Announce NPPAngband 0.5.1 (final) released

[nppangband]

NPPAngband 0.5.1 is complete! This release was mostly about incorporating most of the Vanilla Angband development in recent years. NPP 0.5.0 was based on Angband 3.0.6. NPP 0.5.1 has most of the changes through Angband 3.1.2v2. NPP 0.5.1 was also about fixing many bugs and making dozens of minor changes to improve gameplay and game balance. There are a couple new features, such as a new New object & quiver pickup/handling system, and the way monster temporary timed effects has been changed (which should be in Vanilla soon, along with cumulative monster messages).

But mostly this version has significantly improved UI and game balance over NPP 0.5.0, and should pretty close to a bug-free playing experience (of course I will regret saying that, but there haven't been any major bugs or crashes reported for many, many months).


Here are the links:

source:

http://download.nppangband.org/npp-0.5.1-src.zip

Windows executable:

http://download.nppangband.org/npp-0.5.1-win.zip

Here is the complete changelist:

http://forum.nppangband.org/viewtopic.php?id=1047

From here I am going to work on getting NPP up on github, and Antoine and I have preliminary plans to get Quickband and Ironband working off of this version of NPP as well.

0.5.2 will be a another minor release. I am going to add some features from Angband 3.2, grabbing some great new developments from other variants, and adding some original new features as well. Then in 0.6.0 I will make some major changes I have been putting off in order to preserve savefile compatability.

Thanks to the many people who playtested this version of NPP, gave me feedback and suggestions. Enjoy!

[nppangband]

By the way, question for the other developers: Where else do you make release announcements these days. Do people still use the roguelikes.anounce newsgroup, and are there other places I should post this?

Thanks. --Jeff

[Nick]

Roguebasin is a good one - although I see I haven't updated for a year...

[Nick]

OS X compile here.

[slinberg]

Thanks for the OSX build - does this have your patch to not nuke the Vanilla prefs space?

[Nick]

Thanks for the OSX build - does this have your patch to not nuke the Vanilla prefs space?

Yep - and I can confirm it works.

[slinberg]

Awesome, thanks. Looking forward to trying this variant out.

[nppangband]

OS X compile here.

Thanks Nick!

I might have to release 0.5.2 this weekend as a quick update. I made a couple last minute changes, and introduced a bug that the disturb_move option work any more. Also, probing doesn't seem to work either.

But if I do this, what is the patch to prevent destroying Vanilla prefs? I would be happy to include this as well.

[Nick]

No worries.

The changes are basically in Makefile.osx, this

# Name of the game
NAME =NPPAngband
APPNAME =$(NAME).app
EXE =nppangband

should replace the corresponding lines; also rename NPPchanges.txt to changes.txt.

[nppangband]

should replace the corresponding lines; also rename NPPchanges.txt to changes.txt.

Again, thank you. Do you mean I should rename the NPPchanges.txt file in the main directory?

[Nick]

Again, thank you. Do you mean I should rename the NPPchanges.txt file in the main directory?

Correct. changes.txt is referred to in Makefile.osx, so you could change the name there instead if you prefer.

You weren't kidding about moving to the V3.2 codebase, BTW

[nppangband]

Correct. changes.txt is referred to in Makefile.osx, so you could change the name there instead if you prefer.

I made those changes.

The OSX/MAC build is also available here:

http://download.nppangband.org/NPPAngband-0.5.1-osx.dmg

You weren't kidding about moving to the V3.2 codebase, BTW

I started just wanting to do the shop interface. I think it was about 5-75 hours of cut and paste before it would even compile. I probably wasn't too smart about the way I did some things, and it could have been done alot quicker, but it was still a heck of a project either way. I didn't even get all of it. I still don't have effect.c yet.

Good luck!

What version is the current FAAngband?

[slinberg]

If I could toss in one feature request (I'm mainly a Vanilla player): in Vanilla, if you're given a prompt with only one option, the return key accepts it (rather than "a" or whatever the option designator is). It's a small thing, but I've gotten used to it.

[Nick]

I started just wanting to do the shop interface. I think it was about 5-75 hours of cut and paste before it would even compile. I probably wasn't too smart about the way I did some things, and it could have been done alot quicker, but it was still a heck of a project either way. I didn't even get all of it. I still don't have effect.c yet.

I'm trying to get just about everything except the store interface - the new command structures and spellcasting have hurt most so far, and I'm just hitting object handling...

What version is the current FAAngband?

1.1.6 is current; my version policy is that all 1.1.x are savefile compatible, and increasing x is meant to be just for bugfixing. So once I have all this done it will go to 1.2.

[nppangband]

1.1.6 is current; my version policy is that all 1.1.x are savefile compatible, and increasing x is meant to be just for bugfixing. So once I have all this done it will go to 1.2.

I worded that poorly. I meant to ask, what version of the Angband codebase is FAA based on? IIRC it was based on Oangband, which might have gotten its start with Angband 2.8.3. And I don't know if either have kept up with recent Angband development. I was trying to guess how much of the base code will have to be udpated.