No-sell

[takkaria]

3) Consequently, adding unique new behaviors (say, conic breath attacks) is just a matter of writing the appropriate new function and assigning a string to it; it can then be used in the edit files.

That sounds great. I've been thinking about a 'fork lightning' type attack spell recently - you aim at one monster and it branches out and hits another one nearby as well. As much for the visual effect as anything...

[AnonymousHero]

That sounds great. I've been thinking about a 'fork lightning' type attack spell recently - you aim at one monster and it branches out and hits another one nearby as well. As much for the visual effect as anything...

I believe it's called Chain Lightning .

[Magnate]

by the current team. That's kinda my point. I much rather they worked on a variant instead and then ported only the truly successful changes back to what is commonly known as V.

Nobody seems to have picked up on this, but almost two years ago we tried exactly that. We launched 'v4', which was the 'devteam variant', and we pledged to port only the truly successful changes back to V.

The second part worked - the only thing that's been brought back to V is Nomad's room layouts, which are in 3.5.

Unfortunately what didn't work was the 'variant' bit. It was a failure in that only four people contributed to it, out of a devteam three times the size (though one can never be sure how much of this was coincidence of RL and how much was not really being motivated to work on a variant) - but it was also a victim of its own success, in that two of those four found it SO engrossing that they went to work on Pyrel instead.

Instead almost the exact opposite principal has been exercised. The devs, the only ones who care enough to do the job, put in whatever they like (with some regard to classic Vanilla and community input) and see what sticks, with the promise that truly horrible changes can later be reverted. That just seems ass-backward to me.

That's a shame, but the v4 experiment proves that the only alternative is stagnation. Nobody *wants* to work on V the way you want them to, so there are only two choices - either they work on it in a way you consider ass-backward, or nobody works on it at all.

Angband wasn't broken. It didn't require "change".

You realize that's only your opinion, right? It's not a statement of fact and may not even be one of consensus... which is what is often put forth as pseudo-fact in lieu of actual fact.

...

While I can't speak to every change made, with the exception of Tak's extensive work on the low level code, I don't know what has been done that has been thoroughly tested and isn't game breaking or a subject of some controversy.

I'd quite like to give you a comprehensive answer to this, by going through the changelogs and demonstrating that the proportion of changes which haven't been thoroughly tested / are game-breaking / are a subject of controversy is actually tiny. Which version shall I start from? Since I think I am one of your least favourite devs, how about 3.1.1, which was when I joined and started messing things up?

I never pretended that the current maintainers aren't reasonable people. I just disagree with the whole dev-team philosophy. I need to remain vocal else the dev-team will simple march on uncontested with what they consider reasonable changes.

What do you achieve by contesting this, which cannot be achieved far more convincingly by anyone releasing their own 'fixed' version of V? This is the time-honoured model - it's how Ben took over, and how takkaria took over. Why is criticising and baiting the devteam a better way of opposing us than that??

[Nick]

That sounds great. I've been thinking about a 'fork lightning' type attack spell recently - you aim at one monster and it branches out and hits another one nearby as well. As much for the visual effect as anything...

FAangband haz

[Monkey Face]

After 3.5 I'm out of the 'maintaining V' game. I want 3.5 to be as polished and bug-free as possible to leave future coders the best possible starting point but past that, whatever.

I for one will be sorry to see you leave. I think the game is MUCH better than it was when you took over and I want to say thanks for all the work you (and the rest of the coders) have done. Although I was skeptical of some of the changes at first, especially no selling, I gave it a try and I'm glad I did. I'm really looking forward to the release of 3.5!

[BlueFish]

I absolutely love the "no-selling" option being standard in V. Apart from the game design considerations that I appreciate and agree with, wasn't it first tried in some variant and found to be successful by consensus? What other process can there be?

[Raajaton]

I for one will be sorry to see you leave. I think the game is MUCH better than it was when you took over and I want to say thanks for all the work you (and the rest of the coders) have done. Although I was skeptical of some of the changes at first, especially no selling, I gave it a try and I'm glad I did. I'm really looking forward to the release of 3.5!

I would like to second this post. I'm sure it's much easier to focus on the "negative nancy" posts, but trust that there are those of us that enjoy the direction the game has gone in the last several years.