Preparing for 4.2 release

[Pete Mack]

@Derakon--
I think you are overthinking this. The chances of Wormtongue dropping something useful after dl 30 or so are exceedingly slim anyway, far less than even a scroll of acquirement. A single "excellent" (DL+10)/2 item just doesn't have much value at depth. The value of delaying killing Wormtongue already becomes negative very quickly after around DL 20. The issue is fundamentally that you shouldn't be able to use him as a piggy bank by stealing a large number of ego items. It seems that the solution should be other than special pleading on drop quality.

[Saru]

Saving Throws?

Hello all. I just registered after playing angband on and off for a couple years, (never with much success ) but I've been wondering if saving throws need to be reworked. It seems rather weird that you have just as much a chance of saving against one of Morgoth's spells as you would against a novice priest or something like that. Maybe it would be more interesting if harder opponents (or better spellcasters?) were harder to save against. This might be a nightmare to rework though. Keep up the good work with the game though Nick!

[Pete Mack]

I dunno what the final decision on this is, but I strongly feel that there is something wrong with the speed model for shapechange of other monsters. When a Maia of Manwe turned into a shardstorm, it was utterly helpless. At normal speed, it barely got in 2 more moves after changing. (Note: I am playing an old version, but I don't think this has been fully addressed either way.)

[Sideways]

Poslikes (Pos, Compos, Frog etc.) keep track of how many items you've stolen from each unique during the game (and also how many items you've stolen from each monster), so you can never steal more items from a monster than it would drop anyway, and the stolen items are deducted from the eventual drop.

Not sure how this would play with V's stealing mechanics, haven't tried the new V yet.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Currently everything is ordered by cost (and note that ammo is in reverse order to all other gear); mithril arrows are immune to fire and acid damage, which ups their value. This is how the game has always done it, but again I'd be open to change if there's sufficient demand.

For a time, you had them ordered in descending cost order, which made great ammo be fired first before the bog standard ones, unless one made a conscious choice (with all the added keystrokes), so thank you so much for when you changed it to reverse order. However, my point of view is that damage would be a better metric than cost. That is their true value to @. A normal mithril ammo may be worth more gold (but not really, when one plays no-selling), than seeker ammo, but it doesn't do as much damage. I end up inscribing ammo (f0=g, f1=g, f2=g, ... f9=g) to "correctly" order ammo in terms of damage, from low damage to high.

[Adam]

For a time, you had them ordered in descending cost order, which made great ammo be fired first before the bog standard ones, unless one made a conscious choice (with all the added keystrokes), so thank you so much for when you changed it to reverse order. However, my point of view is that damage would be a better metric than cost. That is their true value to @. A normal mithril ammo may be worth more gold (but not really, when one plays no-selling), than seeker ammo, but it doesn't do as much damage. I end up inscribing ammo (f0=g, f1=g, f2=g, ... f9=g) to "correctly" order ammo in terms of damage, from low damage to high.

+1 to this.
I don't remember the exact number, but I also saw magical pebbles coming before iron shots, although the pebbles had more than 2x damage compared to the shots. Is that reasonable from pricing perspective?

[Gwarl]

speaking personally, having seeker arrows fire before mithril arrows by default made more sense to me, since seeker arrows are more likely to break or be destroyed through attrition it made sense to use them first, while you still had them, rather than chipping away at your mithril while monster breaths chipped away at a pile of seeker arrows.

[Diego Gonzalez]

I was asking to myself: why digging is hurting my blackguard? I just saw the code and found the reason: the new digging code makes you quietly wield the digger for the digging boost, so I lose the CON boost my main weapon has.

It's not a bug, it's a bit funny actually.

Keep on with the changes Nick! I'm enjoying playing the game again thanks to your work.

[Pete Mack]

Sky Dragon should bite to electrify, surely?

[Nick]

As a consequence of looking at what is needed to fix the bug, it became apparent to me that the correct thing to do is a major modification to the command system, and looking into that has showed me some shortcomings in the UI code...

So I will probably be vanishing down this rabbit hole for some time, and emerging with the codebase improved (and hopefully a fix for #2118). Which means 4.2 (which I was hoping to get out the door soonish) will probably be delayed a bit. Which gives everyone more time to argue the important issues like XP modifiers and food

Out of rabbit hole, nothing really needed doing after all, #2118 fixed. Back to bugfixing and tidying up stuff like the stealing issue.

[Nick]

(d) Keep track of the number of items carried by unique monsters. In other words, each time an item is stolen the total number of drops decreases in all future incarnations of this unique. So if you've already stolen from Wormtongue, then he will have an empty inventory forever after. (This feels clunky, but does not have side effects for other @s.)

This (after looking at how compos does it) is now the plan. In full, then:

• Stealing to become a bit easier
• New mushrooms of shadows to increase stealth temporarily
• Unique thefts will be tracked and their drops reduced

These changes will be in the next build, which will break savefiles.

[gtrudeau88]

One miniscule suggestion: could high elves, at character generation, not be 8 ft tall?

[Thraalbee]

Feedback

I've been trying for a while to score an ironman win with a ranger gnome, kobold and hobbit. Still no win, but enjoyable games. I find the game clearly more difficult than previous version but not in a stupid way. Mostly, I die from attrition. It's not one fight that kills, it's the lack of free consumables. Also I am very happy about the Create Arrows spell. It means I can concentrate on bows after the initial 30 levels(ish).

Two things:
* In 20+ games I think I've found one (1) scroll of teleportation.
* Wand of darkness - does it really hurt foes? how would I know? lore has no knowledge about resistance for darkness

[Nick]

New builds now up on the nightlies page and angband.live, with the following changes:

• Fix to looking at targeted monsterd so a single space shows the item the monster is standing on (if any), rather than potenitally several
• Overhead and minimap views now work properly
• Fixes to stealing suggested by Voovus:
  • Stealing is a bit easier
  • New (deepish) object, Mushroom of Shadows, which gives a +10 stealth boost for a short time
  • Thefts are tracked throughout the game, and stealing successfully from uniques will reduce their drops when killed

As forewarned upthread, this build breaks savefiles.

[Pete Mack]

What'd be really cool is if examined squares just showed a list of everything on the square.

a [COLOR="Red"]d[/COLOR] A young red dragon
It is on
b [COLOR="DarkOrange"]![/COLOR] 2 potions of resist cold
c [COLOR="Sienna"],[/COLOR] 3rations of food
d | a rapier
on
e [COLOR="Red"]#[/COLOR]lava

Then pick a letter to see details of the object/monster/(terrain or trap)

Edit:

To do this, you would have to make special purpose listing code that packaged things into proper objects:
Static arrays of:
* Function pointers for suitable lore
* Printing object/monster/etc description (and color)
The menu list would be structs consisting of pointers into the table plus a pointer to the object itself. (You'd really only want to make the function table a singleton object.)