Announce: DaJAngband v1.0.97 Released

[PowerDiver]

I hit a nasty bug. Check out my dump in the comp section. My elvenkind armor changed from having resist poison to having sustain wisdom.

[will_asher]

I started to write a long comment on your character dump, but I decided to put it in a forum message instead.

The problem with monster stealth is that V starts with monsters having infinite stealth and ESP, and you are just making it worse. If you want to mess with stealth, and you want people to want to play your variant, you should be making monsters *less* stealthy [I should hear a pack of hounds from 1000' away through unobstructed corridors] and not have ESP. You are taking a bad situation and making it worse.

I really wanted to like your game, but the overall impression I have is the same as playing V at 2500' without SI, and it just isn't fun. If you lessen things, it will be like no SI in V at 2000', still too aggravating for 90% of players. One thing you could try is to make +alert much much more common. IMO you should, at a minimum, make all items that give +search give +alert as well [i.e. combine them]. Then you are forcing the char to lose a valuable ring slot just to stay alive, which I think is too harsh, but it might just barely be playable. Currently, the game is only playable if you get ESP early. I don't see how a moderate change that keeps monster stealth could fix that.

Monster stealth started because I didn't like the idea of detecting warm-blooded monsters by infravision. The idea of every race (besides humans of course) having infravision seemed silly to me. I also didn't like the idea of every other race having an additional advantage that humans don't.

The idea started when I noticed that the ranger chieftain was invisible in V. I thought, 'why would the ranger chieftain be invisible?' and from the description I figured that it used invisibility to represent stealth in which case see invisible shouldn't make you notice it because it's not really (magicially) invisible at all. (monster's don't have infinite stealth in V, just infinite 'move silently' ..or else all the characters are deaf. I think I might be able to figure out a way to implement the character hearing nearby monsters which aren't in line of sight.)

What I'll probably do is just make monster stealth much weaker and have you automatically always notice monsters that are next to you, maybe also if it's within two spaces. Also, I might reduce the number of stealthy monsters. Probably only things like ranger chieftains, master thieves, cats, and 'clear' monsters should have high stealth. Maybe, I'll even have a separate 'hide' and 'move silently' for monsters when I implement the character hearing monsters, and cats wouldn't be as good at hiding.

The thing about not being able to see the whole room even if it's lit (unless you're in a small room) because of dim lighting should work much better than monster stealth does now, I think.

so many ideas, so little time..

[PowerDiver]

[You quoted me here after I put my nasty comments on my comp dump so not to insult you to a wider audience. I guess I misplayed that scenario. ]

You've got a fair number of changes, and they pretty much all make the game harder. There were not many people complaining that V309 was much too easy. You may want to change some other things to balance stuff out. E.g. you could up the multipliers to allow more blows with slightly heavier weapons, up all light radii by 1 or 2, etc.

Oh - one more potentially serious bug - I was able to drop too many items in the home. The list kept expanding, but entries after '0' had no prefix letter to select them. [This was with roguelike keyset turned off.] If you are storing too many items in too little space, something else is getting overwritten. Or maybe you have upped the storage, but didn't do the prefixes right. In any case, it made me nervous.

[will_asher]

Oh - one more potentially serious bug - I was able to drop too many items in the home. The list kept expanding, but entries after '0' had no prefix letter to select them.

Already fixed for 1.0.98. I turned it from a bug into a feature. The home has three more slots to put stuff in, and they do (in the next version anyway) have a prefix to select them.
It's not a serious bug, in the current release you just have to take a couple other things out of the home before you can take out the last couple things.

[PowerDiver]

I found another bug. When I picked up Celegorm, it had pLite. The 309e code adds pLite to any artifact that is not otherwise splendid. I noticed, because I was told when I wielded it unided. After some time, including save and restore, the pLite was no longer there. I don't think my code was buggy that way, but that version is ancient and I do not know any more. In any case, artifacts should not change during the game. Choices are (1) remove the code that adds pLite, (2) fix the code so that pLite isn't taken away, or (3) change artifact.txt so that all artifacts are splendid.

[PowerDiver]

And another bug, IMO, though presumably it's a change you made. Orb of Draining does not always destroy cursed objects. Being unable to assure safe testing of weapons makes priest-casters much less enjoyable, especially when wielding a morgul blade constitutes slow but certain death with your drain exp change.

[will_asher]

- for 1.0.98: found and fixed the bug which makes it crash when identifying the sling of snowballs. (I had forgotten to add a description in use-obj.c L3123)
- About the orb of draining not always destroying cursed objects: that was an unintentional side effect of a change I made. (I wanted things like acid and fire to not automatically destroy everything it could that was on the floor). That's also fixed for 1.0.98: orb of draining will always destroy cursed objects.
- It will now show number of blows, average damage, and chance of critical hits when you examinine a weapon. Also, when you examine a launcher, it shows the true multiplier. When you pick it up, it now says a short bow (ML2) (+0 +0) instead of a short bow (x2 (+0 +0), using ML for multiplier level. I hope that's okay. I wanted to keep something obvious in there showing that a light crossbow (ML3) is better than an mini crossbow (ML2) instead of just removing the (x2).
- Soon, I'll have a page on the DaJAngband website for known bugs and changes I'm planning for future versions. EDIT: this page is now available at:

http://www.geocities.com/will_asher/MonsterDictionary/DaJAngbandplan.htm

- I'm considering releasing an unfinished test version of 1.0.98 to see what people think of what I've done with certain things like monster stealth (you'll always notice an adjacent monster, and monster stealth is slightly nerfed further from 1.0.97), hearing out-of-sight monsters, and dimly lit rooms (not being able to see the whole room when in a large lit room). Would anyone want to help me test it?
I've been working on 1.0.98 a lot recently (possibly more than is good for me..), but it's fun. Personally, I think making my own variant can be just as fun as playing it.