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.

[Nameless]

I don't remember having any difficulty learning spells or casting them, buying stuff, avoiding hunger or anything else.

I don't recall mentioning any problems with Un in these areas. I didn't suddenly forget how to eat rations when switching versions - I just arrived from a "lost in the wilderness" random result already weak from hunger.

But I never read docs anyway.

And remember: real men don't read manuals.

If I must code dive to figure out how Un works, then forget it. I've got my own code projects on which I could/should be working, after all. IMO, a developer should be looking to streamline my entry into the play experience as a new player, not requiring me to read source code to figure out the basics. It boils down to the fact that at the end of the day, I'm trying to play the game as an end-user in this situation, and there's no user manual to speak of. That's bad.

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.

Did the handy chart of detailed character information with the resistances-by-item-slot not make it into Un? I didn't bother to check, after my little run-in with a spellbook. Frankly, I've never needed to fry myself in V to figure out if I'm resistant, because I can (gasp) read the chart. Zapping myself takes "character" time, reduces character resources, and consumes nearly as much "player" time. Reading the chart takes none of the first, none of the second, and little more (if any) of the latter. (In fact, I think it may even take fewer keypresses!)

Given that goal of an alternative means to check resistances, why not just add a level X spell called "probe resistances" and let players cast this on themselves (and maybe even a higher level Y version for monsters?) to list all their resistances. Problem solved, and no need to fry mages.

Being able to shoot myself in the foot with a magic missile is missing from V for a reason, IMO. Frankly, it reminds me of old (and poorly played) games of D&D from my childhood:
"At long last the secrets of arcane might are mine!"
(To DM - I use my hard-earned spell of wish.)
"I wish I had 1,000,000gp!"
(DM makes a whistling sound to represent a bag containing 1,000,000gp falling from orbit over your PC)

Secondly, it makes wands of wonders properly risky, as opposed to just having a couple of effects that are dangerous.

So, it's a good idea, because hasting that unique or healing it completely when I wanted a frost bolt isn't nearly bad enough! No one uses these for long now because they're risky, aside from at very early levels. (They DO have adverse effects, after all.)

...and now I have to wonder even more about wonder: Will it blow me up, or blow him up, or make him kill me quicker, heal him completely... I already stop using wands of wonder in V first, due to the chance of adverse effects in the hands of the RNG. You're just making a less desirable thing even less desirable, here.

That's why I like it.

Which indirectly answers your poll, in my case. I don't, and it's indicative of a player experience I don't care to have. I'm not saying there shouldn't be things you can do that will cause your character to suffer adverse reactions, but this one isn't much "fun" to me. Truth told, it's kind of a non-starter.

It's clear you've put a lot of time into broadening one of my favorite games. Good luck with Un - it'll be interesting to see how it turns out "in the end".

[Matthias]

Did the handy chart of detailed character information with the resistances-by-item-slot not make it into Un? I didn't bother to check, after my little run-in with a spellbook. Frankly, I've never needed to fry myself in V to figure out if I'm resistant, because I can (gasp) read the chart. Zapping myself takes "character" time, reduces character resources, and consumes nearly as much "player" time. Reading the chart takes none of the first, none of the second, and little more (if any) of the latter. (In fact, I think it may even take fewer keypresses!)

That chart, I guess you are talking about the Character screen, is available in Un as well. But just as in Vanilla, most resistances only show up there if you have *id*ed the items. However V has no Randarts, no magic items and less objects with random powers, so the need to test things isn't as obvious. If you play at a faster pace you might, even in V, find yourself in a situation with a lot more stuff to *id* then scrolls to use.

Once again this is just "in theory". I have never used those self hurting devices and the reason for that is likely what you mention as player time. Those things also take up one more inventory slot than I am willing to pay

[Corydon]

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.

Awesome! I tried this-- created apex, data, save, scores and user folders-- and it seems to work fine.

Thanks for your help, and I'm psyched to play some Unangband!

[GCD]

I used to play Unangband a lot. I found most of the changes very exciting, and I think it has the potential to be the best variant out there. There were two reasons I am not playing it as much anymore:

1. Bugs and crashes - The last few times I played the game crashed. When I tried to restore my saved game I couldn't even get the game to run.
2. Lack of documentation - I agree with whoever said that the lack of documentation is a serious downpoint. Each new version of unangband brings with it major changes to gameplay, including the effects of various stats. It is currently unclear to me what each stat does. I also feels that the stat changes have unbalanced the game somewhat.

I think if you want more people to play unangband your next goal should be to make a version that is stable, balanced and has updated help files. It may not be as exciting for you as a developer but it would go a long way towards getting more people interested in this variant.

[GCD]

I would also recommend making the monsters populating each dungeon level more diverse. I am all for limiting each type of dungeon to specific monster types but I think it has been overdone. Also, some of the dungeons seem to be virtually empty.

[ewan]

So - created folders (thanks) and tried a start. I'm afraid I'm another who never really yet got going: the start menus don't respond correctly to letter-press choices (you have to scroll down) and the game only started up half of the time - otherwise just freezing. This mostly mattered because 'auto-scum' is a birth option, so I had to change that and restart - which never happened. The lack of docs while going through start-up (worse, clearly erroneous docs mostly) was just the icing on my decision to shelve UnA for now.

[andrewdoull]

I just want to say thanks for all the feedback at the moment. I've tried to incorporate a lot of this into the initial startup screens, and the next work in progress will include a lot of improvements here. In particular, you'll be able to dynamically compare the various class and race options, and the usual set of choices will be cut down to only those you have experience with - as a beginner you don't have to worry about class or race, and as someone who hasn't played Unangband before, you'll get a lot fewer choices of class, race and speciality to have to worry about.

I'm not sure why people are experience freezes or lockups during the startup screens. Please let me know which platforms you're running on. Also let me know if disabling mouse input helps.

[petebull]

I'm playing it now. It's nice.

My first stumble was the dungeon. I liked ToMEs approach: make the starting dungeon part of the starting town.

Also, posts like that http://forum.t-o-m-e.net/viewtopic.php?p=20871#20871 helped me enjoying the game.

[Diogenes]

I'm curious as to what's stopping you from trying or playing Unangband on a more regular basis.

Any feedback welcome.

My particular reason would be that it doesn't download - I got as far as http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangba...-wip6a-win.zip , but it keeps timing out on me. Other than that, I'd sure be willing to give it a try.

Cheers,

Peter.

[Bandobras]

Try at

http://angband.oook.cz/variants.php?variant=unangband

The original development site is known for network problems... :<

[Atriel]

I am trying it right now...

Really cool character creation, specs, ideas...
but one thing i am finding hard to swallow

it is common for me to enter a room and see 5 different characters of different colors, and after (l)ooking at them, all of them were walls, just with some sort of flavour! Ok, cool flavours, but it makes kinda hard to "feel the matrix" quickly, grasp in a glance what is going on... And i am very used to Heng, Entro, and somewhat to the new Z...
But i really want to play it more, and i am right now in the process of re-assigning all wall types to the base or pixelated wall characters, just with different colors, trying to make walls a lil bit more consistent.

[Bandobras]

Do you play in ASCII? Are asterisks the problem? I see no other non-standard characters for walls...

[Matthias]

Ok, cool flavours, but it makes kinda hard to "feel the matrix" quickly, grasp in a glance what is going on...

this is imo one of the biggest problems. Wait until you see features that matter, like chasm...

[andrewdoull]

Do you play in ASCII? Are asterisks the problem? I see no other non-standard characters for walls...

I've been a little bit remiss and made some * and % locations traversable. However, I'm going to be more strict on myself and tidy this up next release (at least I hope to - I should be able to for *, not sure about %).

The hash (I'm using a UK keyboard which doesn't have it), * and most % characters are all walls. '0', ';' and ':' are traversable but hard to do so (either deep or take two moves). All others should be readily traversable.

BTW: I'm not working at the moment so happily hacking on the game. Since I don't have internet access regularly, I'm not working on the up to date bug list. At least, that's my excuse...