V 3.5 now in feature freeze

[MattB]

You might try the latest nightly and see if it's still a problem. Takkaria merged the fix in on Sept 30, so it might not have been fixed in your build.

It is the latest build!
I downloaded yesterday and rephial is still listing 1st Oct as current today.

[molybdenum]

It is the latest build!
I downloaded yesterday and rephial is still listing 1st Oct as current today.

Ah, you're right; I don't look at the nightlies page. I'll go back in and look at what's breaking.

[MattB]

Ah, you're right; I don't look at the nightlies page. I'll go back in and look at what's breaking.

Thanks Molybdenum, I appreciate the time spent by everyone that looks at this stuff.

While we're at it...

I've noticed that the damage/round given for my ammunition is the same whether or not I'm wearing my ring of damage +9. Surely that hasn't always been the case? Or am I going mad?

[Magnate]

Thanks Molybdenum, I appreciate the time spent by everyone that looks at this stuff.

While we're at it...

I've noticed that the damage/round given for my ammunition is the same whether or not I'm wearing my ring of damage +9. Surely that hasn't always been the case? Or am I going mad?

You're going mad - RoDam have never affected missile damage.

[Jimmi Magnus]

Squelch fix in September 30 nightly

I'm running the 30 Sep 2013 at 21:20 UTC, revision 508d0ad now, and squelching works just fine.

[MattB]

You're going mad - RoDam have never affected missile damage.

Well...that's alright then.

[MattB]

I'm running the 30 Sep 2013 at 21:20 UTC, revision 508d0ad now, and squelching works just fine.

In that case it must be due to importing a savefile from an older nightly.
Damnit! This gnome mage is looking really good too! (And I deleted the old build as well). Glad it's not a real problem though.

[TJS]

I've not played for a few years so here's some feedback based on version angband-v3.5-dev-559-gcc0595 from the nightlies. Sorry for the list style format as I wrote them down as I thought of them.

Love the map changes, with all the extra rooms - it makes the maps much more fun. Lots of mini-valuts are much better than the very occasional massive vault. Still would like more vaults/rooms earlier on though.

Not massively keen on the pac-man like maze levels and also it seems to break the game rules with everything revealed and lit beforehand too.

The cave levels would be nice mixed in with the normal types rather than a complete level.

Didn't we use to have destructed areas occasionally? Felt like they'd been an epic battle there.

Sounds seem to be broken in the version I tried, many sounds playing at once each time you get hit.

Are more monsters susceptible to certain elements? It seems so and is a good change, although Hydras and undead are complete push overs for mages now (although I think this is a good thing as different monsters are easy for different classes).

The first 40 or so levels feelings I got were of the "not much danger" variety. Would be nice to have some dangerous levels earlier on (and more good items too to go with them). After that all the levels make you at least nervous even if you can cope with them easily.

Did I see monsters slow down after being hasted? If so then it's a very good change, I hate the fact that you need to leave the level when a dangerous monster is hasted.

Can't see black characters on black background with old tiles - almost got killed by ungoliant the unlight early on.
Also the trap detection radius lines cover everything underneath. Squelch seems a bit broken, not hiding some things and hiding others that aren't squelched. (Average armour is not hidden by squelch good)

Did Hithlomir used to have resist poison? Doesn't seem as useful now. Actually I'm probably thinking of Caspanion.

The option "can move with mouse" being on by default killed a newish character when I clicked to bring the Angband screen back into focus and it moved the character into a pack of wolves. Also the run command ran me all the way around the map and into an ancient dragon killing the second character. Not sure what can be done about that though really.

Charisma is gone which is obviously a good change. Glad it wasn't shoe-horned into being used in inappropriate situations.

Don't like it when rules arbitrarily change, like phase door working differently in different places eg vaults or heroism or rFear not overcoming certain types of fear. Fixing overpowered objects or situations is preferable to butchering the ruleset I think.

Have shops been put back to how they used to work? There seems a lot of pointless clicking that earlier versions got rid of - I'm sure 'p' took you straight to the buy confirmation menu and now you have to press return first.

Speed was hard to come by, would have been difficult as a warrior (which is good as I find them the easiest).

Regarding difficulty the game still feels a bit on the easy side and I personally find the first 10-15 character levels or so a bit boring (although this has always been a problem for me). I know it probably won't happen, but I'd like to see the first 20 character levels sped up (say starting at around how character level 4 is now - as you are absurdly weak at the start) and the number of dungeon depths reduced to around 50. Also once you get to character level 20 the game suddenly gets too easy so it needs to be harder after that point.

You are no longer swimming with artifacts like previous versions and there's less egos, but still a few too many and the worst ones never show up in time to be useful. I don't think I've ever used slay orc or even a average dragon scale mail by the time they show up. In fact dragon scale mails are boring all the time as there are no artifacts based on most types (and I've never seen the other rare ones), so when you see one it is often not worth identifying. There's still too much junk in general ( don't understand why average stuff isn't just not created after the levels they are useful, especially now with fuzzy detection).

Gradually getting rid of tedium is a good thing, like boring sticky curses and scumming for restore potions.

Overall the game seems a lot more fun and definitely going in the right direction.

[takkaria]

Don't like it when rules arbitrarily change, like phase door working differently in different places eg vaults or heroism or rFear not overcoming certain types of fear. Fixing overpowered objects or situations is preferable to butchering the ruleset I think.

Thanks for the feedback, but could you elaborate on this point? I'm not sure what you're referring to.

[TJS]

Thanks for the feedback, but could you elaborate on this point? I'm not sure what you're referring to.

Sure. As far as I can see you cannot phase door into a vault and if you are inside it will always put you outside of it. This means that the standard rules of what phase door do are broken when it comes to vaults.

Heroism and rFear is supposed to stop you from being afraid, but as soon as you put on a ring of escaping then they no longer work.

[Derakon]

Heroism and rFear is supposed to stop you from being afraid, but as soon as you put on a ring of escaping then they no longer work.

Rings of Escaping create a different status effect than being frightened; I think it's called "terror". The entire idea of them is that they give you early speed but keep you from being able to fight effectively by any means. Frankly I think they don't work very well; mages might use 2 of them for the speed bonus if they think they can handle the failure rate penalty, and everyone else basically ignores them.

They were an interesting concept -- figuring out a way to give players early access to permanent speed that isn't gamebreaking -- but I think they need to be reworked and not overlap so heavily with the existing fear effect. Maybe they could simply break (be unequipped and destroyed) if the player ever causes damage to an enemy by any means while wearing them? The trick then would be differentiating between damage that monsters cause to each other (e.g. breath attack splash damage) and damage caused by the player.

[TJS]

Rings of Escaping create a different status effect than being frightened; I think it's called "terror". The entire idea of them is that they give you early speed but keep you from being able to fight effectively by any means. Frankly I think they don't work very well; mages might use 2 of them for the speed bonus if they think they can handle the failure rate penalty, and everyone else basically ignores them.

They were an interesting concept -- figuring out a way to give players early access to permanent speed that isn't gamebreaking -- but I think they need to be reworked and not overlap so heavily with the existing fear effect. Maybe they could simply break (be unequipped and destroyed) if the player ever causes damage to an enemy by any means while wearing them? The trick then would be differentiating between damage that monsters cause to each other (e.g. breath attack splash damage) and damage caused by the player.

I use them with almost all my characters even warriors occasionally.

Terror is being scared really though isn't it? Having two very similar properties is really clunky and messes the rules up too much.

Please no "this ring breaks if you damage a monster with them" attempt at a fix (ie completely break how rings work to combat a seemingly overpowered item). This is what I was getting at when I said I didn't like rules that arbitrarily change in one-off situations.

A good set of game rules are simple, work consistently and allow interesting decisions and strategies that often the designers didn't think about. For example mushrooms of terror are pretty useless, but if you could combine them with other items such as potions of heroism to make them useful then that is a fun gameplay mechanic and gives the player the choice to use up a slot keeping them until they can use them as an alternative source of speed.

Having useless items that might be useful if the entire game rules weren't fudged to stop them being useful is not fun at all.

(Apologies if this comes over a bit ranty).

Edited to add that I just looked at the V4 form and noticed another example where the rules were fudged to stop people purposely losing exp and re-gaining a level to combat stat gain.

[Derakon]

The problem with the terror effect vs. heroism is that heroism is an important and balanced potion in its own right -- you sacrifice an inventory slot in exchange for being able to be temporarily immune to fear effects. But if you could wear Rings of Escaping and avoid their bad effects by using heroism, then you would, every time. Speed is so valuable that players will sacrifice almost anything to get it; having to lose an inventory slot and a few hundred gold is nothing, really. You'd have to make heroism far less available just to make certain that Escaping was still "balanced", but that screws over the normal use for the item.

I sympathize with your view that the game shouldn't contort its rules to maintain balance, but at the same time, every effect in the game is its own "ruleset", and should be freely adapted until its rules achieve the desired in-game effect. Or, if that can't be done elegantly, then the item should be removed or re-designed.

Can you think of a way to have a ring that gives you +4 speed, early on, without being unbalancing or uninteresting? By which I mean, without it being either total junk or a no-brainer equipment item for every class?

[TJS]

The problem with the terror effect vs. heroism is that heroism is an important and balanced potion in its own right -- you sacrifice an inventory slot in exchange for being able to be temporarily immune to fear effects. But if you could wear Rings of Escaping and avoid their bad effects by using heroism, then you would, every time. Speed is so valuable that players will sacrifice almost anything to get it; having to lose an inventory slot and a few hundred gold is nothing, really. You'd have to make heroism far less available just to make certain that Escaping was still "balanced", but that screws over the normal use for the item.

I sympathize with your view that the game shouldn't contort its rules to maintain balance, but at the same time, every effect in the game is its own "ruleset", and should be freely adapted until its rules achieve the desired in-game effect. Or, if that can't be done elegantly, then the item should be removed or re-designed.

Can you think of a way to have a ring that gives you +4 speed, early on, without being unbalancing or uninteresting? By which I mean, without it being either total junk or a no-brainer equipment item for every class?

Well for mushrooms of terror even if they were used with heroism would just be as good as potions of speed which are available from the first couple of levels anyway (well at least they used to be - I didn't notice any until deeper levels on the latest version, has this changed? You really need them early on).

The real unbalancing factor is speed itself which I've mentioned before. Speed is so ridiculously overpowered and yet also so necessary when facing a faster dangerous opponent because of double moves that having or not having it completely changes the game. In fact I'd say that when you get +10 speed the rest of the game becomes very easy.

You could nerf speed by impairing recovery, increasing spell failure rates etc. but then I'm arguing against myself a little bit here (although I'd say it is slightly different to the other rules I was complaining about).

If I had my way I'd probably get rid of the whole concept of speed altogether

[Ingwe Ingweron]

I'm running the 30 Sep 2013 at 21:20 UTC, revision 508d0ad now, and squelching works just fine.

Squelch bugs persist in Oct 05 dev 574. Appears to squelch one quality level above what is indicated (e.g., setting squelch of Elven Cloaks to "Excellent, but not splendid" squelches "Non-artifact" instead). There seems to be some disconnectedness between squelching from the inventory/equipment menus and squelching from the options menu, they don't seem to match up. Digger squelching is limited. Unclear what the new category "Great Weapons" covers.

Another persistent bug is in targeting. When a monster is just around the corner and you can "see" it, you can target it. You can also target that location if a monster is not there. However, if a monster is on that location and you cannot "see" it, then targeting will not lock.

Finally, dropping items from inventory/equipment menus still has persistent, albeit intermittent, bugs. For example, you id an item and go to drop it, but the option isn't available. You have to leave the menus, select "d"rop and then drop the item. Still haven't figured out why this is intermittent. Possibly in connection with having inscriptions on the items, and/or items being ego or artifact items, and/or items in the quiver?