Preparation for 4.1 release

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Thanks again everyone for all the bug reports. I am aiming to

1. Fix some of them or
2. At least do a summary post of where we are

real soon now.

"Where are we going?!"

"Planet 10!"

"When?!"

"Real soon!"

- Lord John Whorfin and the responding Johns - "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension".


Sorry, I couldn't resist...

[Pete Mack]

@t4nk--thanks for tracking down the blindness bug. I'd thought that blindness bug was purely a non-gameplay issue, so I got lazy.

[Nick]

Thanks again everyone for all the bug reports. I am aiming to

1. Fix some of them or
2. At least do a summary post of where we are

real soon now.

[Nick]

well, just a vague thought,

let's imagine a new system, related to the level feeling, that triggers when a certain amount of the initially spanwed entities are dead / identified (mobs/items); "you feel there is not much left on this level".

if you get this message, and you walk down the stairs, the market restocks.

this creates a new, artificial, time measuring system independent of turns. you go to the dungeon, you do "a full level", and this allows you to buy stock. Assuming, that you manage to bring back enough loot.

consumables ought to cost MUCH more, but be available more often. im specifically thinking CCW at 600gp each, CSW 200, CLW 30. Phase as well should cost more.

I'm keen on keeping the detect scrolls cheaper, but again, limited to a certain amount per "level". Even SHunger should cost more ... food that doesn't have carry weight?

Forget about stores selling high magic items. No more black market, lower substantially the value of egos. You are basically showing up to a hovel with a GOLD STUDDED CROWN and the poor guy can barely feed himself, he can't give you 30k gold and not even find a buyer for a thing like that.
Also a maximum spend per level from merchants would do great. Maybe just get store credit?



The idea is that loot should be valuable, and you WANT to find loot to sell, so you can get consumables that you NEED to progress.

But don't randomize whether a CSW is on sale, or if they have RLL. And don't make it so one day is 3 CCW, the next is 30 CCW.

Also, as you have seen, some BM items just break the game. Stat potions, wands of TO ...

And the major heal items should NEVER, ever be on sale. It's ridiculous that i can find a stack of 12 !Life which is the most rare potion in the game and a major tool to win the final encounter, on sale for peanuts, with no risk on my part.
Same for Ban, MBan, *Heal, ESP ..

(i would raise the low-mid level gold drops a bit)

Much of this you should be able to do for yourself, by editing files such as object.txt in the gamedata directory (you can, in fact, put a modified copy in your user directory instead if you wish to leave the originals unmodified).

If you have a precise notion of what non-datafile-editable changes you would like to see (banning certain items from selling, for example), they could potentially be combined and put into a birth option. Or you could make your own variant

[Derakon]

my playstyle might be high in turn count, but by no means slow. i can stay on a level for 20 seconds and have it "cleared", because i know there is nothing of interest there.

if i do that for 100 levels, i'll never have enough of anything. also, i have substantially better gear and stats by DL50.

People routinely play ironman no-recall forced-descent, which means one shot at each level and no town. It's reliably winnable with reasonably skilled play. That is in fact the "target playstyle" used for balance.

[Sky]

Moreover, given how frequently you return to town for no real reason beyond that your pack is full of useless high-value loot to turn into useless gold, it's no surprise that you find the Black Market to be an excessively large impact on your power level.

my playstyle might be high in turn count, but by no means slow. i can stay on a level for 20 seconds and have it "cleared", because i know there is nothing of interest there.

if i do that for 100 levels, i'll never have enough of anything. also, i have substantially better gear and stats by DL50.

[Pete Mack]

Treacherous Weapon doesn't seem to do anything. I used one for a long while (other curse activated ~5x) before giving up on auto-ID. Sold to store to discover it.

[t4nk]

@Nick--the same thing happens if you create something in wizard mode while blind. I discovered this ages ago, and had forgotten it til just now.

Now that was a pretty solid bug report, you all should learn from Pete

Pile management in Angband is pretty complicated (and very error prone, IMO...), so I might be wrong, but hopefully what I found will be useful.
I think the cause of this bug (and other similar bugs) is that the game tries to excise obj->known that is not actually in its pile (in p->cave->squares[y][x].obj). Consider:

bool floor_carry(struct chunk *c, int y, int x, struct object *drop, bool last)
{
	...

	/* Redraw */
	square_note_spot(c, y, x);
	...
}

void square_note_spot(struct chunk *c, int y, int x)
{
	...
	if (!square_isseen(c, y, x)) return;

	/* Make the player know precisely what is on this grid */
	square_know_pile(c, y, x);
	...
}

So, floor_carry() calls square_note_spot() that calls square_know_pile() that calls object_see() that does the right thing with obj->known and its pile. But if the player is blind or otherwise doesn't see the original square, then object_see() won't be called and pile won't be updated. That seems as it should be, but player_pickup_aux() calls square_excise_object() regardless (cmd_pickup.c:183).

	if (obj->known) {
		square_excise_object(p->cave, p->py, p->px, obj->known);

Estie also reported:

I think I was killing monsters that dropped items on an already stacked floor. Whether that has to do anything with the error I have no idea though.

That can probably happen if a monster picked up item on unseen grid (mon-move.c:1064; note that next line calls square_note_spot()) and then drop fails (floor_carry_fail()):

	struct object *known = drop->known;

	/* Delete completely */
	if (known) {
		...
		if (known->iy && known->ix)
			square_excise_object(player->cave, known->iy, known->ix, known);

edit: But if the square wasn't seen the object shouldn't be known and otherwise it should be linked correctly... yeah, it's pretty complicated...
edit: I checked again and I don't see how known's coordinates can be non-zero without being in correct pile.

AndreyB also reported similar bug with pile_excise(), unfortunately he didn't give enough details (did I mention that you all should learn from Pete? ), but his bug seems similar.

[kandrc]

as a D&D person, loot is what i live for. and i play with selling enabled.

So you're making suggestions for changes to the game based on what, by consensus of the community, is a deprecated style of play. If playing that way makes the game too easy--which clearly it does because you're pulling in 1, maybe 2 orders of magnitude (!) more gold than I do in a game, and you're maxing your stats at a depth where I have literally found 1, maybe two stat potions--then turn off selling.

[Malak Darkhunter]

Im an old D@D fan myself, its just that Angband has different ways of playing..the most fun for me was to forgo selling and just rely on the dungeon to for the most part provide me with what I need, and it will eventually, it is smart to check the shops every now and again for something interesting however. Im somewhat impatient and grinding gets boring to me unless I have a specific need. ie: (Free Action, See Invisible), or Detection. No selling took a bit of getting used to but it becomes quite liberating.

I typically get what I need at the start and start powerdiving all the way down to stat gain, spending more time on interesting levels along the way.

after I complete stat gain and deem it safe to venture further I powerdive again, then stop and grind some more until i feel confident about making another jaunt downward.

I typically keep powerdiving every so often all the way down to the bottom in between small periods of grinding. Once Im close to Sauron and Morgoth I start wiping out uniques and saving up healing pots and banishment scrolls. At the end I enjoy small periods of grinding while collecting resources.

Altogether money is only marginally useful,(there is more need for cash in variants such as Sangband where you can actually invest money in the stores for better items.) The Dungeon for the most part will give you what you need.

Grinding is only useful for specific needs, and money is not really that important anymore.

I think Angband has progressed to a much faster and more fun experience, I drop in every now and again just to play a new game now and then and to check up on the newest development.

[Derakon]

as a D&D person, loot is what i live for. and i play with selling enabled.

So, as we've discussed in the past, one of the great strengths of Angband is that you're free to play it however you like. That does not mean that the game will be balanced for every playstyle. When deciding on frequency of loot, costs of items, power/distribution of monsters, etc., the devs basically had to pick a "target playstyle" and say "we'll design the game so that this playstyle has an appropriate difficulty of play." Want a harder game? Grind less or play faster than the target playstyle. Want an easier game? Grind more, play slower.

The target playstyle is no-selling, clearing each dungeon floor exactly once. Your playstyle is substantially slower and grindier than that. It's no surprise that you find gold to be in plentiful supply. Moreover, given how frequently you return to town for no real reason beyond that your pack is full of useless high-value loot to turn into useless gold, it's no surprise that you find the Black Market to be an excessively large impact on your power level.

Long story short, when you make balance suggestions, the devs have to calibrate your suggestions against your playstyle, moreso than they do for most of the players on these forums whose playstyles more closely approximate the target playstyle. Indeed I suspect that most players on the forums have a playstyle that's rather faster than the target playstyle.

[Sky]

Should the depth you have to clear be progress dependent (such as max XL) or will D1 do?

i supposed the depth might influence the availability of consumables.

i understand this requires a whole new level of coding, but it's easily on the same page as more modern RPGs.

Where are you getting all this gold? I typically can't afford even a single stat potion in the BM until I'm down in the 80s or even 90s.

as a D&D person, loot is what i live for. and i play with selling enabled.

a single weapon of gondolin is 16k-25k gold. Wands and staves are your first source of solid cash, at 500-1k each. then it's magic armor, ego weapon, superego (?) like gondolin, westernesse, etc and armors of resistance. once you get to seeing 2-3 chain mails of resistance per level, you can buy anything you please, including :

stacks of Acquirement and *Acquirement
stacks of Mass Banishment
stack of *Healing, Life

if i'm playing a Mage, i'm on the lookout for potions of Intellect. get 3-4 of those (total cost: 12.000gold) and you will have WAY more SP than what your current DL expects you to have; and also a slightly lower fail chance.
Which means you can just nuke everything before they even touch you.

i'm pretty much maxed on stats by the time i'm on DL50.

[kandrc]

well, just a vague thought,

consumables ought to cost MUCH more, but be available more often. im specifically thinking CCW at 600gp each, CSW 200, CLW 30. Phase as well should cost more.

Where are you getting all this gold? I typically can't afford even a single stat potion in the BM until I'm down in the 80s or even 90s.

[Pete Mack]

@Nick--the same thing happens if you create something in wizard mode while blind. I discovered this ages ago, and had forgotten it til just now.

[wobbly]

@Nick - yep entire file, & just g, crash