[Un] Unangband 0.6.3 prerelease 2

[andrewdoull]

Hi,

This is the second pre-release of Unangband 0.6.3. It incorporates a large number of bugfixes and re-incorporates the trap region code.

You can download the source code from http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangba...3-pre2-src.zip. You can download a precompiled Windows build from http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangba...3-pre2-win.zip An OS/X release should be available later on today.

I'll update the change list for this at the final release of 0.6.3.

Regards,

Andrew Doull

[baddog73]

I'm looking forward to spending some time playing my favorite "go bump" character with the new Un, and I'm feeling like sharing what I hope will turn out to be some of the cool things about it.

1. Compressing the dlvls from 100 to 60. Great! The game is already *long*, and the blog post about not having enough monster types to keep things interesting in the last 50 levels convinced me.

2. It's about time we got rid of "all bad" amulets and rings! I think it will have a couple of cool effects: make identifying them more fun and encourage the player to experiment, and to get rid of a silly game mechanic that seems contrived. My reasoning is that no wizard would waste time creating a piece of jewelry with all bad effects on purpose - it's a lot of effort for nothing. A person might make a cursed ring by accident but surely not more than once, or have to accept a bad effect to get a desired one, but not in numbers to litter the floor of shallow dungeons like so many magical caltrops. I'm all in favor of jewelry that sometimes has a mixed blessing, though - I think it would be fun.

[Bandobras]

Unbelievably cool! If only I had time to help...

[andrewdoull]

2. It's about time we got rid of "all bad" amulets and rings! I think it will have a couple of cool effects: make identifying them more fun and encourage the player to experiment, and to get rid of a silly game mechanic that seems contrived.

What this means for traditional Angband players, is it might be worthwhile suffering through wearing a ring of teleportation or of woe...

Andrew

[PaulBlay]

What this means for traditional Angband players, is it might be worthwhile suffering through wearing a ring of teleportation or of woe...

I rather like rings of teleportation that give +2 speed.

[buzzkill]

It's about time we got rid of "all bad" amulets and rings! I think it will have a couple of cool effects: make identifying them more fun and encourage the player to experiment, and to get rid of a silly game mechanic that seems contrived.

Sure, but then force ID by use, since nothing is cursed. ID will no longer function for these items.

My reasoning is that no wizard would waste time creating a piece of jewelry with all bad effects on purpose - it's a lot of effort for nothing.

Which is why computer viruses are so rare. Some wizards are just jerks, and who is to say that the effort is for nothing. Agents of Morgoth seeking to hinder the PC for glory or personal gain.

.

[baddog73]

Sure, ID will still have a function. Not all effects can be detected by wearing, and only ID will tell you that you know them all. And rings surely could still be cursed - I'm only against having rings with all negative effects. Suppose you find a foo ring that turned out to be a cursed ring of teleportation with +1 to CHR. You wouldn't be happy if you swapped out your ring of strength for that just to see what it was.

And the computer virus analogy tends to make my point more than not. Computer viruses are very effective for the time invested in creating them because they self-replicate and multiply the total damage across multiple systems. Rings don't AFAIK breed like over-sexed icky things, so I still believe anything purely bad would be few and far between. I imagine that rings with bad effects would be created because (in order of what I think the likelyhood of such an object would be)
1. The wizard is willing to accept a bad effect in order to get desirable ones (e.g. The One Ring)
2. The wizard curses an object in such a way that it doesn't harm himself but makes it unusable by anyone else.
3. The wizard knows of his impending loss of a valuable object, and curses it to bring as much grief to the next owner as possible.
4. The wizard curses an object and leaves it to tempt someone else to use it. Even in this case I would think that an object with some positive effect to tempt someone to use it more likely, like honey on a flytrap.
5. The wizard mistakenly creates a bad object and throws it away.

Meh - I suppose people will think of others, but this is the general idea.

-Ben

[Arralen]

Trying out 063-pre2-win I found that :

- I wasn't able to sell {average} armour and weapons in armourer/weapons shop in town (Bree) on the first try ! Temple wanted to buy an {average} whip, though - maybe because it already had 12 Whips (1d4) (+0,+0) ?! After I tried and canceled that with ESC, the 2 other shops offered to buy the {average} pieces as well ??????
I'm pretty sure it's not me overlooking the letters - there is something fishy about the sell orders... This was in Bree, and I wasn't able to sell 2 other pieces in Hobbiton a bit earlier as well. So I went and fetched from my home the Spiked Club {average} I wasn't able to sell in Hobbiton, and was not sellable at the weapons smith in Bree as well, while the whip still was. Went to the magic shop and had it IDed, and it was sellable afterwards?

- area traps seem to work great, but gas traps are impossible for a thief to disarm, because they always go of when trying to get near them (A discoloured spot didn't go off, though).

- on the other hand, "confused" status does not seem to hinder movement and fighting ... maybe I should have tried disarming the gas trap as well .. sorry, that simply didn't come to my mind.

- it's impossible to melee anyone in town, yet the inhabitants -including the cockroaches- can hit the @ !!

[baddog73]

I'm going to use this post for any bugs or possible bugs.

- Is it intended that the player should have to rest on a shop entrance to enter? This only happened the first time I was in Hobbiton, after returning there shop entrances were normal.

- Not able to attack hobbits via melee. Found this out when I tried to kill Maggot.

[buzzkill]

I was mostly just having some fun with it. But wouldn't it be cool, or really horrible, if curses could become stronger, or spread from one piece of equipment to another if left unchecked long enough.

[Arralen]

- Got a strange message upon reloading yesterdays savegame - a char I started with pre2, btw. :

"8 8 8 8 8 8 14 8 4 8 15 15 15 6 8 2 9 1 (etc.)
Loading a 0.6.3.7 savefile...
Restoring Dungeon..."

This only shows up on the top of the main screen, not in the message log.



- Bill Ferny dropped an {unusual} Soft Leather Armor ... and a "Leather Coat worth 1450 gold pieces", a "Pick worth 1350 gold pieces" ... comparing with older versions of UN I would say the wrong type of ID was applied as pseudo here ?!

[andrewdoull]

Trying out 063-pre2-win I found that :

- I wasn't able to sell {average} armour and weapons in armourer/weapons shop in town (Bree) on the first try ! Temple wanted to buy an {average} whip, though - maybe because it already had 12 Whips (1d4) (+0,+0) ?! After I tried and canceled that with ESC, the 2 other shops offered to buy the {average} pieces as well ??????
I'm pretty sure it's not me overlooking the letters - there is something fishy about the sell orders... This was in Bree, and I wasn't able to sell 2 other pieces in Hobbiton a bit earlier as well. So I went and fetched from my home the Spiked Club {average} I wasn't able to sell in Hobbiton, and was not sellable at the weapons smith in Bree as well, while the whip still was. Went to the magic shop and had it IDed, and it was sellable afterwards?

Odd - I'll have to look at this further.

- area traps seem to work great, but gas traps are impossible for a thief to disarm, because they always go of when trying to get near them (A discoloured spot didn't go off, though).

There's a way of avoiding every trap. I was actually considering swapping the discoloured spot and gas trap avoidance techniques in the final version so that gas traps were easier to figure out how to avoid - I'll try to make this clearer in the final release.

- on the other hand, "confused" status does not seem to hinder movement and fighting ... maybe I should have tried disarming the gas trap as well .. sorry, that simply didn't come to my mind.

Confusion now incrementally impairs you, rather than being all or nothing impairment.

- it's impossible to melee anyone in town, yet the inhabitants -including the cockroaches- can hit the @ !!

That's not the intention - only harmless town monsters and those on errands should not be attacked by the player. I'll have to check my assumptions on this.

Andrew

[andrewdoull]

- Got a strange message upon reloading yesterdays savegame - a char I started with pre2, btw. :

"8 8 8 8 8 8 14 8 4 8 15 15 15 6 8 2 9 1 (etc.)
Loading a 0.6.3.7 savefile...
Restoring Dungeon..."

This only shows up on the top of the main screen, not in the message log.

Looks like I've forgotten to remove some diagnostic code.

- Bill Ferny dropped an {unusual} Soft Leather Armor ... and a "Leather Coat worth 1450 gold pieces", a "Pick worth 1350 gold pieces" ... comparing with older versions of UN I would say the wrong type of ID was applied as pseudo here ?!

The type of pseudo id you get is class dependent.

Andrew

[andrewdoull]

I'm going to use this post for any bugs or possible bugs.

- Is it intended that the player should have to rest on a shop entrance to enter? This only happened the first time I was in Hobbiton, after returning there shop entrances were normal.

There's a bug filed for this already. Since it appears to affect people quite frequently, I guess I'll have to fix it. Try the secret '_' command to enter shops.

- Not able to attack hobbits via melee. Found this out when I tried to kill Maggot.

It's harmless townsfolk... hmmm... not being able to melee Maggot is... interesting. I think I'll keep it in... I'll have to adjust his hit points to make it possible to kill him without melee though.

Andrew

[Arralen]

Inability to sell certain items pseudo-ID-ed as {average}

Odd - I'll have to look at this further.

Here's a savegame - enter the weapons shop, see that
- the shovel is sellable
- the lochaber axe isn't
.. both are "freshly" from Barrow-Downs, and only auto-pseudo-ID-ed. (no scroll read on them)

Hope this helps!