Preparing for 4.2 release

[Nick]

Newest build seems to have a save game bug: unique monsters appear to come back from the grave when loading a game (all marked as alive in monster memory).

Got suspicious after killing Maggot's fifth dog...

Yep, confirmed. Will get a fix out when I work out what's gone wrong.

[Voovus]

Newest build seems to have a save game bug: unique monsters appear to come back from the grave when loading a game (all marked as alive in monster memory).

Got suspicious after killing Maggot's fifth dog...

[Nick]

Spotted two minor bugs:
"Witch" has wrong plural form ("2 witchs").
Wand of darkness appears to do no damage, while claiming that it does (unless it's meant for particular types of monsters that are specifically vulnerable to darkness damage, a la light damage).

First one is actually fixed in the latest build too. Second I need to check.

Tired of losing all my games, I loaded my last (dead) character, said NO to immediate restart, then changed settings from randarts to standarts and then started. And for sure, things went better all the way and just now I had managed to get a short bow of power AND a nice artifact cutlass. Except it was a random artifact! I verified that the =setting was for standards (y) then quit the game to zip the savefile and the randart file for a bug report. Hmmm, there is no randart file. Odd. Restart the game and... crash due to not finding the randart file. Back to rolling up another weak ironman ranger...

OK, will follow this up.

[Thraalbee]

Boo hoo - nasty savefile standart/randart bug

Tired of losing all my games, I loaded my last (dead) character, said NO to immediate restart, then changed settings from randarts to standarts and then started. And for sure, things went better all the way and just now I had managed to get a short bow of power AND a nice artifact cutlass. Except it was a random artifact! I verified that the =setting was for standards (y) then quit the game to zip the savefile and the randart file for a bug report. Hmmm, there is no randart file. Odd. Restart the game and... crash due to not finding the randart file. Back to rolling up another weak ironman ranger...

[Voovus]

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.

Thank you. I'm really looking forward to trying it out. Just finished off a Morgoth, so it's perfect timing too.

Spotted two minor bugs:
"Witch" has wrong plural form ("2 witchs").
Wand of darkness appears to do no damage, while claiming that it does (unless it's meant for particular types of monsters that are specifically vulnerable to darkness damage, a la light damage).

[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.)

[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.

[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

[gtrudeau88]

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

[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.

[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.

[Pete Mack]

Sky Dragon should bite to electrify, surely?

[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.

[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.

[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?