Tears unnumbered ye shall shed

[Nick]

For anyone who may have missed it, some people have suggested that I should be the next Angband maintainer. So I thought everyone should have a chance to see what a Nick-as-maintainer future might hold. I'm going to do a series of individual topic posts; please comment frankly and fearlessly. If this happens, I want it to be with everyone's eyes open.

So here's a quick outline of what I would hope to do:

• Wait for the release of 3.5
• Work out who is interested in contributing to development and in what capacity
• Do a massive restructure of the code with no gameplay (or language!) change. takkaria has done a huge amount of this (pretty much unsung) already; I plan to be fairly revolutionary here
• Tackle the outstanding thorny issues - traps/searching/perception, ID, squelch
• Open up discussion on *big* issues - combat system, dungeon generation and structure, new races and/or classes, new ports, monster and item balance

That'll do for an appetiser

[Timo Pietilä]

So here's a quick outline of what I would hope to do:

All sound good to me. Angband code has some very weird relics in it, like the one I stumbled upon just couple of days ago: monsters might or might not resist the thing they breathe regardless of what the resistance flags say. That's determined in the code, not in the edit-file flags (oddly into same place which gives you messages from monsters and if you learned about their resistances or not). It would be good to get all those oddities cleared out.

[takkaria]

All sound good to me. Angband code has some very weird relics in it, like the one I stumbled upon just couple of days ago: monsters might or might not resist the thing they breathe regardless of what the resistance flags say. That's determined in the code, not in the edit-file flags (oddly into same place which gives you messages from monsters and if you learned about their resistances or not). It would be good to get all those oddities cleared out.

I fixed that a few days ago, after your report This stuff takes a long time - when people notice them they tend to fix them but the code is littered with this stuff and it's not always obvious if you're flicking over code looking for something else.

[Nick]

It would be good to get all those oddities cleared out.

What would probably happen is that a lot of them would be cleared out, and a lot of worse ones would be introduced. But that's OK - picking up bugs like that is always going to be an ongoing proposition. The main aim with a code restructure is to get the code into a state where it's easier for the developers to know what they're doing.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

That was a really nice appetiser!

One of the more important issues for me would be rebalancing monsters so that all monsters are at least somewhat challenging when you first meet them. At the moment many interesting monsters are wasted on too deep dungeon levels. Andrew Doull is the expert on this.

Andrew used to say that the biggest problem of Angband is boring monsters. I tend to agree.

[Timo Pietilä]

That was a really nice appetiser!

One of the more important issues for me would be rebalancing monsters so that all monsters are at least somewhat challenging when you first meet them. At the moment many interesting monsters are wasted on too deep dungeon levels. Andrew Doull is the expert on this.

Andrew used to say that the biggest problem of Angband is boring monsters. I tend to agree.

Only way to create that would be to create variance between monsters, so that while majority are boring enough of those are considerably harder to deal with, so that your "safe" diving speed always contains monsters that are not really "safe". "first meet" is not really a good measurement because people dive at different speeds. Some monsters would need to pose danger at any level for them to be really challenging. Like gravity hounds and Dracolichs.

One thing I would like to do is boost Balrogs. Currently they are too wimpy. Give them darkness storm (balrogs = demons of fire and shadow). They should also be top demons, way worse than Pit Fiends or Gelugons, and more intelligent spellcasters than beasts with breaths (read the book, Balrog of Moria was not fiery bull with wings, it opened a door that Gandalf closed by magic using countermagic).

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Only way to create that would be to create variance between monsters, so that while majority are boring enough of those are considerably harder to deal with, so that your "safe" diving speed always contains monsters that are not really "safe". "first meet" is not really a good measurement because people dive at different speeds.

I guess I would like to even out the difficulty between monsters of the same level. Having some harder monsters is okay! But at the moment there are lots of super-easy monsters that will never interesting. Making them shallower would give them a potential to be interesting.

There's no point in having monsters that are much easier than the other monsters of the same level. (The monster generation algorithm will always generate easier, lower-level monsters anyway.)

[Timo Pietilä]

But at the moment there are lots of super-easy monsters that will never interesting. Making them shallower would give them a potential to be interesting.

More radical suggestion: remove them. If you have enough trees, you have forest where every tree look just like the one before it. More is not always better.

To give example: Paladin (monster, not player). That's just upgraded gallant. Nothing interesting there, but it creates continuum between gallant and Knight Templar. Remove Paladin, and you just created more variance.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

More radical suggestion: remove them.

Yep, unless they actually have enough interesting qualities! Some monsters have never had the chance to shine.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I found Andrew's Algorithmic rebalancing of monsters, but maybe there's a newer version somewhere.

[fizzix]

Work out who is interested in contributing to development and in what capacity

I am itching into getting back into development. Unfortunately, even though I didn't really sign up for a huge role for Mystery Hunt, a lot of the people that did flaked out, and I wound up being thrust in those roles anyway. But, after Jan 20th or so, I will have more free time, and Angband/pyrel work will probably be high up on my list of things I want to do.

Do a massive restructure of the code with no gameplay (or language!) change. takkaria has done a huge amount of this (pretty much unsung) already; I plan to be fairly revolutionary here

So this is not my expertise in any way. I've never been really good at high level thinking about code. But if someone's willing to sit down and talk me through what needs to be done, I would be willing to work on it.

Tackle the outstanding thorny issues - traps/searching/perception, ID, squelch

Yes, please choose a solution. The status quo isn't really ok. Lots of these things have been broken for a long long time (except for squelch really, that's been a massive improvement)

Open up discussion on *big* issues - combat system, dungeon generation and structure, new races and/or classes, new ports, monster and item balance

So it might be worth discussing some of these big issues before the massive code overhaul. Depending on what big features we want in the future, it might affect the structure.

We had some great ideas in v4.

I agree though, we need to get 3.5 out. But while I've been slacking Molybdenum's been fixing bugs right and left, so we're getting closer!

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Yes, please choose a solution. The status quo isn't really ok.

Yes! This is why a maintainer is needed, to make decisions.

I agree on studying v4 first for ideas on radical gameplay changes.

[Derakon]

Nick, your ideas aren't as controversial as you seem to think. But I think it's good to be upfront about being willing to Change Everything; that way the conservative old fogies at least can't claim to be surprised when you ruin their favorite game.

A few particular bullet points:

* Combat: it seems like we have a few possible approaches here. Vanilla-style, O-style, Mists-style, Sil-style, and v4/Pyrel-style. I'm not too familiar with Mists combat, but all of the others (except Vanilla-style of course) would entail a fairly significant rebalance of items at the very least, and Sil combat I suspect only really shines when the monsters are built around it too. We could also of course come up with something new, but all of these systems have the advantage that they're already implemented and working.

* New races/classes: personally, I'd like to see our existing races made more distinct and interesting. In particular, humans, half-elves, elves, and half-orcs are pretty subtle variations on each other and could stand to have "key features" that make them stand out more.

* Item balance: I think the best place to start here is to bring in v4's affix system. It can be used to precisely replicate the existing magic/ego system (or so Magnate tells me), and from there we should be easily able to set up an affix-based ID system as well as start playing around with what kinds of ego items can be created. Just throwing this out here, but what if you could start getting "double-ego" items (e.g. Westernesse + Flames, or Holy Avenger + Defender) once you got deep enough in the dungeon? Or we could just move whole-hog to the affix-based system; fine by me.

For my own part, my spare coding time has to go to Pyrel first and foremost, and there's been precious little of that time available lately. But I wish you the best of luck!

[debo]

Beleriand

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Mist-combat is simple and pretty fun, and it will get more interesting eventually, but it does not suit Angband. It needs basic items that get more and more powerful deeper in the dungeons, it gets silly and "videogamey".

O, Sil and v4 are all good choices. Unangband might have done something interesting to V-combat.