feature/monster

[Nick]

Well, that was the Weekend of the Undead.

New builds for Windows and macOS are up on the builds page (source is here). Changes are:

• Wraiths:
  • White, grey, black and nether wraiths all buffed and moved deeper, so the wights are all shallower than wraiths
  • Major changes to Ringwraiths:
    • They all get a new melee attack which inflicts the Black Breath; this only lasts a short time, but has nasty stat and experience drain effects while it lasts
    • They are all able to summon Ringwraiths
    • They are all now deep monsters, below level 75
    • Their spellcasting and melee have been upgraded accordingly; they still have individual differences, though
• Vampires:Vampire lords and elder vampires moved a few levels deeper
• Ghosts:
  • Shades and spectres buffed a little and moved a little deeper
  • Phantoms buffed a little and should have been moved deeper, except I missed editing that line; will be deeper in the next release
  • Shadows buffed considerably and moved deeper
  • Dreads and dreadmasters moved deeper
• Skeletons:
  • Eye drujs buffed slightly and moved deeper
  • Skull drujs buffed a bit more and moved even deeper
  • Cantoras buffed a bit
• Nagas: Medusa replaced by non-unique gorgons
• Bats:
  • Fruit bats movement made a bit random
  • Giant tan bats now move less randomly and come in packs
  • Doombats sped up
• Golems:
  • Colbrans given more spells and moved deeper
  • Drolems moved deeper
• The "cause wounds" spells have been unified into a single spell, with damage dependent on monster spell power
• A similar thing has been done for the arrow "spells", and shot and bolt versions have been added
• Sundry other tweaks to spells

So that's quite a lot. Opinions and testing encouraged.

[Thraalbee]

My new firewall blocks the windows binary. Not sure why. I get:
"This request is blocked by the Firewall Gateway Anti-Virus Service. Name: Artemis.A_394 (Trojan) blocked."

[Thraalbee]

Really appreciating all your hard work on monsters I decided to brush up the monster viewer. It seems to work fine with the latest release. Enjoy!

https://thraalbee.azurewebsites.net/monview/

It runs locally too without a web server. Downloadable with the same link, just add monviewer.zip to the url.

[EDIT] The selector for a specific group is temporarily removed
[EDIT2] On further testing I see a few monsters don't display properly. Regexp issues... Will post when fixed

[Thraalbee]

The "Plot" is a bit slow. Click a glyph for details
[EDIT] oops, quite crappy code, fixed in dev

[MattB]

Every time I play Angband, I always think:
'You know what could really use buffing? Drujs!'
Actually, hang on...
;-)

[Nick]

Really appreciating all your hard work on monsters I decided to brush up the monster viewer. It seems to work fine with the latest release. Enjoy!

https://thraalbee.azurewebsites.net/monview/

Brilliant! I have been using a script to dump out details.

EDIT: Hm, looks like not all monsters are there - Saruman is missing for me; also Carcharoth
EDIT2: On the other hand, I am finding errors I've made too

[mrfy]

Just ran across Beorn, while playing the most recent version. Was a bit weird with him changing back and forth between man and bear, but I guess the bear form doesn't last. I see he is listed twice in the unique list. After he was killed, it lists "Beorn, the Shape-Changer" as dead and "Beorn, the Mountain Bear" as alive.

[Nick]

Just ran across Beorn, while playing the most recent version. Was a bit weird with him changing back and forth between man and bear, but I guess the bear form doesn't last. I see he is listed twice in the unique list. After he was killed, it lists "Beorn, the Shape-Changer" as dead and "Beorn, the Mountain Bear" as alive.

Yes, there are a few things that need to be adapted to deal with shapechanges.

[Thraalbee]

Brilliant! I have been using a script to dump out details.

EDIT: Hm, looks like not all monsters are there - Saruman is missing for me; also Carcharoth
EDIT2: On the other hand, I am finding errors I've made too

Should be ok now. Same link as before. Plot rewritten for speed and has grouping. https://thraalbee.azurewebsites.net/monview/

I found out that I had missed "light:" as an entry in monster.txt so it never made it to the regexp. All monsters missing had the light: attribute
NOTE: ** there is no hint in the comments section about this new field

Also, the "red dragon bat" has it's "light:" entry in a slightly different order than all others. That means it will not display in this tool. I changed it in my file to match the others and then it displays.

If you open the console window in Chrome (only browser I test with) you'll see a list of entries that won't display due to incorrect depth value which usually happens when the regexp fails to match.

[Nick]

Should be ok now. Same link as before. Plot rewritten for speed and has grouping. https://thraalbee.azurewebsites.net/monview/

I found out that I had missed "light:" as an entry in monster.txt so it never made it to the regexp. All monsters missing had the light: attribute
NOTE: ** there is no hint in the comments section about this new field

Also, the "red dragon bat" has it's "light:" entry in a slightly different order than all others. That means it will not display in this tool. I changed it in my file to match the others and then it displays.

If you open the console window in Chrome (only browser I test with) you'll see a list of entries that won't display due to incorrect depth value which usually happens when the regexp fails to match.

Yes, all works fine for me in firefox - the problem before was I was using an ancient firefox on my development linux VM.

Light will be documented in the next update, and red dragon bats fixed.

[mrfy]

Well, that was the Weekend of the Undead.
[*]Wraiths:

• White, grey, black and nether wraiths all buffed and moved deeper, so the wights are all shallower than wraiths

I'm finding white wraiths to be much tougher than their previous versions. Mostly because they are now speed +10.

[Nick]

I'm finding white wraiths to be much tougher than their previous versions. Mostly because they are now speed +10.

Aha - they are meant to have been moved to DL38, but are still at 26. This is not the first time I have moved a monster to the approriate place in the file, but failed to change its depth line

[tangar]

Great update!

[*]Major changes to Ringwraiths:

• They all get a new melee attack which inflicts the Black Breath; this only lasts a short time, but has nasty stat and experience drain effects while it lasts
• They are all able to summon Ringwraiths
• They are all now deep monsters, below level 75
• Their spellcasting and melee have been upgraded accordingly; they still have individual differences, though

I like such Black Breath mechanics. Also it's great that it's not overcomplexed as in TomeNET (there you should use special item (Athelas) to remove it.. and it's quite big problem to find that item).

But I'm not sure about moving Nazguls to >75 lvl. Endgame is already more than dangerous. Moving one of the most dangerous creatures down could break game balance (in terms of difficulty curve); old and experienced playes could even do not notice that, but new players have very different feeling of the game.. So nazguls was a 'gradually' threat, which was increase in time. Also Nazguls made mid-game more interesing to new players; and killing your first Nazgul it's always a big achievement: I remember how I was happy to do so first time, so proud

As I suppose that this particular change (moving to >75) made to follow Tolkien's lore (as Nazguls should be together etc). But imho it's not 'angbandish'

It's righteous to enhance Angband with canonic Tolkien stuff, but at the same time - the most important thing is to preserve canonic Angband stuff itself.

[wobbly]

I'd like to see Uvatha moved to an early avoid monster position, earlier then say, Smaug.

[wobbly]

Aha - they are meant to have been moved to DL38, but are still at 26. This is not the first time I have moved a monster to the approriate place in the file, but failed to change its depth line

Hmm, if I try & change this in my own copy (pre-compiled but not yet run & in a fresh directory) I get a parser error, what's the deal here?