Preparation for 4.1 release

[PowerWyrm]

This is clearly bad; I'll file it as a bug, but I am not terribly hopeful of either reproducing it or working out what went wrong without reproducing it.

Never saw that before. Probably related to the new dungeon layouts added in the latest builds (lair and such).

[Sky]

Thats a cursed amulet you got there.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

You see an Amulet of Resist Acid {??}. Identify it and you learn the rune of resist acid. Seems that if I know the name of this amulet, shouldn't @ know the rune?

[Nomad]

Torches no longer disappear when they run out of fuel in the latest nightly; you're now just left with a Wooden Torch (0 turns).

Some related oddities - you no longer seem to get the warning messages to tell you when the light level is running low, and instead of the "your light has gone out" message when it completely runs out, you get "Your Wooden Torch has recharged."

[Nick]

Sorry, to have derailed the bug squashing with all this. Though, in my defense, it is a bug, just one that is being delayed until next time. I hope all your thought about realms will still prove useful in the end, so your time will not have been wasted.

No need to apologise - as you say, it was thought that needed to be had at some point, and my inability to stay focused is my problem, not anyone else's

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Funnily enough, realm number is vestigial and isn't used for anything.

I found a workaround for my strange hybrid class experiment, though it does nothing for the larger other realms issues. I just changed the classes "new" prayer book into a "magic" book in object.txt and class.txt, although kept it as realm "2". Now, the book appears as red in the inventory (green on the ground) and @ can cast spells as usual even with Takkaria's new system.

Sorry, to have derailed the bug squashing with all this. Though, in my defense, it is a bug, just one that is being delayed until next time. I hope all your thought about realms will still prove useful in the end, so your time will not have been wasted.

[takkaria]

Can't you achieve the same thing by using autoinscriptions though? Even having the books autoinscribed by default. I just think that anything that can be changed inside editable files should be, and hard coding should be a last resort.

In fact I'm probably going to be autoinscribing books 1-8 with a-h now.

I think using autoinscriptions for this is an unnecessary workaround to a bad UI, so I'd rather just fix the UI. It's fine for people who already know the game but it's just added complexity for new players. I will work out how to allow both letters and numbers when selecting a spell, though.

[Nick]

In the penultimate nightly (I didn't realize you'd just uploaded a new version while I was playing), @ descended stairs and used a mapping stave, with the result depicted in the attached. Namely, @ surrounded by walls in a single cell off to the left, and the entire dungeon (guessing it's a special room or vault) completely separated from @. Too far to phase door and no recall leave the @ stranded.

[ATTACH]1541[/ATTACH]

Edit: In fact, attempting either Phase Door or Teleport Self results in the game locking-up and eventually crashing.

This is clearly bad; I'll file it as a bug, but I am not terribly hopeful of either reproducing it or working out what went wrong without reproducing it.

[Nomad]

Wait, I've remembered the bug I actually came into this thread to post about!

Torches no longer disappear when they run out of fuel in the latest nightly; you're now just left with a Wooden Torch (0 turns).

[Nomad]

I was waiting for this for a long time. Currently, Angband only has 2 sets of books. My variant has 9. And many spells like Call Light or Detect Traps are duplicated in all the books. Would be great to reorganize the spells into schools like what's done in the ToME variants (Mana, Fire, Conveyance, Divination...) and then assign differents schools to classes.

Maybe schools could have a fixed number and spells be lettered across all books in that school, rather than individually by book? e.g., the first book contains spells lettered a-f, second book contains spells lettered g-k, third book l-q, etc. Then a spell would always be at the exact same 'address' regardless of how many books you are or aren't carrying. So if, say, escape spells are school 2 and Teleport is in slot h in the second book, you will always type m2h to cast Teleport, regardless of whether you're carrying just that particular book with teleport in or another number of others from the same or different schools.

If you restrict each school to 23 spells, slots a-w like the inventory, then they'll all fit on a single screen and you can have a nice combined interface that shows you all currently available spells from that school in one long list rather than needing to remember which individual book you want. Ten schools of magic (if you use 0 as a number as well) would give you 230 spells to play with. In fact, if it's going to be fixed schools rather than books that move around in the inventory, no reason you can't use letters and have 26 (or 52!) schools if you need more than 10 for variants.

Anyway, here's the thread where we were kicking around ideas for magic systems a while back, so we should probably take this discussion over there if it's going to be ongoing.

Oh, one more point, though - if we're going to expand the number of books, might I suggest an "Auto-ignore all non-aligned spellbooks" menu option rather than making poor warriors in particular manually squelch each individual book every game?

[Nick]

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.

Funnily enough, realm number is vestigial and isn't used for anything. The real problem is that there is a hard-coded translation between object bases and the symbols used for referring to the bases in the code. This would be hard to remove, because the code actually needs to know about aspects of how books behave as distinct from other objects.

I do have the aim of allowing classes to take books from more than one realm; the main obstacle to be overcome (which you mentioned) is that calculations of mana, number of spells, fail rate, etc currently assume a single realm.

This thread has now been thoroughly derailed, and I have not fixed any bugs today because I've been thinking about how magic realms work

[PowerWyrm]

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 was waiting for this for a long time. Currently, Angband only has 2 sets of books. My variant has 9. And many spells like Call Light or Detect Traps are duplicated in all the books. Would be great to reorganize the spells into schools like what's done in the ToME variants (Mana, Fire, Conveyance, Divination...) and then assign differents schools to classes.

[Gwarl]

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.

Can't you achieve the same thing by using autoinscriptions though? Even having the books autoinscribed by default. I just think that anything that can be changed inside editable files should be, and hard coding should be a last resort.

In fact I'm probably going to be autoinscribing books 1-8 with a-h now.

[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.

[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.