Angband 4.0 beta release

[Nomad]

Just encountered one of my templated rooms which should have had a treasure of specified tval appear in the [ position (in this specific case a chest) but it had a warhammer there instead. Looking at object.txt it looks like the numerical tvals have been replaced by words, so possibly the entries in room_template.txt need to be updated accordingly? (It's only rooms 92-100 that make use of the facility to specify a set tval, so the rest shouldn't need changing.)

Just encountered another templated room (the Laboratory layout) which should have had potions and had no items at all, so there's definitely something not working here.

[Thraalbee]

CRASH BUG: Silver jelly. Repeatable.
I fight the silver jelly and get "your light dims" a few time but once the "your light has gone out" message comes Angband crashes every time.

[Nomad]

You can't reorder ammo in the quiver without a fair bit of faffing about, since if you drop some ammo and pick it up again it just goes back into the same slot, and inscriptions are now behaving a bit strangely:

* The old trick of inscribing ammo {@f9} to put it in slot 9 no longer causes the ammo to move while it's in the quiver. However, if you inscribe it, drop it and pick it up again, it will then be placed in the 9th slot, even though that slot is now technically slot 'j'. (Incidentally, is the quiver still capped at 10 slots even though they're now lettered rather than numbered? I tried inscribing {@f11} but it just treated that as slot 1.)

* I wanted to see what would happen if I tried actually using the letters rather than the previous numbers, so I tried the inscription {@fj} Very bizarrely, when I picked this ammo up, it didn't go into the quiver at all, but into the main inventory. As soon as I erased the inscription or replaced it with a numerical one, it jumped into the quiver.

* At this point I figured what the hell, and inscribed the ammo {waffles} to see what would happen. Attempting to pick it up from the floor crashed the game.

[Nick]

Update f6f24a3 fixes:

• Monster lore reading and writing - putting a copy of monster.txt in the user directory, named as lore.txt, does now give full monster memory
• Activations on the *thancs and a whole lot of other artifacts now work again
• Suicide command works
• Silver jelly crash bug fixed
• Remaining stupid large numbers fixed

Confirmed but not fixed yet are weirdness with leaving stores, light and visibility occasionally disappearing and Nomad's waffles bug. Object selection was pretty much the last thing I implemented before the beta release, and it's showing its immaturity.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Thanks, Nick, for your dedication in squashing the bugs and more importantly the entire recoding! In each new nightly that I play, I make notes of the bugs I notice until I can generate a repeatable crash. Sometimes these will be bugs already reported, but not yet fixed. Here is the latest:

Angband 4.0 dev f6f24a3

1. “x” is erroneously keymapped as “w0ss”. Should be “w0”.
2. Messages clear instantly. Always have to go to <ctrl>P to find out what happened.
3. Convenient level feeling indicator introduced in 3.5.1 is missing.
4. Digging is broken. E.g., dagger shown as digging magma vein in 16.0 turns fails to clear magma vein after over 1,000 turns. Same dagger shown as clearing rubble in 13 turns takes 45 turns to clear rubble.
5. Game crashed inside store when I hit <Ctrl>P from inside a store to see the messages that I missed because they cleared instantly. Then <Esc> twice (once to exit the message recall display and the second to exit the store) and *Crash*.
6. Display when in Store and open the [e]quipment or [i]nventory window, the store contents and e/i window contents visually merge. There used to be a separation between the two.
7. Finally, an old bug that has been present in the previous versions too. The object display subwindow shows all objects encountered and still on the floor as "seen". Like the monster display subwindow, the objects should be separated into what @ can "see" and what @ is "aware" of.

[DeusIrae]

Yay, new excuse to play Angband! Just found a tiny bug, in f6f24a3: I've got a full backpack, wielding a non-magic dagger, and just found a shiny new dagger lying on the dungeon floor. When I stand on top of it and attempt to wield it from the floor, the new dagger goes into my hand, the old dagger overflows out of my pack (so far so good), but then my pack overflows again and the new dagger drops to the floor too. The new dagger later pseudos as magic, but the pseudo-ID doesn't change the behavior any.

The mental image of a butter-fingered Half-Troll ineptly juggling knives is pretty funny, at least!

Edit: just had a similar but weirder thing happen -- with both ring slots filled, I tried to put on another on straight from the ground, but instead of the ring I took off overflowing onto the floor, instead it went into my pack and bumped a stack of torches out.

[Nomad]

Something seems to have changed with monster behaviour - I've twice had them stop pursuing and wander off the second I stepped out of line of sight leaving a corridor. So you can effectively be in situation like this:

#..........#
#..........#
#####[color=orange]@[/color]######
    #[color=lightgreen]o[/color]#     
    #[color=lightgreen]o[/color]#       
    #[color=lightgreen]o[/color]#

Take one small step out of line of sight...

#..........#
#.....[color=orange]@[/color]....#
#####.######
    #.#     
    #.#       
    #.#

And they'll all wander off back down the corridor and leave you in peace to heal up for as long as you like. Which means you can pretty much sit there infinitely shooting with ranged weapons and then stepping round the corner to wait for them to go away once they get too close.

ETA: ooh, and I just shot seven monsters at once with the same iron shot. If you use 'f' and just pick a direction or manually target a monster at the back of a pack rather than using 'h' to target the nearest, your ammo will just keep going straight through, hitting every monster in its path. Which is tremendously fun, but probably not actually desired behaviour...

[Nick]

Update 7497c1a is up. It fixes

• A bug in the description of monsters pushing past other monsters (found and fixed by noz)
• Problems with ammo inscription for the quiver (waffles are back on the menu)
• Problems with entering and leaving shops (I think all of them)

Note with the last one that the '_' command for entering stores is gone - the stand still command does the same job.

[Thraalbee]

A BIG thanks to Nick and all working hard on the new release! Some more angb-v4b17-gf6f24a3 observations below:
* Character screen: rAcid and rFire turns green when there is immunity but rElectric and rCold does not
* Artifact activations are wrong. Bladeturner activates for bless rage resist but I/g gives description which says it activates 300 hp energy ball. Ringil, Eol and Umbar activates but you don't get to direct the ball/bolt. Feanor activates for speed but description does not tell this
* Inspection (I) remembers if you last had the inventory or wield view and resumes that. I think I like this but previously it always started at inventory?
* light radius: all lights seems to flicker, even Thrain, so that sometimes it does not light up the dungeon.
* stairs created when killing Sauron and Morgoth are sometimes hidden by items or an & and when you stand on it and press x you dont see there is a stair
* earthquake seems to blind you temporarily even if you have rBlind
* rogue keyset, inscription "@m3" on Chants And Blessings works fine, m3b*t works but keymap <tab> = m3b*t fails to recognize the 3. Mapping to mcb*t works but is not ideal.
* wizard mode teleport level from town crashes game. tele level from dungeon works though

[DeusIrae]

Yay, new excuse to play Angband! Just found a tiny bug, in f6f24a3: I've got a full backpack, wielding a non-magic dagger, and just found a shiny new dagger lying on the dungeon floor. When I stand on top of it and attempt to wield it from the floor, the new dagger goes into my hand, the old dagger overflows out of my pack (so far so good), but then my pack overflows again and the new dagger drops to the floor too. The new dagger later pseudos as magic, but the pseudo-ID doesn't change the behavior any.

The mental image of a butter-fingered Half-Troll ineptly juggling knives is pretty funny, at least!

Edit: just had a similar but weirder thing happen -- with both ring slots filled, I tried to put on another on straight from the ground, but instead of the ring I took off overflowing onto the floor, instead it went into my pack and bumped a stack of torches out.

Oops, just noticed this had already been reported. Sorry! One more thing that's more a change than a bug, but an annoying one: hitting 'g' on a pile of objects just picks up the top one, instead of prompting to ask which one I want to grab ('I' on a floor pile still gives a choice of what to expect). Will make cleaning up after clearing a dragon pit rather a pain.

[DeusIrae]

Just got breathed on by a baby black dragon, and got the message:

"Your Mithril Amulet glows Your Cloak is damaged!"

In the message log, they appear on two separate lines instead of running together like they did in the main window, but there's no period after "glows."

ETA:

* Reading a scroll of Identify, the prompt lists a Flask of oil I just picked up from the dungeon floor as ID-able.

[Nomad]

Just autosquelched a weapon (sorry, sorry, sorry - I mean 'autoignored') and this happened.

I think I auto-ignored something and it dropped on top of something that had already been squelched. I mean ignored.

Don't know if that helps?

I just got this bug, with the same sequence of error messages. (I'm still playing f203133 from 18th March.) I wasn't paying full attention to the exact circumstances, but I think MattB might be right that the auto-squelched weapon dropped on top of another squelched item, possibly more than one.

[Nomad]

Just found an Amulet of Inertia with no speed penalty. Is that supposed to be possible?

[Tibarius]

re:Nick

First of all i would say thanks to Nick and everyone else involved with developing this game.

I just wonder why you release a version that is so full of bugs that any braindead would stumble over dozens of bugs in the first 3 minutes of playing???

Wouldn't it not be much more effective to test the product you coded a Little bit and fix the obvious bugs before you toss of a threat like this?

I don't want to blame you, you must not justify yourself for anything you do. I am just baffed that any coder would give code out of his hands that is as buggy as this threat suggests.

[Nick]

I just wonder why you release a version that is so full of bugs that any braindead would stumble over dozens of bugs in the first 3 minutes of playing???

Wouldn't it not be much more effective to test the product you coded a Little bit and fix the obvious bugs before you toss of a threat like this?

Good questions!

Angband has a lot of code - over half a million lines - and has been in continuous development for over twenty years. It was beautifully rewritten by Ben Harrison in the 1990s, but since then there have been big changes to the game, but they have been made bit by bit and by a lot of different people, so they don't always co-ordinate very well.

As a variant maintainer, I was very aware of the difficulties in changing one part of the code without breaking others, and of limitations on what I could change if I still wanted to use things like the edit file parser, or the Windows port. So when I took over as maintainer, it was with the understanding that I would be doing a major rewrite.

With that much code to be changed, the new code was never going to be perfect. We have some unit testing, and I was trying to playtest each change I made, and there was a lot of help from the extended devteam, but there were still bugs being missed. So we had a devteam meeting last October, and decided to release a beta version when all the intended changes were done.

There are several reasons for making an actual beta release (which has only been advertised on the forum, not to a wider audience like a real release):

1. The community gets a chance to see what's happening and complain if they don't like it
2. Hopefully enough people would be interested enough to play the beta and report bugs
3. Related to the last, a variety of guinea pigs players on different platforms and with different playstyles would be much more rigorous bugtesting than the devteam alone could ever have hoped to achieve
4. It speeds up the process of getting this release done and so we can get on to the more exciting later ones which have actual gameplay changes

I must say, point 2 worked better than we could possibly have imagined