[announce] Sangband 1.0.1 released

[Magnate]

Have Staffs of Cure Medium Wounds been nerfed? They used to be useful, but now they seem more like they should be called Cure Insignificant Wounds.

Also, wands of Stinking Clound are relatively common, and are a passable way of dealing with some of the early evasive monsters.

I think CMW got changed from % healing to a flat 20hp, so yes they are much less cool as they don't scale with you.

@Bostock: yes!! My umptymillionth Kimba got a quest for five tengu and my heart sank. Then I remembered to buy a dagger and equip it in the shield slot (I was a rogue so going with a light primary anyway) and it was a breeze! So I take back my carping about evasive monsters, they're ok (and as you said, not a patch on stormcrows or lightningjaws).

But ... there's definitely a bug with RES_EDGED. AFAICT from looking at the source they SHOULD resist arrows and bolts, but for some reason they don't. This bug is IMO the only reason they're not impossible already. I think it should be toned down from a chance to ignore the hit altogether (which is high, 60 or 70% for nonvorpal weapons IIRC), to a reduction in the damage (say 1/2 or 1/3). This way you could still chip away at them instead of having a much larger number of effective misses.

I got a quest for 9 iron golems (which resist all elements except acid and have IM_EDGED, which is even worse), and had no acid attacks. So I tried to bring karate up from zero and got killed doing it - it's nigh impossible to raise a melee skill later in the game.

[Magnate]

Yes (20% to 10%). I was under the impression that they were crazy good and nerfed to useful. At 20%, I felt like a) Priest's schtick, healing, was accessible to everyone b) too useful mid-fight c) made magic devices too good.

Ooh, I've been mis-reading it then - I thought it was flat hp. 10% is still scalable, and I agree with your reasoning for weakening it. I never used to rely on potions when it was 20%, and that feels wrong.

I think that's on purpose for balance reasons.

I think you're supposed to have more than one way of killing things. Magic, traps, devices, missile weapons, melee. Or you can just run. Killing everything not required. It is really annoying, though. At least with bless, martial artists can hit everything.

Well, the combination of those two responses is interesting. In fact I have no problem with stone trolls - as has been pointed out, they don't resist any elements so they're not hard to kill at all - but I do think they're worth too few xp compared with similarly hard monsters (they're much harder than uruks or cave ogres yet worth little more xp). Iron golems are another matter, the only way to kill them is acid or martial arts, but more on this anon when I write up my next set of comp notes.

As I said in a previous reply, I thought the change to arrows and bolts not being resisted was a bug, but glad to see it's considered balancing.

[Magnate]

I've played through a few games without problem. Is anyone else having problems here. I buy ?Tele, ?PD, !CCW (early !CSW), and ?WoR.

I spend ALL my money on ?PD and !CSW until about 1200', and then suddenly it's no longer a problem. This is consistent over all my comp games (they of course all use exactly the same character, but I see no reason why starting race or stats should affect gold drops ...).

He should drop it. My one test confirms that Smeagol drops picked up items, though it could be a bug. Send the savefile over. (middendorfproject@gmail.com).

Ok will do - he definitely didn't, so hopefully it will be helpful.

Haven't seen these. I'll investigate on a linux box. Which version are you compiling?

I compiled r129 and ran with no options (not even -mgcu - it defaults to that when run in a terminal anyway). I will check on #angband-dev as I think some of these may have been encountered and fixed in V.

EDIT: checked. Apparently many of these (esc and ^s for sure) have been fixed in V's current main-gcu.c ... I don't know how old/different sangband's main-gcu is - hopefully the fixes will stand out?

EDIT2: I gather not, since S's main-gcu has different bigscreen support which (I think) predate's V's bigscreen code. Hmmm. I don't suppose you'd be interested in updating to V's bigscreen support? Or even to AngbandBase? (I guess not, since I think Leon did quite a lot of work on the screen stuff.) main-gcu.c isn't really my thing, but I'll see if I can bisect and find where these things were fixed in V, and let you have a patch or two.

Or I could just fix it so that if you do that without penalty. And color code it so you know when you're too low. Most of the time, I just press escape if I'm not happy with what I've added.

Yes me too, but I didn't notice that I'd lost xp buying back accidentally un-bought points until I'd pressed Return. Colour coding would be hugely helpful actually - just make it purple if you take it down to a level where you'd need to pay new xp to buy it back. That way you can escape if it's an accident, and still keep the current behaviour (I think letting people do it without penalty breaches your chosen policy on skill reduction).

Probably all kinds of hindrance (slow, stun, confuse, etc.) from all sources should train skills.

Yes! Huge thumbs up.

Thanks for all the responses. I had forgotten how excellent this variant is. Kudos on the changes to martial arts: using the melee critical code works really well IMO.

Just off to burn a few more Kimbas until the comp completes ...

[camlost]

I think CMW got changed from % healing to a flat 20hp, so yes they are much less cool as they don't scale with you.

@Bostock: yes!! My umptymillionth Kimba got a quest for five tengu and my heart sank. Then I remembered to buy a dagger and equip it in the shield slot (I was a rogue so going with a light primary anyway) and it was a breeze! So I take back my carping about evasive monsters, they're ok (and as you said, not a patch on stormcrows or lightningjaws).

But ... there's definitely a bug with RES_EDGED. AFAICT from looking at the source they SHOULD resist arrows and bolts, but for some reason they don't. This bug is IMO the only reason they're not impossible already. I think it should be toned down from a chance to ignore the hit altogether (which is high, 60 or 70% for nonvorpal weapons IIRC), to a reduction in the damage (say 1/2 or 1/3). This way you could still chip away at them instead of having a much larger number of effective misses.

I got a quest for 9 iron golems (which resist all elements except acid and have IM_EDGED, which is even worse), and had no acid attacks. So I tried to bring karate up from zero and got killed doing it - it's nigh impossible to raise a melee skill later in the game.

Percentage healing in S does a minimum of twice its percentage in absolute HP. So 10% is a minimum of 20HP. CLW is a minimum of 10HP (5%). That way they're more useful for more of the game.

I'll think about toning them down. The bug for shooting is that the code is testing the launcher object, not the ammo object. An easy enough fix, though percentages should perhaps be reduced. A lot of warriors don't have good access to blunt weapons.

I've had some luck with weapon type to weapon type conversion mid to late game, but I've never really tried weapon <-> martial arts. Of course, innate skill and/or stats matter a lot more when making that transition.

[camlost]

Yes me too, but I didn't notice that I'd lost xp buying back accidentally un-bought points until I'd pressed Return. Colour coding would be hugely helpful actually - just make it purple if you take it down to a level where you'd need to pay new xp to buy it back. That way you can escape if it's an accident, and still keep the current behaviour (I think letting people do it without penalty breaches your chosen policy on skill reduction).Yes! Huge thumbs up.

Thanks for all the responses. I had forgotten how excellent this variant is. Kudos on the changes to martial arts: using the melee critical code works really well IMO.

Now purple in r165.

I'm glad you like the changes in martial arts. They certainly took long enough. I'm looking forward to hearing more detailed thoughts.

EDIT2: I gather not, since S's main-gcu has different bigscreen support which (I think) predate's V's bigscreen code. Hmmm. I don't suppose you'd be interested in updating to V's bigscreen support? Or even to AngbandBase? (I guess not, since I think Leon did quite a lot of work on the screen stuff.) main-gcu.c isn't really my thing, but I'll see if I can bisect and find where these things were fixed in V, and let you have a patch or two.

That'd be great. Screen work isn't really my cup of tea, but I'll probably have to poke into it sooner or later.

Ok will do - he definitely didn't, so hopefully it will be helpful.

I definitely agree with the analysis -- Smeagol should have dropped Wormy's drop, and he should have it. He picked it up, he didn't drop it, you didn't change levels, and objects weren't compacted. The code looks like it should work, and tests suggest it does. I'll file it under strange until I hear of it again.

[Bostock]

Hallucination bugs

Did you catch the minor hallucination bugs I post-edited into the report on shop cycling?

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Hello,

perhaps martial arts was just fine before, but is a bit too powerful now?

Somewhere around version 1.0 Leon introduced the change that some racial skills costs also affect skill efficiency. So a wrestler with a skill cost of 8 is now more efficient in the end game.

I have a hunch that this was not properly balanced. As I wrote in an earlier post, races get martial arts skills much cheaper than weapon skills. So this change probably boosted karatekas and wrestlers, while leaving weapon-users at about the same power level.

Mikko

[camlost]

Did you catch the minor hallucination bugs I post-edited into the report on shop cycling?

Yes, Issue 69.

[ekolis]

Hey, I don't know if you're interested in maintaining this, but I created a MSVC 2010 solution file to build Sangband... want me to send it to you for inclusion in the repository?

[Magnate]

Hey, I don't know if you're interested in maintaining this, but I created a MSVC 2010 solution file to build Sangband... want me to send it to you for inclusion in the repository?

Does your Windows build still have the bizarre message delay behaviour? When I play r129 in Windows I get the game pausing before the final message after any turn, and I have to press a key to flush the output before the final message will appear and let me take my next turn. This seems to happen only when playing with "fullscreen, subwindows" and not with "fullscreen, large map". Anyone else experienced this?

[camlost]

Does your Windows build still have the bizarre message delay behaviour? When I play r129 in Windows I get the game pausing before the final message after any turn, and I have to press a key to flush the output before the final message will appear and let me take my next turn. This seems to happen only when playing with "fullscreen, subwindows" and not with "fullscreen, large map". Anyone else experienced this?

Yes, it was bugging the crap out of me. It is fixed in r163 (probably not correctly, but it works). It's a bug with displaying the character screen in a subwindow. Removing that screen is the obvious workaround, or you can recompile version 129 with r163 patched in. There's no gameplay changes in that revision.

http://code.google.com/p/skills-angband/issues/detail?id=62&can=1&q=subwindow

[Bostock]

Subwindows are for dweebs anyway.

*ducks*

[Magnate]

Yes, it was bugging the crap out of me. It is fixed in r163 (probably not correctly, but it works). It's a bug with displaying the character screen in a subwindow. Removing that screen is the obvious workaround, or you can recompile version 129 with r163 patched in. There's no gameplay changes in that revision.

http://code.google.com/p/skills-angb...=1&q=subwindow

The bug affects both the character screen and the "equipment attributes" screen, but it's playable with both of those turned off. I am currently teaching myself how to cross-compile for Windows so I'll update soon.

[UniqueName]

Does your Windows build still have the bizarre message delay behaviour? When I play r129 in Windows I get the game pausing before the final message after any turn, and I have to press a key to flush the output before the final message will appear and let me take my next turn. This seems to happen only when playing with "fullscreen, subwindows" and not with "fullscreen, large map". Anyone else experienced this?

Vista64. I've had the problem where messages get stacked on top of each other. I also may be getting some wierd behavior when external events happen that causes keypresses? Like maybe incoming outlook mail and Av notifications? I'd have to play around in those situations more. I don't keypress very often. Spend most of my time staring at the screen trying to figure out what to do.