Angband 4.0beta status

[Ingwe Ingweron]

The descriptions are precise - they're just not fully informative to the newcomer:

• The Purging description doesn't tell you that being "nourished for 499 turns" means you're at the point of fainting
• The Sprinting description doesn't tell you that the sprinting effect means haste followed by slowing

Personally, I'm comfortable with that

Well, you are the master so it's up to you. A fuller description was given in 3.5.1 and, for a newbie, even after eating the mushroom I think they will be left confused and wondering what went wrong. They won't find any explanation anywhere in the game as to the ill effect their @ suffered.

[Nick]

Well, you are the master so it's up to you. A fuller description was given in 3.5.1 and, for a newbie, even after eating the mushroom I think they will be left confused and wondering what went wrong. They won't find any explanation anywhere in the game as to the ill effect their @ suffered.

The problem I've been having with this is that with the new structure of effects, the effect descriptions need to be a bit more general. So the sprinting effect is actually implemented as "increased in timed effect", so it's hard to get the details in there. Similarly, purging is "set food value", and the effect doesn't know that that means the player is left hungry.

On the other hand, the thing that I was completely forgetting was that every object also can have a general description as well as its effect description. So the next update will have some new object descriptions

[Nick]

Update 58e2622 fixes:

• Some inadequate mushroom descriptions
• Errors in Wonder effect (thanks PowerWyrm)
• More fixes to Wonder...
• Update of help files

Still haven't finished the last help file, and will probably change the OSX user directory as discussed earlier - this means the ~/Documents/Angband directory in OSX and the ~/.angband/Angband directory in Linux behave exactly the same.

[tumbleweed]

angband-win-v4.0beta-356-g0644321

• Trying to dig into Lava: "This seems to be permanent rock."
• The Options menu does not actually have a menu item that brings up the in-game options ('=') analogous to Help->Contents bringing up the help ('?')

Some more issues that seem to specifically affect non-1x1 tile modes:

• There are odd redrawing issues when you Alt+Tab, Alt+Tab right after moving. Ctrl+R afterwards fixes, and so does using Ctrl+R BEFORE doing the Alt+Tab, Alt+Tab thing.
• There's something about trying to look after leaving a shop that sometimes makes your character disappear?! For example by moving to the far west of town, toggling mouse movement, then entering and leaving a shop, then pressing 'l', then picking a direction that doesn't land you anywhere interesting (west or north-west to the edge of town in my case) - I know this is horribly unspecific, but I've been able to (unreliably) reproduce the issue several times. Ctrl+R afterwards fixes, but using Ctrl+R BEFORE looking does NOT prevent the quirky behavior. Saving and reloading before looking DOES prevent the quirky behavior.
• It is possible to open the context menu at the very right edge of the game window, but not closer than about one context menu height to the bottom of the window.

And some assorted suggestions, possibly for later versions:

• Flash screen red/green/orange/brown/whatever when receiving periodic damage/effects like bleeding/poison/hunger?
• Colorize disenchantment and item destruction messages, and possibly others that are not "business as usual"?
• Make the Main Gauche a shield (off-hand item) that mostly boosts offense? (I haven't thought about the implications for balance)?

Also there's a bunch of issues I've reported before that still affect the game, but I guess I better cross-check with the issue tracker before reporting them again.

[Timo Pietilä]

angband-win-v4.0beta-356-g0644321

• Trying to dig into Lava: "This seems to be permanent rock."

That one should obviously be "You just burned to crisp. You die -more-"

[tumbleweed]

Oh, totally.

angband-win-v4.0beta-360-g58e2622

• Got a reliably reproducible assertion failure trying to look at that lava square to the northeast using the context menu.
  

  File: cave-square.c
  
  Line: 522
  
  Expression: square_in_bounds(c, y, x)

  
  Ignoring makes the game throw the same failure again, this time at line 532.
  The top row of squares in the image is the very topmost in town, in case that matters.

[takkaria]

Angband 4.0 dev a5ccbbe

Not necessarily a bug, but as of this version the file saving structure has been changed. Instead of saving scores in the Apex directory, and savefiles in the Save directory, these are both now being saved in subdirectories of the User directory. Is the higher level Save directory now redundant? Was this an intended change?

Nick, can we change the names of subdirectories while there's going to be no backwards compatibility? I've been hacking on Angband for years and I still didn't get 'apex' until just now.

e.g.

apex -> highscore
file -> text
info -> spoiler?

Take everything out of the xtra/ subdirectory just into lib/, and then...

xtra/graf -> graphics

???

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Update 58e2622 fixes....

The MacOSX version is still not up. That's a pretty long time for it to compile, isn't it? Or, is there a different problem?

[Nick]

Oh, totally.

angband-win-v4.0beta-360-g58e2622

• Got a reliably reproducible assertion failure trying to look at that lava square to the northeast using the context menu.
  

  File: cave-square.c
  
  Line: 522
  
  Expression: square_in_bounds(c, y, x)

  
  Ignoring makes the game throw the same failure again, this time at line 532.
  The top row of squares in the image is the very topmost in town, in case that matters.

So is that when you right-click on the lava grid? Is that in Windows?

I had believed all the tile drawing issues were fixed - what are you still seeing?

[Nick]

The MacOSX version is still not up. That's a pretty long time for it to compile, isn't it? Or, is there a different problem?

It's there now. The OSX buildslave is actually my dev machine, and I had an internet outage

[Nick]

Nick, can we change the names of subdirectories while there's going to be no backwards compatibility? I've been hacking on Angband for years and I still didn't get 'apex' until just now.

e.g.

apex -> highscore
file -> text
info -> spoiler?

Take everything out of the xtra/ subdirectory just into lib/, and then...

xtra/graf -> graphics

???

I can't believe we didn't already do this. On Linux apex is already scores (so I lied earlier) - yeah, I think they probably just about all should change, in particular edit->templates.

[tumbleweed]

So is that when you right-click on the lava grid? Is that in Windows?

Yeah, like I said, angband-win-v4.0beta-360-g58e2622

I right-click on the adjacent lava tile to the northeast, then pick "l) Look At" from the context menu. Then kaboom.

Edit: Happens as long as I stand in a straight diagonal to the southwest of that lava tile, no matter what the distance. Maybe LoS related.

I had believed all the tile drawing issues were fixed - what are you still seeing?

I do still see quite a bunch of tile (re)drawing issues. Especially most if not all the non-1x1 oddities I've previously reported, like object menus not being erased properly when switching between inventory, quiver and equipment.

Third time's the charm for attaching the screenshot

[Nick]

Update 781f39c fixes:

• Spell typos (thanks PowerWyrm)
• tumbleweed's looking crash - was in fact looking at any edge square
• Improve tile behaviour with object menus (still not perfect - there can be a leftover line of numbers down the right edge in some circumstances)
• Make the cursor remain big for big tiles

Still need to do more help, and takkaria's directory rename.

[tumbleweed]

Update 781f39c fixes:

• tumbleweed's looking crash - was in fact looking at any edge square

Odd. I never managed to trigger it by looking at the lava directly from the south (or from anywhere outside the straight diagonal to the southwest for that matter), nor by looking at any of the nearby permanent wall tiles from anywhere.

angband-win-v4.0beta-356-g0644321

• There's something about trying to look after leaving a shop that sometimes makes your character disappear?! For example by moving to the far west of town, toggling mouse movement, then entering and leaving a shop, then pressing 'l', then picking a direction that doesn't land you anywhere interesting (west or north-west to the edge of town in my case) - I know this is horribly unspecific, but I've been able to (unreliably) reproduce the issue several times. Ctrl+R afterwards fixes, but using Ctrl+R BEFORE looking does NOT prevent the quirky behavior. Saving and reloading before looking DOES prevent the quirky behavior.

angband-win-v4.0beta-365-g781f39c

All right, here's a savefile that might help with this issue.

It can be reproduced with the following steps:

1. Enter the shop to the southeast.
2. Leave the shop, take one step to the northwest.
3. Press 'l'.
4. Pick a direction. Northwest has been working reliably for me, but other directions may trigger the issue as well.

And some observations I made regarding this curious glitch:

• It seems to depend on the scrolling position and/or game window size. In this case I've been using a client area of 1076x788.
• You need to be close enough to the edge of the level so no automatic centering happens - or would happen - when leaving the shop and taking the step away from the door. This seems to apply regardless of whether center_player is enabled!

[Nick]

There is going to be a delay in final release. For this, you can blame takkaria and tumbleweed in about equal measure - well, you should really blame me, but I'm blaming them and transitive closure of the blame relation means you all should too.

It struck me as I read tumbleweed's tiny (read: actually quite large) request that these two linked posts are indeed linked, but to each other, and there should be a big reshuffle, rename and reorganise of all the lib directories. So I'm planning to tear that all apart and put it back together in a way that respects the changes in the rest of the game while lib/ has remained static.

I'll try not to take too long over it, and please keep playing and submitting bugs in the mean time.