3.a advocacy

[PowerDiver]

I've released the code I play, in which I implemented many ideas I posted about here years ago. I believe it is close to 3.0 in spirit, but that may just be my personal biases.

My source is at

https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21ALVh4_pxj53aWRI&id=CDE8AC50859A409%21126&cid=0CDE8AC50859A409

and t4nk kindly produced a windows executable at

https://mega.nz/#!JZoglRzT!kMi1DGS2AVck4370hD9GDwdgwVGw8LxtI-weEhdb814

[edit]
t4nk produced an improved version

https://mega.nz/#!oFRCGBJA!b7bs4C9tus9fZAQ72f9rpWMf3hHgJduwLVj3c_dluZI

This is alpha code. I tried hard to keep in-game descriptions correct, but there are undoubtedly many mistakes.


I would like people to use this thread to talk only about whether 3.a is good or bad, and whether individual ideas are good or bad. I will start a second thread for rules, and a third thread for advice.

[fizzix]

Thank you for posting this. I will definitely give it a shot, presumably when it inevitably becomes an upcoming competition.

[t4nk]

I spent some time playing it today. I highly recommend to give it a try. There are just so many good ideas.

[Grotug]

Is there much of a learning curve coming from Vanilla? (it's all I play and always find I don't have the patience for the adjustment that variants require).

[PowerDiver]

I don't have the patience for the adjustment that variants require

The adjustments will be more in terms of gameplay than in different rules.

The biggest difference is the intent that the player will learn flavors by use. You can mostly mitigate that using the easiness option always_learn. I didn't test that well, but hopefully it works.

I'd guess the biggest learning curve is dealing with different spellbooks. I wanted to differentiate the classes, so I changed who gets what spells. So long as I was doing that, I made changes to the letters of the spells in a fashion that will allow for random or mixed-class spellbooks. (a) is always a bolt, (b) is always a detection, etc. The upshot is that spells won't be where you used to find them.

It worked. The classes are truly differentiated. I need to use different approaches when playing different classes.

I assume 3.a requires significantly more skill to win than 3.1+, even if one uses always_learn. A stack of !CCW [renamed cure deadly ailments] doesn't turn @ into a healer. I crushed many abusable gameplay mechanisms. @ will power up more slowly. I don't know if you'd consider dealing with that sort of stuff to be "adjusting to a variant".

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Should these be variant threads? Will 3a be available for OS at some point?

[PowerDiver]

Should these be variant threads? Will 3a be available for OS at some point?

The question of what is Vanilla is a religious war. IMO, 3.a is Vanilla -- the appropriate successor to 3.0. IMO 3.1+ is the unspeakable variant. The dev team might have a different opinion, but I expect to have at least a little support even there after they play it a bit. In any event, 3.a is the first successor to 3.0 that has any semblance of old fashioned game balance, although it is possible I made things a bit too difficult.

I chose carefully when I posted these threads to the Vanilla section of the fora. It's where they belong, even if you consider 3.a to be a crazy variant. At a minimum 3.a is a testing ground for ideas that were discussed over the years as possible improvements to V. Presumably at least a few of my mods will migrate to 4.something. One of the points of this thread [advocacy] is for people to argue about the worth of any specific ideas they want to see migrate.

Presumably someone capable of compiling 3.0 for OS could compile 3.a for OS. That someone would not be me.

[Nick]

The question of what is Vanilla is a religious war. IMO, 3.a is Vanilla -- the appropriate successor to 3.0. IMO 3.1+ is the unspeakable variant. The dev team might have a different opinion, but I expect to have at least a little support even there after they play it a bit. In any event, 3.a is the first successor to 3.0 that has any semblance of old fashioned game balance, although it is possible I made things a bit too difficult.

I chose carefully when I posted these threads to the Vanilla section of the fora. It's where they belong, even if you consider 3.a to be a crazy variant. At a minimum 3.a is a testing ground for ideas that were discussed over the years as possible improvements to V. Presumably at least a few of my mods will migrate to 4.something. One of the points of this thread [advocacy] is for people to argue about the worth of any specific ideas they want to see migrate.

Well, whenever someone has argued against a gameplay change, my response has been along the lines of "Angband is a community game - if someone puts out something claiming to be Angband and the community accepts it, then that's what it is". Good to see it's finally happened

I'm not planning to try it at the moment - regrettably, I'm barely even playing (what I regard as) V at the moment - but I'm very interested to hear others comparing and contrasting.

I'm going to call 3.a a fork

[t4nk]

I don't like bad items. Especially potions and mushrooms that drain stats (but also useless things like staffs of darkness). What kind of good gameplay do they promote? I haven't found anything that restores stats yet. Looks like shops don't sell restoring things?

[PowerDiver]

I don't like bad items. Especially potions and mushrooms that drain stats (but also useless things like staffs of darkness). What kind of good gameplay do they promote? I haven't found anything that restores stats yet. Looks like shops don't sell restoring things?

Questions about how to use stuff or how to get restores should go into the advice thread.


I will offer this general perspective to people considering playing. If you can't get over being forced to use bad items, even needing to search them out, then this is not the version for you. If you all want to opine that this sucks, that's only fair. I did ask you to express your opinions.

[t4nk]

Bad items truly suck, but what I really hate is "{tried}". Fortunately, there is an option to disable it.
While playing, it occured to me that the cursor and 'r'ecall should work on overview map (the 'M' command). There was even, I think, a ticket, to make the main map (term_screen) zoom out when using TARGET_LOOK, but it would be better and simpler if overview map just was interactive (that's not a feature request for 3.a.0 it's what I should probably do at some point...)

[PowerDiver]

"Angband is a community game - if someone puts out something claiming to be Angband and the community accepts it, then that's what it is". Good to see it's finally happened

How am I supposed to argue with that? You are far too reasonable.

[Nick]

How am I supposed to argue with that? You are far too reasonable.

The beauty of it is, I don't have to spend time trying to argue with you now

[Grotug]

I'd like to try this out now, but I am on a Mac and have no coding/hacking skills. :-/

Is it runnable through Mac's Terminal?

[debo]

Hi, I'm running in an extremely time- and bandwidth-limited environment at the moment. I would really love to have EddieBand played as the next comp starting ASAP, but I'm not going to be able to run/compile the stuff in this thread and figure out how to make a decent comp-ready savefile (with appropriate birth-options etc.) anytime soon.

Are there any volunteers to create such a savefile? Otherwise we'll probably delay an EddieBand comp until such time that I can sit down in someplace civilized and do the tinkering.