Preparation for 4.1 release

[Nomad]

Okay, this is kind of silly:

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It's dark, so I can't see that the door in front of me which was previously closed is now open. But my infravision stretches further than my light radius, so I have a direct line of sight to Orfax where he's standing on the other side of the door. Nonetheless, I remain convinced that the door in between us is still closed.

(Edit: I was gonna say you could probably just update dungeon features within infravision range, but then it occurred to me that presumably you'd also have the same problem with a door in a dark square between you and a more distant monster with its own light source.)

[Saplaran]

Just to be clear, is this a request that you can use letters, or that the prompt be changed? Or both?

It would be nice if you could use letters, too, or you change the prompt since letters don't do anything.

[Saplaran]

It now only detects secret doors, so is working as intended.

Maybe you should rename it then to something like "Detect stairs and hidden terrain"?

[Saplaran]

It is just possible that I may consider having a line like the yellow cursor box that goes between grids rather than overwriting them with the wrong colour, at some point in the future. But that's not really something I want to do currently while I'm in the last throes of cleaning up bugs and preparing for the first release with major gameplay changes for three and a half years.

A simple textmessage when you leave the area would be enough, maybe with the old flag in the bottom status-line.

[kandrc]

A simple textmessage when you leave the area would be enough, maybe with the old flag in the bottom status-line.

Indeed. We, at the keyboard, do not always know where we've detected. I do not think it's reasonable gameplay that the character is in the same position. The character has called on some high magic to overlay a specialty map on the terrain within in its mind; it knows where it stands within that map. Status indicators would at least be better than we have now. Better yet would be status indicators plus a command to render an overlay for various kinds of detection. 'O'bserve could overlay, say, trap detection by default, and have a toggle menu to overlay other kinds of detection. Frankly, even if the terrain went away and only the detection regions were displayed, it would still be better. In that case, we can switch between them to where we've already detected, where we want to go in order to hit that corner that we're not sure if we want to venture into...

Or maybe you just don't like green? Perhaps a cyan or magenta line?

[bio_hazard]

bio_hazard is pointing out that the two effects from the elemental rings are at odds -- enemies that would be hurt by a fireball are unlikely to be attacking you with fire damage (so the temp resist is useless), and vice versa. There's a point to be had there, but I think it's fine to only have one or the other effect be useful in a given situation, and I've always found elemental "inversion" (fire means cold damage, etc.) confusing. Especially if you want to posit that lightning and acid are somehow opposites.

In any case, I'd be somewhat worried if I were still using a Ring of Fire by the time Smaug came around!

Back a couple of pages now, but what about having the ball activation optional? I find it happens that I only want the resist and it's actually a lot of trouble to park the ball spell somewhere where it won't wake anything up or destroy loot on the ground. Maybe that's the whole point of this being a relatively early ring that's not 100% useful in all situations.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

There's a new build up, with one change - books are now automatically inscribed with 1-9.

If one of the basic tenants is to make variants easier to create, than this change in its current form creates problems. I just tried it, and any new user created books cannot be selected to cast magic as a number doesn't appear. (Well, the first in the list is selected, or you can arrow key to the next book, but there is no simple way to select by number or to use key-maps for selecting spells). Book_Tags aren't in the object.txt code, so the numbers can't be edited, added to or deleted. Or am I missing a way for user-editable files to resolve the problem? User inscription does not override the Book_Tag, so that doesn't solve it either.

[takkaria]

If one of the basic tenants is to make variants easier to create, than this change in its current form creates problems. I just tried it, and any new user created books cannot be selected to cast magic as a number doesn't appear. (Well, the first in the list is selected, or you can arrow key to the next book, but there is no simple way to select by number or to use key-maps for selecting spells). Book_Tags aren't in the object.txt code, so the numbers can't be edited, added to or deleted. Or am I missing a way for user-editable files to resolve the problem? User inscription does not override the Book_Tag, so that doesn't solve it either.

So the numbers are derived from the order in which they appear in the object.txt file. If you add one book at the end of the list, that should be #9. After that there isn't anything at present, but I can modify it so that 0 will follow 9.

I think it's true that Angband should be for variants, but there are tradeoffs. This particular change is there to allow the vast majority of people to play without having to set up inscriptions and auto-inscriptions on books if they don't want to accidentally cast the wrong spell occasionally. I will modify it so that after the first 10 it reverts to letters.

[Nick]

New builds up on the nightlies page, changes are:

• Vortices now resist poison, silver jellies are not hurt by light
• Terrain and objects in the blast radius of earthquake and destruction are forgotten
• Items on the ground destroyed by failed curse removal disappear properly
• Bug causing all randart jewellery to get +3 light is fixed
• Dead characters can be reopened with the -w switch again

There are no only a couple of bugs left on the tracker, but there are also some relatively recently reported bugs I haven't filed; there are also some other pre-release tasks to do, like updating help.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

So the numbers are derived from the order in which they appear in the object.txt file. If you add one book at the end of the list, that should be #9. After that there isn't anything at present, but I can modify it so that 0 will follow 9.

I think it's true that Angband should be for variants, but there are tradeoffs. This particular change is there to allow the vast majority of people to play without having to set up inscriptions and auto-inscriptions on books if they don't want to accidentally cast the wrong spell occasionally. I will modify it so that after the first 10 it reverts to letters.

That makes sense. Nine should ordinarily be enough, but since currently the number of magic realms isn't user-editable, making a new class requires tacking on books to the existing realms, but only used by the new class. In my test case, even your proposed solution will probably fail as my test is a "hybrid" class with spells in a red book and spells in a green book. It's likely then that their "number" will overlap, e.g., book "a" red book and book "a" green book.

Would it make more sense to provide the ability to expand the number of magic realms? Then one could, for example, modify constants.txt for 3 realms, just use "3" for the magic realm in the class.txt spells for the new class, create books identified as realm "3" in objects.txt, and presumably your new numbering system would then work just fine with an upper total of nine books per realm.

[Nick]

Would it make more sense to provide the ability to expand the number of magic realms? Then one could, for example, modify constants.txt for 3 realms, just use "3" for the magic realm in the class.txt spells for the new class, create books identified as realm "3" in objects.txt, and presumably your new numbering system would then work just fine with an upper total of nine books per realm.

Yes, it would. One of the first things (caveat: there are a few first things) I will be doing post-4.1 is re-doing how magic realms are handled. There will be a number of details to thrash out, but I'm at least looking at the potential for a class to have books from more than one realm (if realm is even the correct concept).

[Derakon]

Yes, it would. One of the first things (caveat: there are a few first things) I will be doing post-4.1 is re-doing how magic realms are handled. There will be a number of details to thrash out, but I'm at least looking at the potential for a class to have books from more than one realm (if realm is even the correct concept).

Just ditch the concept of realms as a logical thing altogether. Books have spells and a color/icon, different classes can access different subsets of spells from different books, and sort them in the inventory based on their native depth.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Yes, it would. One of the first things (caveat: there are a few first things) I will be doing post-4.1 is re-doing how magic realms are handled. There will be a number of details to thrash out, but I'm at least looking at the potential for a class to have books from more than one realm (if realm is even the correct concept).

I didn't think it would be too hard, but apparently it is. I'm guessing it breaks down in the Number of spell realms used in the "book:" line of class.txt but that's just a guess.

Here's what I thought would work, but fails (copying these from gamedata to the main angband directory then modifying):

realm.txt (adding a realm to the list and modifying names as appropriate).

object_base.txt (adding new book type corresponding to new book-noun used in realm.txt)

object.txt (adding new books corresponding to the new book-noun used in realm.txt, with such graphics, properties, allocation, etc. as desired)

class.txt (realm : the new realm name used in realm.txt; magic : as normal, with such number of books as added to object.txt for the realm; book : new book noun used in realm.txt : [Name of Book] used in object.txt : number of spells : realm number

spell: doesn't link to realm or object, so should be fine to use spells as they are. For future possible work, putting spell effects into editable files so that new spells could be created.

The above doesn't work, I think possibly because "book:" in class.txt references a realm number that isn't part of the realm.txt file or anywhere else I could see, but must be used by the game somewhere.

It does work if one doesn't add a realm, and just adds books to the current realms and uses only those new books for the class (could be ones from both realms, though one realm needed to be chosen for spell points stat). Well, it did work until the automatic numbering of books made accessing the magic in those books unwieldy (can now only be done with arrow keys to move between books each time a spell is to be cast and those spells cannot be accessed using keymaps).

Obviously, you have an intimate knowledge of the code and can identify other areas where user-editing of realms is breaking down. My initial goal was to create a sort of Dunedan Ranger that could access both healing "priestly" magic and wizardly "arcane" magic. Thinking of Faramir, the student of Gandalf. I also created a super-race/class Valar-Istari, to test the editabllity of game files, long ago when Nick first started this process and I did extensive game testing, including parsing through the gamedata files line by line.

[Nomad]

Just ditch the concept of realms as a logical thing altogether. Books have spells and a color/icon, different classes can access different subsets of spells from different books, and sort them in the inventory based on their native depth.

I feel like spellbooks should be themed by subject/spell type, with each class able to use some, all or none of the spells from a given book as appropriate. (A fair number of essential spells are duplicated or have similar counterparts across both red and green books anyway.) Give each class a suitable subject area as their starter book - so, say, maybe rogues get the book of detections, mages get attacks, rangers get escapes, priests get healing, paladins get buffs - and then those five starter books can the town books, all available for a similar price, with four additional dungeon books of rarer spells.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

I feel like spellbooks should be themed by subject/spell type, with each class able to use some, all or none of the spells from a given book as appropriate. (A fair number of essential spells are duplicated or have similar counterparts across both red and green books anyway.) Give each class a suitable subject area as their starter book - so, say, maybe rogues get the book of detections, mages get attacks, rangers get escapes, priests get healing, paladins get buffs - and then those five starter books can the town books, all available for a similar price, with four additional dungeon books of rarer spells.

If it were only Vanilla, that might work, but what I'm talking about is to be able to create other classes like Druids, Necromancers, etc., a la FAAngband, for example. Making it much easier for Nick on that great day he gets back to FAAngband or even Beleriand, not to mention others with variant aspirations. I don't think generic deterministic grouping would work so well in such broader universe.