.5 now in feature freeze

[Derakon]

Yup! Here: https://github.com/angband/angband/b...er/changes.txt

Looking that over:

* The Cocoa port has resizable terms! Hooray! Now we can ditch the Carbon port forever.
* Having no-selling on by default is liable to confuse some players ("Why don't I get any money when I sell things?") but is ultimately the right thing to do IMO.
* Speed bonuses on Elvenkind armor? That seems wholly unnecessary. Or is that change ("Elvenkind now has level-dependent speed bonuses.") referring to the boots?
* There's a bunch more good stuff that people who skipped the 3.5-dev competition may not have heard about, too. A few big ones (all of which I approve of):

** Addition of a forced_descent option, where you can only play each dungeon level once.
** Monsters can appear in heterogenous groups (e.g. all of the novice adventurer types (acolyte, apprentice, etc.) can form adventurer parties).
** Monster melee damage and AC is added to monster memory after only one attack.
** Charisma is gone.
** Ego items are more common early, less common later, and uniques are more likely to drop good stuff.
** Certain items in stores are now infinitely-stocked.
** The Gorged status is gone.
** Pits are smaller.

All in all, great stuff! Nice work, everyone on the devteam!

[DaviddesJ]

Any hope of moving full monster knowledge from a "cheat" option to a "noncheat" option? I don't see the point in penalizing people for looking up in game what they could look up in their browser next to the game. I'm going to play with it on either way, but I don't see the point in marking such games as "cheaters", in the same way that, say, infinite resurrection does.

[ekolis]

* Having no-selling on by default is liable to confuse some players ("Why don't I get any money when I sell things?") but is ultimately the right thing to do IMO.

Why can't no-selling just *prevent* selling, not rip off the player???

[Derakon]

Because then you can't ID items by selling them to the stores.

[Zyphyr]

Why can't no-selling just *prevent* selling, not rip off the player???

Selling for no money is still potentially useful as a way to Identify things. Not one that you are going to use often, but it is still valid.

[Magnate]

Congratulations, and thanks to all those who have given up their time to get this release out.

For what it's worth, 3.5 is probably the best (fun and well balanced) version I have played.

That's because I've had almost nothing to do with it ;-)

[ekolis]

Looking through the changelist, it looks like a good cleanup of a lot of messy stuff. I look forward to trying out the final version

* Rebalance object generation. Flatten out chances of getting good and great items - means more good and great items early on, proportionally fewer later.
* Make uniques more likely to drop out-of-depth items, and reduce the number of chances DROP_GREAT drops get at being great to compensate.

Yay! I suck at Angband, so maybe now I'll get to see some decent items, and survive a bit longer...

* Change monster elemental attacks so that they do some part of their damage using elemental damage and some of it using physical damage. This means that the damage a monster attack gets calculated twice - once for if it was pure damage, one if it was elemental damage. Whichever of the two is higher is the amount of damage dealt. This meant that immunity won't reduce damage ridiculously low.

Does this mean that resistances are useless? If I'm reading this correctly, it means that if you resist fire, any fire damage you take will be converted to pure damage since the HP you lose from X points of fire damage is less than the HP you lose from X points of pure damage...

* Remove Iron Spikes, jammed doors, and player door bashing.

Hooray for less tedium!

* All classes now start with a dagger (except priests) and less food/fewer torches.

In addition to or replacing their thematic class weapon? Why?

* There are more food types for sale at the General Store, and it sometimes stocks some mushrooms now as well.

What exactly is the point of multiple food types, anyway? I always go for rations...

* No rings are now native <DL10

Hopefully not just the sucky ones can be found at DL10? I always thought it was dumb that early rings were a noob trap, since they were always Weakness or Aggravate Monster...

* Add option to show damage player does to monster in melee.

Cool. Why only melee?

* Include Dubtrain's sound set instead of the one Angband perviously had (encoded as high-quality VBR MP3).

I might actually play Angband with sound on now!

[takkaria]

Why can't no-selling just *prevent* selling, not rip off the player???

Ideally we'd add a store service that would allow you to identify items for free, and then actually prevent selling. But no-one coded that yet.

[takkaria]

Any hope of moving full monster knowledge from a "cheat" option to a "noncheat" option? I don't see the point in penalizing people for looking up in game what they could look up in their browser next to the game. I'm going to play with it on either way, but I don't see the point in marking such games as "cheaters", in the same way that, say, infinite resurrection does.

I sympathise with your point and it's something I've thought about doing. But haven't done yet. I guess I worry that newbies will just turn full monster memory on straight away and lose the fun of discovering what monsters do a bit at a time.

[takkaria]

Does this mean that resistances are useless? If I'm reading this correctly, it means that if you resist fire, any fire damage you take will be converted to pure damage since the HP you lose from X points of fire damage is less than the HP you lose from X points of pure damage...

Uh, maybe this point isn't so well explained. This change only applies for elemental melee attacks, not for breaths. Also, there is no physical attack damage from the following attack types (the ones that don't use physical force):

   if (method == RBM_TOUCH  ||
        method == RBM_ENGULF ||
        method == RBM_DROOL  ||
        method == RBM_SPIT   ||
        method == RBM_CRAWL  || 
        method == RBM_GAZE   ||
        method == RBM_WAIL   ||
        method == RBM_SPORE  ||
        method == RBM_BEG    ||
        method == RBM_INSULT ||  
        method == RBM_MOAN){

So only things like hitting, clawing, punching, etc. will be affected.

In addition to or replacing their thematic class weapon? Why?

Replacing. Because it sucks to have to explain to newbies that they should sell their weapon and get a dagger instead.

What exactly is the point of multiple food types, anyway? I always go for rations...

To add flavour to the game, both literally and metaphorically.

Hopefully not just the sucky ones can be found at DL10? I always thought it was dumb that early rings were a noob trap, since they were always Weakness or Aggravate Monster...

I think I just shifted the earlier less interesting rings down to dl10, without changing the ones already there. The idea was to add more of a 'discovery curve' e.g. instead of starting to find everything all at once, new item types appear as you dive. I did this because I think it's going to be more fun for new players to discover things like that.

Cool. Why only melee?

Because it's the easiest place to do it. Ideally it would include monster damage and player melee and spells as well, but I have limited coding energy and it's better than nothing.

I might actually play Angband with sound on now!

Yeah, I do sometimes; against some background music it can actually be pretty great.

[DaviddesJ]

I sympathise with your point and it's something I've thought about doing. But haven't done yet. I guess I worry that newbies will just turn full monster memory on straight away and lose the fun of discovering what monsters do a bit at a time.

I'm not sure that's really that much fun. How many people really want to climb all the way down to dl40, discover that some monster has paralysis, start over, climb all the way down to dl40, discover that some other monster has poison breath, start over, etc.? I think most people who stick with Angband for any length of time use one kind of spoiler, or another. The design of the game, where if you don't know what you are doing you tend to die suddenly and unexpectedly, sort of dictates that. Are there really people who go into greater vaults with no idea what any of the enemies in them can do?

The general philosophy of improvements to the game seems to be, if people can do something, you might as well make it easier for them. Macros rather than forcing people to type the same keystrokes over and over. Squelching superfluous items. Looking up stuff easily that people can look up if they want seems to fit squarely into this category.

[Timo Pietilä]

I sympathise with your point and it's something I've thought about doing. But haven't done yet. I guess I worry that newbies will just turn full monster memory on straight away and lose the fun of discovering what monsters do a bit at a time.

Any chance getting external monster memory not tied to savegame used? You do get old memories by using same saved game. Any veteran player that uses same savegame for all his/her games have that full memory from the start, but every now and then savegame compability breaks or saved games get lost or corrupted or something like that.

[Timo Pietilä]

Are there really people who go into greater vaults with no idea what any of the enemies in them can do?

Yes. One fun part of the game is to find out what things do.

[takkaria]

Any chance getting external monster memory not tied to savegame used? You do get old memories by using same saved game. Any veteran player that uses same savegame for all his/her games have that full memory from the start, but every now and then savegame compability breaks or saved games get lost or corrupted or something like that.

I agree with the suggestion but no-one's come forward to code it yet. It wouldn't be that difficult, but there's always a tonne of stuff to do and it's not high on my personal todolist, at least. My priority with V is trying to fix as many bugs as possible so that 3.5 is a polished release worthy of being played for years to come.

[DaviddesJ]

Yes. One fun part of the game is to find out what things do.

Well, to each his own. All the more reason to have different choices for the different types of players. Which we do have now, so that's good. I just think labeling half of the players as "cheaters" because they have different preferences from the other half is not good. Save the "cheat" label for those things that really change gameplay.