Angband 4.0 beta release

[StMicah]

A heads up re squelching:

Just went to squelch an average robe. My choices were to ignore this item or average *body armor*. When I select the second option, it indeed squelches average body armor.

[MattB]

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.

I don't pay Nick (or any of the other devs) a penny for the incredible game I play. Maybe you do, but I suspect otherwise. Nick is spending whatever time he has left after children and job to improve our wonderful game and by far the most efficient use of that time is spent coding, rather than playing (for which I pity him). The most sensible thing is to let 'The Community', who are on the whole fairly experienced in the game, find the bugs that are out there.
If you don't want to help, that's fine - play the stable 3.5.1 release. You may have noticed that there is no link to the nightlies page from rephial.org; you have to deliberately go there. This thread was intended exclusively for those who want to give a helping hand (especially those, like me, who have no idea how to code) in getting Angband 4.0 ready for release.
That's my five cents - I'm off looking for bugs...

[mrrstark]

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.

As a professional software engineer, I absolutely understand why this was released.

• Show Progress
• Get Feedback
• Have friendly people help find bugs after big changes

If anything, I think they waited too long. But I get that reasoning too... reactions like this.

Very excited about the changes this refactor will allow.

[Nomad]

My Half-orc rogue seems to be gaining SP faster than he should. In 3.5 he'd have got his first point of SP on reaching level 5 and learning Detect Monsters, but I've just reached level 5 and I have 4 SP already.

[debo]

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.

This is more of an alpha IMO. Beta was a poor name for this release.

The 4.0 release will be the real beta

If you look at the diffs it's almost hard to believe that you can move in any direction without it crashing, there were some massive changesets in here. I am pretty impressed.

For future reference, if a programmer puts any Greek letter next to a release, that translated as "I am really sick of working on this and I want you to find bugs for me"

[Nick]

This is more of an alpha IMO. Beta was a poor name for this release.

In fact we were calling it alpha in the devteam meeting, but I optimistically and unilaterally started calling it beta a couple of months ago and no-one complained

[Thraalbee]

This is a very important step for Angband's future development.
In the early days of Unix, Data General started their own Unix line with a major rewrite of the original code with special focus on the file system which was a horrible mess. DG's development team beat the competitors for a long time after that due to the extensive code re-write (1+ year iirc). And like in Nick's project, this was done with the clear instruction "ZERO functionality changes until the restructure is completed and stable". The following results were amazing, DG/UX got great file and volume managment, even clustered file systems, long before Veritas, SUN and DEC even came close to match this. Also "true clusters" with shared release areas as well as high security version and more. Alas, the hardware suffered from poor CPU's which were no match for the much more powerful cpu's from HP, DEC and SUN.

[MattB]

Just walked onto a set of stairs with a summoning trap on. Now that's cruel! Funny, but cruel.

[MattB]

Another tiny one.
When ID'ing by use, with autoinscribe on that item, you inscribe the thing you've just drunk/read/eaten, as in the below...

[MattB]

I drink an un'ID'd potion.
"You breathe frost.
You have a hazy potion {tried}"

Hmm...I wonder what it could be?

[MattB]

I have Heroism autoinscribed as @q4 and Rods of Light as @z4.
Hitting 'q4' gives me the drop command. Hitting z4, bizarrely, gives me the (lowercase) look command!?

[Nick]

Update ff17bf8 fixes the robes ignore and 'x' keymap bugs, and has also included all the changes between 3.5.0 and 3.5.1 (including the return of the level feeling indicator).

It is possible that the store entry and exit fix has fixed the intermittent light bug. I have been unable to reproduce it recently, although I had seen it before, sp pleae let me know if it's been seen since 7497c1a.

I have also been unable to reproduce the auto-ignore bug, but that can't possibly be fixed - more info or even a savefile would be useful.

While talking about ignoring - with ignore by ego item type, is there any need for "excellent with no high resists" and "excellent but not splendid"?

[Tibarius]

Thanks

Thank you Nick, MattB, Mrrstark and debo for your explanations.

I think i can better understand you now!

Gee, i have to Speed up with my 3.5.1 Player's Guide ... else 4.0 is realeased before my guide is finished.

[Thraalbee]

More observations of v4b17-gf6f24a3
* Dropping items and picking up returns "{special}" etc inscriptions until id'd.
* shooting bolts that hit the enemy continue their path and land in same place as bolts missing the target
* blindness bug. fighting against Ogre shaman et al I get "You cannot see!" messages and am in effect blind but without the status message of being blind. As Dwarf with 2x items with rBlind this should not happen. Quaffing !ccw cures the ailment (but no message informs me of that) and I can use spells again. This could be the flickering of light problem but I feel it is not
* quaffing unidentified *healing* at full hp - nothing happens but message says "You have no more potions of *healing*
* crash on recall from town is quite frequent from plvl 32, dlvl 38. restarting after crash and recall works
* glyph of warding (from priest spell) is invisible but on "x" it says you are on a glyph of warding

[Nomad]

* I zapped a rod at a wall and got a fireball, but it didn't ID; I had to zap a monster with it before it was recognised as a Rod of Fireballs.

* There's no message when you read a Scroll of Teleportation, nor when an Amulet of Teleportation activates, so you just silently appear elsewhere in the dungeon, rather confused.

* There seems to be an extra blank option at the top of the Quality ignore menu - it has a list of selectable squelch levels but is unlabelled, and none of the previous categories are missing from the menu, so I'm not quite sure what types of equipment it works on (everything?) and am a bit scared to experiment.

Just walked onto a set of stairs with a summoning trap on. Now that's cruel! Funny, but cruel.

I know these are happening by accident, but we absolutely need to implement traps on doors, stairs and item squares. They would solve a large part of the problem of traps being trivially avoidable.

It is possible that the store entry and exit fix has fixed the intermittent light bug. I have been unable to reproduce it recently, although I had seen it before, sp pleae let me know if it's been seen since 7497c1a.

I think I may have seen the light source flicker occasionally, but now it appears to happen for a fraction of a turn rather than taking up a whole turn and leaving you unable to read. (Or I may just be imagining that. It's a bit hard to tell.)

Anyway, something you've fixed has definitely speeded the game up! Repeat-until-finished tasks like resting were taking a perceptible amount of time to complete and now they're back to normal. I think you may even have fixed/improved digging as well: hard to tell with isolated datapoints, but so far this game my High-elf has cleared piles of rubble in 16, 22 and 99 turns, when before it was ranging from about 50-400.

I have also been unable to reproduce the auto-ignore bug, but that can't possibly be fixed - more info or even a savefile would be useful.

I tried everything I could think of to reproduce it after it first happened, but I can't figure out what was special about the exact circumstances. All I remember is that I was standing in a corridor fighting a succession of monsters, so items were probably piling up at my feet, and then an Awl-pike auto squelched and dropped on them, triggering the crash. So possible things contributing might have been monster drops (of squelched items?), ammo piling up (this was in a version that still had the waffles bug: I don't think any of my ammo was inscribed, but it's possible), and/or multiple items auto-squelching and dropping while still standing in the same square.

While talking about ignoring - with ignore by ego item type, is there any need for "excellent with no high resists" and "excellent but not splendid"?

Ooo, we have ego-based ignoring options now? I didn't even see those. That's fantastic! Yes, I'd say you might as well scrub those two options, then, though "non-artefact" is still useful as a catch-all.

Thanks for all these bugfixes, Nick! I'd say that aside from the problems with @-inscriptions the beta's now much more playable, at least in the early levels where I've been running about.