Why aren't you playing Unangband?

[andrewdoull]

> What's next, warriors hacking off their own feet and starving to death before they get back to town?

A perfect idea! As for now you can only die by failing to catch a thrown weapon hurled with a trick shot (from the main weapon slot) and by failing to set up a trap. If I had my way you would also occasionally prick yourself when coating weapons and ammo with mushrooms and potions.

Actually implemented that... its actually you occasionally prick yourself when using coated weapons and ammo. Very occasionally.

The reasoning behind being able to hit yourself with spells is multi-fold: Firstly, you get another way of testing if you have a particular resistance. Secondly, it makes wands of wonders properly risky, as opposed to just having a couple of effects that are dangerous.

But mostly, its because fireball is not that interesting a spell.

I mean, look at it this way. Bolt spells, you at least have to attempt to ensure that the target is in direct line of fire. Minor fire ball, which is unique to Unangband, is a mix of bolt and ball spells. It explodes at the first target in line of fire. Everything in line of sight spells are interesting because they force you to wade through lots of damage messages and lots of mana, and are (usually) only effective against a particular target type.

But fireball - at least the Angband implementation of it - is dull. Automatically hit anything in line of fire for lots of damage, plus targets adjacent to it. It at least has the redeeming and slightly balancing factor that it destroys stuff on the ground. But the too much junk problem in Angband makes this beneficial rather than problematic the majority of the time.

By making the player get damaged if they are too close to the fireball, there's at least a trade of between position and utility of the spell. There's no more standing at ground zero and fireballing a monster you should be meleeing to death or running away from.

That's why I like it.

PS: I'm likely to tone down the amount of food used moving between locations and replace a 'lost in the wilderness' with a random encounter with monsters. Having to have a full stomach before you travel is still quite a strict requirement.

[Magnate]

Just in case anyone who hasn't yet tried Un is reading this, I have to say when I tried it I didn't have anything like these problems. I found a dungeon, went exploring and just got a bit overwhelmed with all the features. I don't remember having any difficulty learning spells or casting them, buying stuff, avoiding hunger or anything else.

But I never read docs anyway.

CC

[Bandobras]

> What's next, warriors hacking off their own feet and starving to death before they get back to town?

A perfect idea! As for now you can only die by failing to catch a thrown weapon hurled with a trick shot (from the main weapon slot) and by failing to set up a trap. If I had my way you would also occasionally prick yourself when coating weapons and ammo with mushrooms and potions.

Are you not afraid of chopping your head off with your own weapon? Are you not afraid of frying your ass with your own fireball? Play UnAngband! And remember: real men don't read manuals.

[Nick]

I noticed this recently for OS X having just bought a new Mac book. The temporary fix is to create the lib folder structure (I think you need lib/apex, lib/data, lib/user of the top of my head) under the Libraray/Preferences/Unangband folder under your user account. I'll confirm this tonight.

Pete Mack has done a bit of work on OS X ports generally - the FA one seems to work pretty smoothly now. It might be worth comparing the main-crb.c and Makefile.osx for Un and FA and see where there are differences. There's also a src/osx directory for FA which may be relevant.

[Nameless]

Out of curiousity, I pulled down a copy of UnAngband, having never played it before. I figured it'd be an interesting thing to try a variant, and given this thread, why not give it a go?

First reaction? What are all these different races, and how do they differ beyond stats? I'll check the documentation. OH! There is no documentation... Oookay. Maia looks like the "easy mode" given the significant bonuses without penalties, and I'll play a mage. Sure, that'll be familiar from V. Oh, and I have to pick other stuff? I'll check the... oh, right.. no documentation. Oh, Magic Books and Sorcery sounds good, since I'm a mage. Hey, wait... it didn't take, and I'm a Warrior classed Man of Bree. I'll start over, maybe I missed it. (Did it twice, third time was the charm. Odd, but probably just me, I hope.)

Constitution affects spellpoints? Egad, the changes in this version must be significant! Look at all these spells in the first book! Well, at least *they* explain themselves. That's nice to have.

So I explore a bit - and find that I can get lost and nearly starve to death just going "one hill over" into the next area. Gotta carry lots of food and be prepared to arrive in a "weak" state due to hunger. A bit odd, but I can live with this, and I still want to figure it out, right? Besides, this very open grassy are is nice (what parts have tiles and not placeholders, anyway) and it's all shiny and new.

At last, I find a dungeon (in Bree?) and prepare to make a first descent. I've got torches and a cloak, food for the trip and my spells all learned, so I go for it. I find some faeries, and smite them with Magic Missile. This repeats for a while, I pick up some copper. Things are rolling along.

Finally, I try to cast on a faerie, target myself unintentionally, and my Soon to Be Mighty Maia dies by Magic Missile-ing himself in the foot. Thank goodness I discovered this early, before I spent the time to get a fireball spell and used it to kill myself unexpectedly while fighting a close-ranged, hard fought battle with a unique monster.

It's not enough that there's no documentation to speak of, or that the wildly V-divergent features cry out for more intuitive in-game explanations before they bite you, but now I ALSO have to worry about killing myself with my own abilities? Not by eating an unidentified poisonous mushroom, or drinking a potion of detonations by accident, but by casting the spells I was "born" with? What's next, warriors hacking off their own feet and starving to death before they get back to town?

I uninstalled it posthaste - if I can do this with a Magic Missile spell, then this is a variant with a more hostile player environment than any game in which I'm interested. Thanks, but I'll pass. Maybe I'll try it again later - a few more versions down the road to soften the player environment and polish the numerous rough edges, and produce a lot more documentation.

Maybe. They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

[andrewdoull]

To get to the original question: why am I not playing Unangband?

I did play some earlier versions, and I enjoyed them, but I haven't played the most recent version for a very simple reason: I can't get it to work!

I've downloaded the most recent version (0.6.2.whatever it is) for OS X. When I open it, I get an error message telling me it can't create the scores.raw file, and that the 'lib' directory is probably missing or broken.

If you tell me how to get it to work, I promise to play it!

I noticed this recently for OS X having just bought a new Mac book. The temporary fix is to create the lib folder structure (I think you need lib/apex, lib/data, lib/user of the top of my head) under the Libraray/Preferences/Unangband folder under your user account. I'll confirm this tonight.

[ewan]

Fwiw, my reason for not playing Un is exactly the same as the previous poster: that it doesn't run under os x. [I get identical errors.]

[Daven_26d1]

I've downloaded the most recent version (0.6.2.whatever it is) for OS X. When I open it, I get an error message telling me it can't create the scores.raw file, and that the 'lib' directory is probably missing or broken.

I don't use OS X, but it sounds to me like the binary is in the wrong folder, as relative paths are being used. I presume it should be one level up from the lib directory, assuming that you do have all the files/folders...

[Corydon]

To get to the original question: why am I not playing Unangband?

I did play some earlier versions, and I enjoyed them, but I haven't played the most recent version for a very simple reason: I can't get it to work!

I've downloaded the most recent version (0.6.2.whatever it is) for OS X. When I open it, I get an error message telling me it can't create the scores.raw file, and that the 'lib' directory is probably missing or broken.

If you tell me how to get it to work, I promise to play it!

[tigen]

Ok this is strange. I can't reproduce it now. Maybe it depended on my screen size, or something about the start condition.

I guess I was too quick to blame bigscreen. It seemed like running without bigscreen fixed it.

I attached gdb to it at the time and saw that it was crashing at xtra2.c:5007. I'm at a different PC now so maybe I'll be able to reproduce at home.

(To be more clear, it crashed when I pressed 'l" to "look" around.)

[TJA]

I did not read about "--" between "-mcgu" and "-b", but i tried what you wrote - and it works great!
No crash no problems ...

Can you make a "strace" log of such a crash?

[tigen]

I gave it a very brief try last night, on Linux. Compiled ok with Makefile.std. 0.62 wip5b. I found out that -mgcu -- -b (big screen mode) caused it to crash.

[will_asher]

My main reason for not playing it now is that I'm still trying to win a game of Vanilla before I get much into other variants.

Having said that, I tried UnAngband for a little while before, and I liked the campaign mode and themed rooms, and a lot of things about it. But at the time, it was very buggy, and I quit until more of the bugs were worked out. Then when newer versions came out, I heard about stuff like charging and dodging which sound like something I really would not like. But I do plan on trying it again once I finally win V.

[andrewdoull]

As for poll - none of the above.

My reasons:

1) Way too buggy. I got random crashes or freezes nearly all the time at random intervals and from random, and unknown reasons.

There is one known lock-up bug, which is when a monster inventory or the floor stack ends up with a 'loop' of items in it - I'm going to do a work around to prevent the lock up (but it'll still make the stack fairly buggy) until I can figure out what is causing this. Other than that, I test pretty thoroughly with the dumbborg which should highlight lockups in the majority of code paths. Which version are you using and on what platform?

2) Campaign mode is just...not for my taste at all. I prefer somewhat normal wilderness, not situation where you never know if you will be able to get back from where you went. And in most cases you will not.

Campaign mode was an interim hack that worked a lot better than expected. I'm going to make most of the edges two-way, so there'll only be a few locations you can't back out of. In fact, I'll probably try and so something a little smarter than that...


Andrew

[Daven_26d1]

Reading this thread, I can honestly say I'm getting pretty interested. My favourite roguelike is ADOM, but I find it hard to bring myself to play very often, basically having exhausted many times just about every way to start the game.

If Un can give me that sort of complexity, with secrets to discover for ages (I'm not keen on source diving/spoiling except to check theories) and many different ways to use mundane items, then I can't see how I can't play it!

I'm still loving Sang right now though, it would be unfair to abandon my first character! However, Mr Doull - consider me a recruit for the near future.