Angband 4.0 beta release

[Nomad]

Seriously, while I wish the NetHack devs the best of luck, the problems they're having are nicely indicative of how thankful we should be to Ben Harrison, and more recently Nick, for their efforts in keeping the Angband codebase clean and easily modifiable.

To be honest, while I'd love to see a new Nethack release (so much about the clunky old UI that frustrates me now I've got used to steady improvements in Angband), it does say something that as soon as I saw there was no date specified I immediately stopped believing anything was likely to happen within a timescale worth holding my breath for.

Many props to the Angband community for having kept everything in active, publicly visible development pretty much continually all these years.

[MattB]

Redraw is still not right, I'm afraid. Now I often get the
a)
b)
c)
etc.
after effects of menus lingering on the dungeon screen after the menu itself is gone.

Also, using Shockbolt (enable nice graphics), all of the 'tall' tiles leave multiple afterimages of their heads as trails wherever they go. Again, this is a redraw issue, I suspect.

[AnonymousHero]

To be honest, while I'd love to see a new Nethack release (so much about the clunky old UI that frustrates me now I've got used to steady improvements in Angband), it does say something that as soon as I saw there was no date specified I immediately stopped believing anything was likely to happen within a timescale worth holding my breath for.

Many props to the Angband community for having kept everything in active, publicly visible development pretty much continually all these years.

Seconded. These periodic announcements with promises, but no actual code releases and/or release dates have held back the variant Nethack variant creation for years and years. It's just about the worst thing you can do to a project, IMO. Hopefully, they'll get something out this time, but I'm not holding my breath. (Source: Roguelike Radio's Nethack episode.)

[AndyHK]

Playing the latest version.

1) I have my UI option set to make Uniques appear as purple and in the main window they do, but not always in the monster list on the terminal 3 window; Ar-Phaazon the Golden shows as a Gold “p”, Saruman as a shimmering “p”, and Carcharoth as a shimmering “C”.

2) Pathing still seems weird for some monsters and in some circumstances, for instance in one save file I have Omerax the Eye Tyrant seems unable to move up two squares to chase me but nothing is blocking his path. I have a safe file if you want to have a look.

<EDIT> I don't know if this is an intentional change but Sauron was also hesitant to come after me in a similar way and wouldn't come near my anti-summoning corridor at all.

3) I was able to teleport (via Rift) a Great Wyrm of Many Colours into an anti-summoning corridor filled with Glyphs of Warding (so he landed on a Glyph and broke it immediately). The Wyrm then broke each one coming up the corridor toWards me. The message was “The rune of protection is broken! You have removed the Glyph of Warding”. I didn’t remove it, the Wyrm did.

4) I had an Assertion Failed/ Obj-pile.c semi-repeatable bug when I went to open a chest. It happened twice on the same chest but was ok after that. I haven’t had it since. No save-file (sorry).

5) Is something going on with the frequency of randart generation in the dungeon? I am now at c-level 50, hovering between d-level 97 and 98 to get consumables for killing Sauron and Morgoth. So far I have only found 10 randarts out of 113 (including 3 rings and, 4 swords, 1 axe, 1 pair of boots and Dragon Scale Mail). I have not seen any artifact lights, amulets or any others at all which from my experience with previous games on 3.5.1 I should have found quite a few by now.

[fizzix]

Playing the latest version.

5) Is something going on with the frequency of randart generation in the dungeon? I am now at c-level 50, hovering between d-level 97 and 98 to get consumables for killing Sauron and Morgoth. So far I have only found 10 randarts out of 113 (including 3 rings and, 4 swords, 1 axe, 1 pair of boots and Dragon Scale Mail). I have not seen any artifact lights, amulets or any others at all which from my experience with previous games on 3.5.1 I should have found quite a few by now.

We should be able to test this with stats. The problem is that with the new functionality in 4.0 stats is painfully slow to run. You don't notice it when playing, but you do when you generate levels repeatedly. Where I used to get 1000 sims in about 5 minutes on my laptop, now I can only get much fewer. (admittedly, I last checked this a while ago, so maybe things have changed?)

The plan will be to rebalance 4.0 against 3.5 to make sure drop rates are roughly the same. I'm not sure we're at the point where it's worthwhile to do that yet.

[ekolis]

Haven't read through this entire thread - I've been away for a while - but is there any reason why the custom edit files are stored in the Angband folder and not a user folder on Windows? Why not somewhere in AppData, or in C:\Users\MyUsername\Angband if you don't like hidden folders?

[MattB]

Not sure if I've mentioned this before (apologies if so), but if you try and buy something when your inventory is full, nothing happens. No message - nothing. This keeps making me think I've miskeyed and try again. And again. Because I never learn from my mistakes.

[Nick]

Haven't read through this entire thread - I've been away for a while - but is there any reason why the custom edit files are stored in the Angband folder and not a user folder on Windows? Why not somewhere in AppData, or in C:\Users\MyUsername\Angband if you don't like hidden folders?

AFAIK user files (pref files, character dumps, etc) have always been kept in lib\user on Windows - probably because the most usual way of getting Angband for Windows has always been just an ordinary zip file, not any kind of installer. Of course if someone were to modernize the Windows port (or even write a whole new Windows UI) that would be great - but that person will not be me

[Nomad]

Utterly trivial as bugs go, but reading a Scroll of Darkness from a pile of them on the floor results in:

Darkness surrounds you.
You are blind.
You see a Scroll of Darkness.

[Nomad]

Resting to recover from the hallucination effect of a Mushroom of Emergency caused the window to briefly show a "(not responding)" error, though it cleared a little later without actually freezing/crashing.

I feel like there's something up with the resting mechanic, and possibly other repeat actions - in 3.5.1 you can rest hundreds of turns and the whole thing is over in a near instantaneous blip, but in 4.0 there are times when resting runs relatively quickly and other times when you can see the numbers visibly counting down and long rest periods take a perceptible amount of time to complete.

[Nomad]

Okay, I'm largely assuming the RNG is just playing with me for its own amusement at this point, but this is the third 4.0 game where I've found a Rod of Speed lying around on the floor extremely early in the dungeon. (In a checkerboard room at 350' in this case.) I've had a couple of early Staffs of Speed as well. In fact, in one game (actually this one I posted a save file from) I managed to find a +4 speed ring at 1050', a rod of speed at 1350', got +6 speed boots from Lokkak at 1700' (and I think those may even have replaced an earlier pair with a smaller boost), and then a +6 speed ring from a lesser vault at 1950'.

So is this just me, or are other people's games also raining speed items before they even make it to the halfway point?

[MattB]

Okay, I'm largely assuming the RNG is just playing with me for its own amusement at this point, but this is the third 4.0 game where I've found a Rod of Speed lying around on the floor extremely early in the dungeon. (In a checkerboard room at 350' in this case.) I've had a couple of early Staffs of Speed as well. In fact, in one game (actually this one I posted a save file from) I managed to find a +4 speed ring at 1050', a rod of speed at 1350', got +6 speed boots from Lokkak at 1700' (and I think those may even have replaced an earlier pair with a smaller boost), and then a +6 speed ring from a lesser vault at 1950'.

So is this just me, or are other people's games also raining speed items before they even make it to the halfway point?

Nope - just you. Stop your whinin'!

Seriously though, about a dozen runs and not a single rod of speed and only a few RoSp's (+6 to +11).

[Nomad]

Nope - just you. Stop your whinin'!

Well, all right then. If I'm just special, fair enough.

[PowerWyrm]

More bugs here: http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=7196

[Nomad]

If you pick up more than 10 types of ammo, it pushes whatever's in slot j of the quiver into the main inventory. I'd argue that either 1, you should get a "quiver full" message and not be able to pick it up at all, or 2, the newly picked up ammo should go into the main inventory rather than forcing out ammo that's already quivered.