V 3.5 now in feature freeze

[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!

[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 ;-)

[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.

[Derakon]

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

[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???

[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.

[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!

[Derakon]

It does? It doesn't in 3.4.1, so that has to be new on 3.5.

[EDIT] I don't find that in changes so I need to test that.
[EDIT EDIT] No, it doesn't cure poison.

Bah, my mistake. Sorry for the confusion. CSW does clear up confusion/blindness, and I always think of those as more serious than poison, ergo it ought to cure poison too...oh well.

[Timo Pietilä]

Ah, yes, I just reverted that change, thanks. It's an unexpected side effect of a change to how distance is calculated.

does that affect radius one ball spells too? (assuming there are radius one spells, can't think any just now).

[Nomad]

Ah, yes, I just reverted that change, thanks. It's an unexpected side effect of a change to how distance is calculated.

Ooh, thanks. I was hoping that was unintentional.

[takkaria]

When was torchlight changed so that radius 1 light no longer illuminates diagonals? I don't see that on the change list.

Ah, yes, I just reverted that change, thanks. It's an unexpected side effect of a change to how distance is calculated.

[Ed_47569]

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.

[Nomad]

When was torchlight changed so that radius 1 light no longer illuminates diagonals? I don't see that on the change list.

[Timo Pietilä]

In addition to waybread, Cure Serious Wounds also removes poison.

It does? It doesn't in 3.4.1, so that has to be new on 3.5.

[EDIT] I don't find that in changes so I need to test that.
[EDIT EDIT] No, it doesn't cure poison.

[Derakon]

Whats the status on poison duration ? Ever since ccw has been made scarce, I feel compelled to wait out poison and it has been bugging me to no end.
I havent seen anyone else complaining, so maybe its just me (or maybe noone was playing 3.5 ?), but as it is I feel its borderline unplayable. If I play at all, I do the "wait 10000 turns downstairs till shops refresh" like in old *id* days to get enough !ccw for poison curing. Playing kobold also helps, but I like to change it up occasionally.

In addition to waybread, Cure Serious Wounds also removes poison. But are you getting badly poisoned frequently? Most melee poison only lasts for a few turns...