Why aren't you playing Unangband?

[Bandobras]

* I don't like carrying a whole bunch of scrolls just to ID, or even pseudo-ID, stuff.

What classes do you play? For most (all?) classes pseudo-ID of some kind is free and instant. Also, if you don't like the hassle of saving money by using weaker scrolls, Identify scrolls alone suffice. What is exactly the bad gameplay experience coming from here?

* Since the addition of the tower to Weathertop, the LOTR theme is just too hard.

Not been there for months and there were some big changes lately, so I cannot comment.

* I don't like so many strictly themed dungeons.

You mean monsters? Like bugs on the Marshes? Or rather terrain types or anything else? Not to make monsters boring, many dungeons are unthemed or only slightly themed. Which dungeons you feel would get better by removing monster themes? In newer versions you can travel freely (at least in The Hobbit part of the campaign). Does the possibility to switch between dungeons help when the monsters in a particular dungeon become boring?

Thank you for your comments and I hope to fight against you in the competition, nevertheless.

[mavfin]

Hi, I'm a newbie on these forums.

My reasons for not playing UnAngband are that the distributed executable for OSX only works on Intel, and when I downloaded the source, and typed in "make -f Makefile.osx", it compiled and created an executable, but when I launched it, it presented me an error "Cannot prepare menu bar!" and quit.

The console does not show anything unusual from UnAngband.app.

What you can do is just do a make -f Makefile.std all, and it'll make a version that works fine under X11 or in a shell (the X11 and Terminal apps are in the Applications/Utilities folder)

[andrewdoull]

* I don't like carrying a whole bunch of scrolls just to ID, or even pseudo-ID, stuff.

Just sell your equipment to the shop and buy it back - problem solved

I will take this one on the chin - ID in Unangband has always been a little controversial. I would have thought that the (newish) instant pseudo-id would have helped in this regard.

* Since the addition of the tower to Weathertop, the LOTR theme is just too hard.

Now, the Nazgul do not appear any more in the LotR theme, until you trigger an event by visiting a location elsewhere. So it's possible to visit all the early locations without worrying about getting insta-killed by a Black Rider.

* I don't like so many strictly themed dungeons. Themed levels are better. (I end up playing the questless version instead.)

I'm still trying to work out what I want to do about 'strict' theming. The monster theming is less 'strict' than perhaps the last time you played, due to the presence of monster ecologies. This means you can get a big mix of different types of monsters on some levels in a 'themed' dungeon (not all - usually due to the presence of a monster/unique with escorts being generated early in the ecology). The terrain is just a place-holder for the moment until I switch over to specifying dungeon flags (lava dungeon, ice dungeon etc.) to match on, as opposed to guaranteeing particular terrain gets generated on each level. But that won't happen until 0.6.3.

And finally:
Too many variants.

Amen.

[Pete Mack]

Now, the Nazgul do not appear any more in the LotR theme, until you trigger an event by visiting a location elsewhere. So it's possible to visit all the early locations without worrying about getting insta-killed by a Black Rider.

I'll give it another try. I got whacked so many times by 'Adunaphel', I'd given up entirely on that quest. In the very old days, Using sunlight & fire against her was a bit of a cheat, but it was an interesting one.

I'm still trying to work out what I want to do about 'strict' theming. The monster theming is less 'strict' than perhaps the last time you played, due to the presence of monster ecologies. This means you can get a big mix of different types of monsters on some levels in a 'themed' dungeon (not all - usually due to the presence of a monster/unique with escorts being generated early in the ecology). The terrain is just a place-holder for the moment until I switch over to specifying dungeon flags (lava dungeon, ice dungeon etc.) to match on, as opposed to guaranteeing particular terrain gets generated on each level. But that won't happen until 0.6.3.

I'll try it out. I used to get bored by the various towers (all those animals, and dragon bats) and by Smaug's den (all those dragons, and dragon bats)

[andrewdoull]

I'll try it out. I used to get bored by the various towers (all those animals, and dragon bats) and by Smaug's den (all those dragons, and dragon bats)

Ah - you might find monster ecologies inserting a whole lot of animals and dragon bats to ensure variety on levels that don't have them...

On a better note, you have a lot more choices than towers and Smaug's den for progression now.

Andrew

[Pete Mack]

Just sell your equipment to the shop and buy it back - problem solved

I will take this one on the chin - ID in Unangband has always been a little controversial. I would have thought that the (newish) instant pseudo-id would have helped in this regard.

I do like instant pseudo, but unless you have a good-pseudo class, you end up with annoying designations like 'magical'. And you end up getting stuff like 'uncursed', 'non-magical', all designating non-stacking arrows (+0,+0). That said, I really do like the way *ID* works, although I'm not entirely keen on it applying to ego items.

This would be much better if bags for utility stuff were common and shallow, or available in (say) the general store in Rivendell (Summer)

[Matthias]

I think the id-holding bag has been made a lot more common in recent versions. All my newer characters had it early enough.

[stanza]

What you can do is just do a make -f Makefile.std all, and it'll make a version that works fine under X11 or in a shell (the X11 and Terminal apps are in the Applications/Utilities folder)

I've tried this too. At the time I thought the developer files for X11 were not installed as I was getting errors doing this, so I was just trying to either get curses or gcu working, neither of which would, but now it is kicking in my brain that I must have forgotten some includes. Apple does seem good at putting include folders in nonstandard places.

I'll try this when I get home from work and report. Any other Leopard-PPC users out there?

[Pete Mack]

Hi, I'm a newbie on these forums.

My reasons for not playing UnAngband are that the distributed executable for OSX only works on Intel, and when I downloaded the source, and typed in "make -f Makefile.osx", it compiled and created an executable, but when I launched it, it presented me an error "Cannot prepare menu bar!" and quit.

The console does not show anything unusual from UnAngband.app.

What version of OS X are you using? When I was working on this, I was using 10.3 and 10.4

Since my OS X box is currently acting as a doorstop, I can't help you out. It means that one of the OS X configuration files (Angband.xml or something in main.nib) is broken. Perhaps somebody else can help out on this?

A quick diff of the source code shows that UnAngband does have one bug: window drags may break the mouse code.

[andrewdoull]

What version of OS X are you using? When I was working on this, I was using 10.3 and 10.4

Since my OS X box is currently acting as a doorstop, I can't help you out. It means that one of the OS X configuration files (Angband.xml or something in main.nib) is broken. Perhaps somebody else can help out on this?

A quick diff of the source code shows that UnAngband does have one bug: window drags may break the mouse code.

Thanks - I'll have a quick look. Andrew Sidwell's changing use_sound to be an in-game variable has stopped me synching directly with the latest Angband code base.

Re: the files - it compiles fine from SVN. It sounds like I'm not including one or more files in the source distribution, which I'll check. The other issue might be compatibility between Power PC and Intel builds (I'm building on Intel).

Andrew

[Pete Mack]

Thanks - I'll have a quick look. Andrew Sidwell's changing use_sound to be an in-game variable has stopped me synching directly with the latest Angband code base.

Re: the files - it compiles fine from SVN. It sounds like I'm not including one or more files in the source distribution, which I'll check. The other issue might be compatibility between Power PC and Intel builds (I'm building on Intel).

Andrew

The particular error about the menu bar means that the problem is unlikely to be in the C code. Take a look at .../src/osx/English.lproj/main.nib with Integration Builder, and see if anything shows up wrong. The menu numbers should all match the constants in osx_tables.h, but failing that won't cause the menus to fail to load. It would only mean that they don't do the correct thing when you select a menu item.

PS: integration builder is a pretty easy app to learn compared to the equivalent windows tools, though it is rather more primitive.

[stanza]

What you can do is just do a make -f Makefile.std all, and it'll make a version that works fine under X11 or in a shell (the X11 and Terminal apps are in the Applications/Utilities folder)

I've tried this too. At the time I thought the developer files for X11 were not installed as I was getting errors doing this, so I was just trying to either get curses or gcu working, neither of which would, but now it is kicking in my brain that I must have forgotten some includes. Apple does seem good at putting include folders in nonstandard places.

I'll try this when I get home from work and report. Any other Leopard-PPC users out there?

So I get home this evening, cd unangband/src, do a make -f Makefil.std and get all sorts of errors. And then I think "well, I've got so many compiles on top of each other that if I want to give them the real errors, I need to do a make clean". Then I did a "rm *.o", followed by make -f Makefile.std, and what do you know? It works!

I suspect what had happened is that it was marking compiled files as not needing compilation, whilst the object files were for the Makefile.osx.

On to UnAngbandy goodness!

[stanza]

The particular error about the menu bar means that the problem is unlikely to be in the C code. Take a look at .../src/osx/English.lproj/main.nib with Integration Builder, and see if anything shows up wrong. The menu numbers should all match the constants in osx_tables.h, but failing that won't cause the menus to fail to load. It would only mean that they don't do the correct thing when you select a menu item.

PS: integration builder is a pretty easy app to learn compared to the equivalent windows tools, though it is rather more primitive.

I get the error:
'Interface Builder was unable to determine the type of "main.nib".'

This is using Xcode 3.0. I suspect if I were using Xcode 2.5 it might be able to read the nib. There does not seem to be an "importer" or anything that may work.

I'm not likely to try to download Xcode 2.5 until at least the weekend, and then only if I'm feeling tough.

[Pete Mack]

I get the error:
'Interface Builder was unable to determine the type of "main.nib".'

This is using Xcode 3.0. I suspect if I were using Xcode 2.5 it might be able to read the nib. There does not seem to be an "importer" or anything that may work.

I'm not likely to try to download Xcode 2.5 until at least the weekend, and then only if I'm feeling tough.

That is strange. Is 3.0.9 working? It was built using the same XCode, and shares a lot of the same code in main.nib. (3.0.8 is even closer; the only difference w/ UnAngband is the 'about' popup.)

[stanza]

That is strange. Is 3.0.9 working? It was built using the same XCode, and shares a lot of the same code in main.nib. (3.0.8 is even closer; the only difference w/ UnAngband is the 'about' popup.)

Vanilla Angband 3.0.9 compiles without any problems whatsoever. And the nib happily loads in Interface Builder.

So, I copied main.nib from Angband 3.0.9 (it's a folder) into UnAngband 0.6.2 and the first time I try it, it gives me a permissions error, but I learn my lesson this time, make -f Makefile.osx clean; make -f Makefile.osx and it works!

The only catch is that the about window is wrong. So for anyone else who wants a PPC build, I offer this link:

http://www.techfocus.net/~stanza/tmp/UnAngband.app.zip

I can't guarantee that it will work on your machine, with my developer experience I find almost nothing works on the non-development machine the first try. But I've got almost no mac developer experience, so YMMV.