FAangband 1.0

[d_m]

Mountains are the terrain type I'm least happy with (desert could use some improvement, too). They are supposed to be kind of tricky, but I still don't feel that I've got it quite right. I will do more work on them at some point, but I'm not exactly sure when. If, on the other hand, you felt like tweaking the generation and seeing what happened, I'd certainly be interested to see alternatives.

Do you have a public repository of some kind? Or do you just prefer patches against the most recent release?

I'm not promising anything, but I'm currently working on generate.c in Vanilla so I've been thinking about it a lot recently. If I have any ideas I'll try to send you a patch.

Now back to my dwarven throwing champion!

[Nick]

I've been going through Nan Dungortheb and finding that the level generation often (nearly 50%) causes FA to crash. This is reproducible for a given save file, and I find you need to take some actions to get around it.

If this isn't a known issue, I can send you a savefile (FA 1.0.2) where > always causes a crash.

No, that's a new issue. A savefile would be greatly appreciated.

[Nick]

I've been playing FA a bit recently

Cool.

Now, maybe this is just a cognitive failing on my part, or an intentional representation of the mountains as being harsh and treacherous terrain, but it would make me happy to have the mountain regions either be more "open" or more cave-like.

Mountains are the terrain type I'm least happy with (desert could use some improvement, too). They are supposed to be kind of tricky, but I still don't feel that I've got it quite right. I will do more work on them at some point, but I'm not exactly sure when. If, on the other hand, you felt like tweaking the generation and seeing what happened, I'd certainly be interested to see alternatives.

[Nick]

Telepathy
I'm using a Broadsword of Angband now, which gives me see invisible and telepathy. In a spider lair in Amon Rudh, most "S" rarely showed up, and got the according entry in their monster description (which is fine and WAD, as they are animals, after all).
But now I'm on AR29, got the "Goblin drums" special level - and the orcs do not show up via telepathy neither, nor do they get the "rarely show" entry ?!
UPDATE: Looks like they show up, but only within a very small radius (8 squares or something) ?!?!
UPDATE2: Looks like general visibility for monsters is 8 squares, but 16 for dungeon features (or something like that). As detection spells work at full range, shouldn't telepathy as well????

Yes, vision is rather hackishly reduced on special levels - I tried to make it less hackish in 1.0.1 and broke field-of-view completely, so we're back to the original.

Special Levels
At least in AR, special levels are not 100% guaranteed. I've been down to AR30, and nothing happened, got TLed up to 28, went down to 29 again, and got the Goblin drums special level?!
("The complainer complains, that even the faults in reality are f*** up!")

That bug only affects wilderness themed levels.

.. and at least this special level does not generate a level feeling?! CTRL-F results in a blank ?

OK. There was a bug where it showed the "feeling" for themed levels twice at the start; looks like I've overcompensated. Again.

(Quality) Squelch
How is it supposed to work? I would anticipate that squelch (dubious) would let me keep a {perilous} shield, yet it got dropped. IDed as {coated} [6,+18] !! with +XY% acid, -10% fire resist ...

I can't exactly recall (and have no access to the code ATM), but I think there is a setting to keep all ego items...

[jevansau]

Crashes in Nan Dungortheb

I've been going through Nan Dungortheb and finding that the level generation often (nearly 50%) causes FA to crash. This is reproducible for a given save file, and I find you need to take some actions to get around it.

If this isn't a known issue, I can send you a savefile (FA 1.0.2) where > always causes a crash.

I now just ensure I save before WOR or going down stairs, so it's just an inconvenience (also at L68 so soon on to Angband).

Regards,
Jonathan

[d_m]

Hi Nick,

I've been playing FA a bit recently, and realized that I have a (really dumb) complaint: I hate the mountain regions.

I have been playing a lot of dwarves and going north from town, and I just hate all the (long) diagonals; it makes it hard to run and for some reason I have trouble seeing paths and understanding what's going on. The net result is that I click directions somewhat impulsively and randomly and feel kind of frustrated.

Now, maybe this is just a cognitive failing on my part, or an intentional representation of the mountains as being harsh and treacherous terrain, but it would make me happy to have the mountain regions either be more "open" or more cave-like.

[Arralen]

Telepathy
I'm using a Broadsword of Angband now, which gives me see invisible and telepathy. In a spider lair in Amon Rudh, most "S" rarely showed up, and got the according entry in their monster description (which is fine and WAD, as they are animals, after all).
But now I'm on AR29, got the "Goblin drums" special level - and the orcs do not show up via telepathy neither, nor do they get the "rarely show" entry ?!
UPDATE: Looks like they show up, but only within a very small radius (8 squares or something) ?!?!
UPDATE2: Looks like general visibility for monsters is 8 squares, but 16 for dungeon features (or something like that). As detection spells work at full range, shouldn't telepathy as well????


Special Levels
At least in AR, special levels are not 100% guaranteed. I've been down to AR30, and nothing happened, got TLed up to 28, went down to 29 again, and got the Goblin drums special level?!
("The complainer complains, that even the faults in reality are f*** up!")

.. and at least this special level does not generate a level feeling?! CTRL-F results in a blank ?


(Quality) Squelch
How is it supposed to work? I would anticipate that squelch (dubious) would let me keep a {perilous} shield, yet it got dropped. IDed as {coated} [6,+18] !! with +XY% acid, -10% fire resist ...

[Nick]

Hi Nick, I am still getting occurances of recharging an item and it remaining on 0 charges (I don't have to re-identify it after the recharge). Today was the first time it has happened to me when reading the scroll (no surprise as it is the same code), but I can definitely confirm that the scroll vanished afterwards.

Really quite baffling, as I haven't touched the recharging code for several versions. Does it happen to all devices? Any idea of frequency? I'm assuming you're using 1.0.2 - any chance you've hit a capital letter (I guess not, in WinCE) or the wrong menu item? A save file would be nice - although not likely.

[Psi]

Hi Nick, I am still getting occurances of recharging an item and it remaining on 0 charges (I don't have to re-identify it after the recharge). Today was the first time it has happened to me when reading the scroll (no surprise as it is the same code), but I can definitely confirm that the scroll vanished afterwards.

[Nick]

BTW:
You are using the "default" (V) copyright notice in Makefile.src and in variable.c
If you want to set it to the same value as in "news.txt", you need to fix both values.

Also, I just took a look at the makefiles. The NAME and EXE (or some equivalent) values from Makefile.osx really need to be used more uniformly. Probably NAME should be set in Makefile.src, and other values derived from it in the individual Makefiles.

These are laudable aims with which I am in broad agreement; although they may be detrimental to the charming eccentricity of the game as it stands. I will think long and carefully.

[Pete Mack]

BTW:
You are using the "default" (V) copyright notice in Makefile.src and in variable.c
If you want to set it to the same value as in "news.txt", you need to fix both values.

Also, I just took a look at the makefiles. The NAME and EXE (or some equivalent) values from Makefile.osx really need to be used more uniformly. Probably NAME should be set in Makefile.src, and other values derived from it in the individual Makefiles.

[Nick]

Nick -- is there an svn repository I can fetch from next time?

Not yet, but I am slowly thinking about setting up something of the sort.

[Pete Mack]

FInally got around to downloading this. Looks good.

Nick -- is there an svn repository I can fetch from next time?

[Psi]

That's OK - it'll only be sitting there for one turn before you pick it up and put it on.

Well... I thought it was going to a have a superstealth activation (and maybe some normal stealth). You're likely to have/need everything else the cloak gives covered by the time you face Ungoliant (albeit not to that magnitude).

[Pete Mack]

Nick, just took out ungoliant for her prize and discovered there is no tile configured for an unlight cloak.

Nonsense--tile 0 has always been the traditional unlight cloak.