feature/monster

[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]

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."

[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.

[MattB]

Why are you fighting them at all?.

I wasn’t fighting them!!!
I set off a trap on level 45 (latest feature branch) and summoned 4 Balrogs, a Glabrezu and a Gelugon. I panicked and took a step back. That one step was as far as I got, lol.

[Pete Mack]

Why are you fighting them at all? Unless you have double fire resist and can kill them quickly at a distance, they are a sure net negative to fight. Making them stronger changes very little.

[MattB]

I’m happy/excited/impressed by most of the changes. But here’s a few preliminary worries...

Whip sounded awesome, until I realised you’d sneakily buffed Balrogs. I bloody HATE Balrogs! Then I read further and you buffed then again!! Argh!!!

*&%*'s sake...

> Some of your Arrows (0) were destroyed!
> The lesser Balrog resists a lot.
> The lesser Balrog breathes fire.
> Low hitpoint warning!
> *** LOW HITPOINT WARNING! ***
> One of your Arrows (0) was destroyed!
> The lesser Balrog resists a lot.
> The lesser Balrog sets off a blinding flash.
> You repel a sudden bleariness.
> You resist the effect!
> The lesser Balrog breathes fire.
> You die.
> The lesser Balrog resists a lot.

[tangar]

I doubt you meant it to be rude, but if I were Shockbolt I'd find this comment pretty offensive.

I'm sorry if I hurt someones feelings, but what's rude or offencive in sharing an opinion about gameplay experience with different tileset? As I said:

Shockbolt is a great artist

..and his tilset for ToME is marvelous. But Angband is more playable with Gervais; at least at current state, while Angband using his old tileset which mixed with Gervais tiles and looks pretty weird.

All what I say is my IMHO, there are a lot of people who wouldn't agree with me

I myself created open-source 1-bit tileset (btw, it's completely free, anyone are free to use it without any obligations): http://tangar.info/en/t/tileset and I don't expect that everyone would like it, no matter how much hundreds of hours I've spend to create it

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Still I can not understand why people prefer Shockbolt over Gervais. Shockbolt is a great artist, but his Angband tiles doesn't have enough contrast, it's hard to distinct one monster from another.

I doubt you meant it to be rude, but if I were Shockbolt I'd find this comment pretty offensive. Personally, I stick with the plain ASCII because I play on a laptop. I've played quite a lot on Gervais when I had a regular size computer screen, however, if I were fortunate enough to have a large monitor then I would play Shockbolt tiles, hands down. They are gorgeous!

[MattB]

Not a biggie, but...
According to my character screen, my elvenkind armour I'm wearing may have ESP. Although it obviously doesn't.
:-)

[MattB]

Staff of darkness does not produce a dark spot in the town.
But maybe that's intended...
[device skill of half trollwarrior] vs [sun]

[tangar]

AFAIA it's not made for DnD game, Gervais drawn his tileset especially for ToME (aka Angband): http://pousse.rapiere.free.fr/
so it's fits to the game spirit perfectly.

I believe Gervais made the best tileset which could be ever created for open-source roguelike game. It looks better then a lot of commercial artwork. For me, the only tileset which could be close to it is ADOM graphics.

But Gervais made it 15 years ago and of course a lot of rearrangements should be done. I agree that some tiles need rework or even replacement.

[PowerWyrm]

The problem with Gervais tileset is that it's D&D generic. Many tiles don't correspond to anything at all. Some uniques especially have silly tiles (Lorgan for example looks like Dr Zerg from Futurama).

[tangar]

I see, thanks.

Still I can not understand why people prefer Shockbolt over Gervais. Shockbolt is a great artist, but his Angband tiles doesn't have enough contrast, it's hard to distinct one monster from another. At the same time Gervais monsters are bright and sharp; they looks oldschool fantasy style, very easy to remember who is who. It's easy enough to rezise Gervais tileset to 64x64 if needed - they won't loose their beauty. And we (community, V-devs and variant's maintainers) could do with them whatever we like without any risk.

Matt, yep, this book from Gervais

[PowerWyrm]

The current Shockbolt tileset (the one from the post above) only contains tiles made by Shockbolt himself. The old tileset (the one from /lib/tiles in current V) is an outdated one which still contains old Gervais tiles (since it was the base Shockbolt used for his work at first).

[MattB]

I mean that every time a new object, monster, trap or terrain feature is introduced, I have these choices:

1. Leave it without tiles
2. Search through the tilesets in the hope that there is an appropriate tile I can use
3. Make new tiles for it (or hope someone else does)

and I'm not very happy with any of them.

So far I've gone with option 2 when a monster is renamed or replaced by something roughly equivalent, and otherwise option 1. So I'm constrained in the sense that introducing new stuff means breaking tiles further, and they'll then have to either remain broken, or be fixed by someone.

Well anyone can recolour an existing tile, see attached (that's me recolouring a Shockbolt, sorry), and it strikes me that a simple change of colour in e.g. tunic would solve the problem in most cases. The problem lies in what can and cannot be altered under its license.
If you wanted me to recolour tiles I'd be happy to do so, as long as we were sure we weren't infringing anything.

EDIT: Well, now I'm confused...
That same book tile exists in the Gervais set, so maybe it's not Shockbolt after all?