[FA] FAangband development

[petebull]

More problematic - should you be able to enlist them for help? Should they attack other monsters?

Absolutly. If there are undead and paladins coming after me on the same time those that are after me and can't reach me should fight undead instead.

Should you be able to trade with them?

Hm, tough call. No idea. My gut feeling says no.

[Seany C]

I don't see any reason for 'good' and 'evil' NPCs to attempt to take out each other but watch out for chain-summoning - Z has a handful of 'good' characters and it can lead to high-level summons all over a level occasionally...

Trading NPCs? It's the not-so-Desperate Adventurer, all of a sudden...or has Alebeard gone for a stroll?

S.

[Seany C]

Gah! I don't see any reason for good and evil NPCs not to take out each other...

Sorry, having a fat-fingered day...

[andrewdoull]

Gah! I don't see any reason for good and evil NPCs not to take out each other...

Sorry, having a fat-fingered day...

Surely it'd be smarter for one side to stand back and let the other side take you out first... I mean, we are talking about monster AI.

[Nick]

New resistance plan

I'm planning a revamp of resistances for the next version. The plan goes something like this:

1. Some items will give a percentage resistance (probably typically about 30).
2. Resistances will be multiplicative - so two 20% sources of resistance will give 36% resistance, and so on.
3. Resistance on things like armour of Resist Fire will vary.
4. Temporary resistance will be 50%, so a genuine halving.

This way no amount of resistance will add up to immunity, and ego items will be more interesting.

[pav]

EyAngband does plain sum of percentile resistances, but cap them at 70% for high resists, and 55% for low resists (temporary resist adds 40% and rises the cap here to 95%).

[Nick]

EyAngband does plain sum of percentile resistances, but cap them at 70% for high resists, and 55% for low resists (temporary resist adds 40% and rises the cap here to 95%).

The problem with a plain sum of percentages is that it doesn't make as much sense in terms of damage getting through - so a 20% source of resistance will cut damage by 20%, but a second one will cut the damage by 25%. This is why Bahman introduced the current resistance points system (which approximates multiplying) into O, which FA has inherited. The multiplicativeness will actually not make a huge amount of difference to how resists work in FA, but it allows me to have variable resistances much more easily.

[pav]

It's magical resistances, surely plain sum makes as much sense as multiplication

[CJNyfalt]

I finally took time to take a look at FAAngband, and my first impression is that the UI needs to be upgraded:

- ToME/S/O style ingame savefile handling menus needs to be added. Lack of that makes it a pain to play multiple characters.

- The main-x11 port doesn't use a settings file to store UI settings.

- And of course the main-x11 port looks crappy and primitive compared to the SDL port in Sang.

[Nick]

I finally took time to take a look at FAAngband, and my first impression is that the UI needs to be upgraded:

- ToME/S/O style ingame savefile handling menus needs to be added. Lack of that makes it a pain to play multiple characters.

Agreed, but I'm a bit scared of this - the O version at least doesn't seem to behave well in Windows when you are moving savefiles around. It probably should be done as a port-specific thing for when there isn't menu-based savefile handling.

- The main-x11 port doesn't use a settings file to store UI settings.

I had forgotten how annoying this is because I use a script for playing in Linux which sets up all the windows. I can post it later if anyone's interested, but it's based on one written by (I believe) Ben Harrison and included in the comments at the top of main-x11.c.

- And of course the main-x11 port looks crappy and primitive compared to the SDL port in Sang.

Yes, although it has a certain rustic charm . The next version will definitely have an SDL port, and probably GTK as well.

While we're on this (and in the absence of a porting forum ) is there any value in having other interfaces, like Qt or FLTK? I don't know enough about this to judge, and any commentary I could find on GTK vs Qt seemed to be decided on religious grounds.

[CJNyfalt]

I decided to add the improvements to main-x11.c myself, you should have a diff file in the mail.

While we're on this (and in the absence of a porting forum ) is there any value in having other interfaces, like Qt or FLTK? I don't know enough about this to judge, and any commentary I could find on GTK vs Qt seemed to be decided on religious grounds.

Well, the value for having a Qt port would mostly be that users that only use Qt based applications (and not any Gtk ones) could save memory space if they compile the program to use dynamic linking, since only one version of the library would then be loaded into the memory.

[pav]

Not much point doing anything else than SDL. Or plain X11.

[Nick]

I decided to add the improvements to main-x11.c myself, you should have a diff file in the mail.

That works great, thanks.

[takkaria]

Not much point doing anything else than SDL. Or plain X11.

Disagree. I want to have a new Tk-like port using Qt, because Qt is cross-platform. Other than that, a GTK2 port is good because it can use system antialiased fonts easily, which I happen to really like.

[takkaria]

Agreed, but I'm a bit scared of this - the O version at least doesn't seem to behave well in Windows when you are moving savefiles around. It probably should be done as a port-specific thing for when there isn't menu-based savefile handling.

I plan to implement this in Vanilla for 3.0.9; I'll probably have a go at it just after 3.0.8. Feel free to nick it from where when it's done (it'll use some new cross-platform directory scanning code so there are no such problems, and only be invoked for the relevant ports which don't have their own way of handling savefiles.

While we're on this (and in the absence of a porting forum ) is there any value in having other interfaces, like Qt or FLTK? I don't know enough about this to judge, and any commentary I could find on GTK vs Qt seemed to be decided on religious grounds.

FLTK is pretty unheard of, really. Qt would be interesting, and is cross-platform where GTK2 isn't. There is a proper GTK2 port in development for Vanilla, though.