Xygos 0.1.0 "Zoo Keeper" released

[Mike]

This is the 0.1.0 alpha release of Xygos, a variant of Angband aiming towards conversion from V's fantasy milieu to an eclectic sci-fi / futuristic / post-apocalyptic theme.

Most of that theme conversion has been done, although the occasional magic wand does pop up here and there. It's imbalanced and crashy still, but playable (so the new timed-autosave feature is recommended). If anyone wants to check it out I would appreciate bug reports (even for minor issues such as garbled messages or aspects which appear to be unthematic, left over from V), suggestions or patches (on Github, or here on this thread).

Source is available here: https://github.com/msearle5/xygos
Builds (Windows and MacOS) are available here: https://github.com/msearle5/xygos/re...0-1-g0810111ad

New (from Vanilla) top level files include:
BUGS (what it says - though most of them are marked as fixed)
BRANCHES (list of branches, with brief descriptions)
CHANGES (summary of changes made - the equivalent of changes.txt)

Changes from the last release include:

The win quests. Level 25, 50, 75, 100 in the Fortress and level 120 in the Space Station have a quest boss needed to advance. To win you need to kill the final one. Earlier ones have an artifact as reward.

Dungeons: They don't all start at level 1, and the side dungeons (not Fortress) now have guardians. There is now a separate recall depth per town.

Monsters: Removed all the old Angband monsters that don't belong, and added a lot of new ones.
Some have one or more passive attacks - on any successful melee attack it will retaliate.

Items: All unwanted artifacts, ego-items, base items are gone. Added are cybergear (arms, legs, brain chips), new armors, etc.

In-town quests - there's a shark or a lot of triffids menacing the town, and random hits from the Black Market.

Multiple egos: An item can have 2 egos, rarity and depth is between ego and artifacts.

Levels of resistance: No longer just on or off, but increasing numbers of resists give more resistance. Added gravity, water and inertia resistance.

Personalities: A character may be Athletic, Shouty, Boring, etc. with various advantages and disadvantages in stats, skills, etc. Some also change HP or grant techniques. Special cases are Munchkin (easy mode), Scrub (hard mode) and Split (change every level up. At level 50 you can change at will.)

Engineer: Add several item related techniques. They now gain exp from learning icons, and are zero-fail technique users.

Super: An extension for superheroes with costumes and powers gained as they level. They also have a weakness (a high vulnerability).

Randomly named artifacts, from a file of names picked based on the artifact's power. You can use all randarts, all standarts or both (which is the usual choice as there aren't many standarts yet).
There are also randomized quest artifacts - given as the reward for midbosses or dungeon guardians - which are always randomized even in a standart game.

And much more!

[HugoVirtuoso]

Any way you could get this put on angband.live for live playtesting?

[Mike]

Angband.live

I like the idea! I've dropped Gwarl a PM to see what needs to be done.

[Nick]

When do you think it will be ready for a competition?

[clouded]

This looks cool! Unfortunately ran into two severe issues with the windows binary:

There is no "File / Window / Options / Help" bar (which unless you know the shortcuts makes it impossible to start/load a game)
Trying to start a game results in a crash saying "Failed to find terrain feature General Store"

Edit: Turning off tiles in the ini files lets me start a game fine.

Played for a bit, some stuff:

- Random crash when trying to start a character with the unknown talents perk: crash happened after pressing space to select it, doesn't always happen.
- When a hologram monster gazes at me there is a message "ERROR: Effect handler not found for SOUND."
- Using roguelike keys, when in look mode "k" direction doesn't work
- It's easily missable that you can press Q in stores to look for a quest
- Firing a gun not at a monster results in the bullet falling to the floor and being able to be picked up again - sometimes this results in a crash
- Failing to use a gadget says "you failed to zap it"
- Matrix bugs are imbalanced, too easy to get tons of good potions
- Towns having different houses is a bit of an inconvenience when it costs money to travel between towns. Perhaps it's better to just have a single house?
- Had a crash reading an unidentified scroll on DL24 of the fortress, I'm guessing this was deep descent trying to take me below the quest level on DL25 but I haven't IDed it yet.

[Mike]

Clouded: Thanks, I'll have a look at those. The Windows build should at least have the menu back and avoid crashing because of tiles: see the latest update (not the top of the list because I have rebased) at https://github.com/msearle5/xygos/re...0-4-g650634f50
This hasn't been tested on Mac yet though (and it might break it since the shared tiles have been removed).


Nick: It doesn't look like it's ready for prime time yet. But a competition is definitely something for me to aim towards - maybe in 0.2.x or 0.3.x? I'd want there to be no major known bugs (ones which lose characters), for there to be more variety of character types (right now it's biased towards warrior types), and for there to be a reasonable distribution of monsters (they are biased towards low-level ones).

[Mike]

Clouded: could the unIDed card that caused the crash have been the security card? This is not randomly generated - it's only generated when you kill the Pie Spy. That was crashing, while deep descent and level teleport (and everything else I tried) worked OK.

[clouded]

- The card crash is reading a "local acquisition" card (and the greater variety)
- I'm way too strong early. At CL30 I have 380 HP, 150 AC, 5 BpR (with a dual darksaber so it's really 10), +17 speed and +2 movement speed. This is in part getting good loot and part monsters not being strong enough, I've been killing everything in one or two turns without getting scratched. Not sure how you want the power scaling compared to vanilla but so far monsters need some serious buffing!
- Cyber augments are a cool idea but legs seem way too overpowered. Movement speed is a really strong ability, I think you should reduce the effectiveness of a pval of it if you want it to be common. I don't think the player should ever get more than +2 permanent move speed (without some downside). Arm implants don't seem too strong. I only upgraded on my plain +3 int brain implant when I found a telepathy one after DL90. Implants in general sell for a ton without costing anything to implant / remove.
- Killing white horrors can cause the other horrors to get placed invisibly. They can't be seen or hit, but saving causes them to appear.
- When using a printer with plastic blocks there are so many items it goes off the screen. Needs to scroll or have categories
- Dark auras of grues should have some visual effect, it took me a while to notice they were lowering my light and weren't just invisible
- I suspected something might be wrong earlier but after probing the final boss and then checking the game files it seems as though all monsters only get a single attack - the one that is listed last I guess.
- Monster list feedback: I assume you still have work planned but I felt like I was mostly fighting animals (and usually ones from V) which wasn't what I expected. The only dangerous monsters I've seen so far are Mecha-Triax (appropriate in difficulty), shamblers (not too hard though, I killed one OOD around DL50), Cyberdemons (nasty), and Godzilla (nasty, haven't seen rPois at all). The other uniques I've ran into had much too few HPs.

Can't upload dumps to the ladder yet so I bundled a few into the attatchment if you want to look at them.

[backwardsEric]

- I suspected something might be wrong earlier but after probing the final boss and then checking the game files it seems as though all monsters only get a single attack - the one that is listed last I guess.

That seems to be due to a problem in do_parse_monster_blow(), it likely should initialize b from *blow rather than setting it to NULL. As it is, only the last blow ends up being saved. Changing that would also plug a small memory leak. The "if (!r) return PARSE_ERROR_MISSING;" in that function likely should be moved to the callers, parse_monster_blow() and parse_monster_passive(), since r has already been dereferenced by that point.

I didn't run into any severe problems running Xygos on a Mac (11.5.1; self-compiled). There's a cosmetic issue in the point allocation at birth: the line giving the total points allocated overlaps with the saving throw display on the character sheet making it more difficult to read. Perhaps a bit of clearing before and after the total would help?

Xcode's leak checker reported some leaks. Here's the ones from loading an existing character:

• The monster_mutation allocated in parse_monster_mut_name() is leaked. It looks like inserting a mem_free(r) after "n = (struct monster_mutation *) ..." in finish_parse_monster_mut() plugs that.
• Memory allocated by string_make() in player_quests_reset() is leaked (6 allocations; 2.05 KiB total).
• Memory allocated by mem_zalloc() in parse_flavor_flavor() is leaked (239 allocations; 48 bytes apiece; 11.2 KiB total).
• Memory allocated by string_append() in parse_flavor_flavor() is leaked (236 allocations; 6.36 KiB total).
• Memory allocated by string_make() in insert_string() (called by flavor_init()) is leaked (59 allocations; 16 bytes apiece; 944 bytes total).
• Memory allocated by mem_realloc() in insert_string() (call by flavor_init()) is leaked (1 allocation; 512 bytes total).

[Mike]

Some bugs splatted

I've made a few fixes, the main one being that monsters no longer have just one attack:

https://github.com/msearle5/xygos/releases/tag/0.1.0-13-gc1eb1c25a

I'd be interested to know how this feels - I would expect it to still seem overpowered, especially later on - but still, that change must make a big difference.


FWIW though, you may be overestimating the effect of dual vs. single foo-sabers. There is exactly one that gives you 5 extra blows, but you have to kill the win monster first to get it, it's the equivalent of Grond.


Between base items, the differences are that:
Damage dice are twice as high (2d14 vs 1d14).

Weighs 3-4 times as much and has -5 to hit, so you get less blows that connect.
Has x2 vs. x3 critical. Few things resist dark, light, etc. So that's roughly equivalent to doing 50% extra damage (2d14 x 2 vs. 1d14 x 3) in ideal circumstances (if the weight and to-hit penalties made no difference) and in practice less.
Still, I suspect that bumping up the weight and increasing the -5 penalty would help. (They are 10 levels deeper, so it makes sense that they are more powerful, but only by so much.)