The future of Oangband?

[CJNyfalt]

Here is some of the stuff I said when releasing 110u:

I think at least some of that would be good to add.

I agree that much of that would be useful. No doubt about that, as long as we keep the savefile loading system working I have no problems.

The best way would probably be that you fork and patch your version up to 1.1.0u, and then once Bahman is on board, we can start to pull the best bits in.

EDIT:
You might also want to watch my own fork, since I push my changes there.

[CJNyfalt]

By the way, what is the missing feature in 110u?

For what it's worth, in the unlikely event that I start working actively, Oangband is FAR from done. There are a huge number of fundamental gameplay improvements still waiting to happen. Some would require heavy refactoring, some would not. My gameplay priorities:
- Further improvement to AI. This would really want a cleaner internal API for the AI module. Add cooldowns to monsters spells; and make the monsters even smarter.

Well, I know next to nothing about programming AI, but I would like to see the underlining game treat the player and monsters exactly the same way with the same rules. So that the game would be split into three parts UI, AI and game mechanics. Obviously there is a long way to go.

- Further reductions in tedium. Even fewer, even better drops. Remove the incentive to grind for consumables. Further rework stat gain.

Agree, strongly agree. I would prefer to see most consumables as optional, so that a warrior would be able to win only using healing potions as consumables. As for stats, I prefer to gain stats from experience instead of potions.

- Extend the idea of archery spells with more combat magic.
- Give more nifty tricks to Warriors, but without losing the pure fighter feel. Possibly by implementing combat techniques as activations or side effects for weapons and/or armor. Also with more warrior-friendly sources of shapeshifting.

I agree with this. As for shapeshifting, remember the tales of berserkers. Maybe add some cloak or armor that allows warriors to shift into wolf or bear form? Or add as a speciality for warriors?

- Make the early game a little more forgiving. Ramp up late game difficulty.
- Solve the big-three balance breaking abilities: Banishment, Teleport-Away, Destruction.

I am the wrong person to ask about balance, but it is clear that we need to nerf some monsters to compensate for their removal. Of the three listed, I am least comfortable to remove teleport-away.

- Reduce the role of speed. Add in more "specialized speed" for casting, combat, and archery. Somehow make this smoother and less confusing than it currently is (i.e. specialized speed to affect cooldowns rather than

Agree, it is a bit ridiculous how important speed is in *bands.

- Add cooldowns to many player abilities and rebalance around them.

Details?

- Add good things from Angband: gain/lose potions, new identify semantics, no_sell as default

For the first, I prefer to gain stats from experience.
For the second, I noticed some changes that looked interesting but I am not up to date on what exactly has changed.
For the third, I agree with it, but I feel that it might be a bit too heavy-handed, and would prefer something a bit more elegant.

- Generally rebalance artifact weapons. Some are way too general (*cough* Ulmo *cough*) and I would like to make sure each class always have different favorites.

I have always favored skill and character build over gear.

- Reduce damage spikiness in the late game, and restrict high-end healing.

Fixes to things I was never really happy with:
- Set items. Maybe ditch them.

They are interesting but problematic.

- Variable weapon dice. These are great, but they need to interact better with squelching and pseudo-id.

Well, that is something that I am not really sold on.

- The Ent player race. I don't know... they are super cool, and yet they feel weird.

In what way do they feel weird?

- Druids are too good at too many things. Maybe move martial arts to the specialty list for them, rather than default?

Would you really pick martial arts, if it needed an additional specialty?

- Remove some of the more boring specialities and develop/balance/add the ones that really affect gameplay.

Well, I prefer to get more specialities rather than over-tweak them. I tend to mod the game so I get them more often. Since, after all the more the merrier.

[Magnate]

Thank you - that's a very interesting list, almost all of which applies to V. We have already tinkered with both tele-away and destruction in the dev versions, so we'll see how people like the changes in 3.3. We also have a ticket to look at Banishment (but probably not until 3.4).

On new ID semantics, Eddie has been working for a long time on what he calls "rune-based ID", where @ can identify the property of (e.g.) Resist Fire on any item after seeing it on one item. I am quite excited to see how this works - he's been talking about it for a long time and I think it has the potential to take ID much closer to where it ought to be (interesting and low overhead). So if it does work, I think it is very likely takkaria will want it in V.

[Bahman Rabii]

Agree, strongly agree. I would prefer to see most consumables as optional, so that a warrior would be able to win only using healing potions as consumables. As for stats, I prefer to gain stats from experience instead of potions.

Well, its a fine line between consumables and charged items, so I am not sure I would make such a strong statement.

I agree with this. As for shapeshifting, remember the tales of berserkers. Maybe add some cloak or armor that allows warriors to shift into wolf or bear form? Or add as a speciality for warriors?

We already have Lion amulets, Vampire potions, DSM, and Beornings. A specialty to enhance shapeshifting could be cool, and maybe 1-2 pure combat shifts.

I am the wrong person to ask about balance, but it is clear that we need to nerf some monsters to compensate for their removal. Of the three listed, I am least comfortable to remove teleport-away.

It is a given that nothing major can happen without balance changes to compensate.

I also did not say "remove"; if they can be reinvented in a better way, great. For teleport away, I wonder if we can (1) remove beaming completely, (2) offer a partial saving throw to reduce the range.

Banishment is the biggest candidate for removal.

Details?

Attack spells: Your biggest effects don't have to be spammable - you can use a larger rotation of spells. This also allows "Casting Speed" buffs to turn into "Spell Cooldown Reduction" buffs, which moves in the direction of all actions taking equal time.

Buffs: High cooldowns enable more varied and powerful buffs. For example, you could have a low level Haste spell that lasts for say 10 base speed turns and due to uptime tops out at 10% up time. I won't even speculate if you could bring back GoI in some form...

Debuffs: Really reliable debuffs have to either be weaker or less spam-able. This can also be implemented by giving the monster resistance to repeated debuffing.

Healing (spells and potions): Limiting the frequency of the biggest heals, while also limiting the most "spikey" damage is a way to make the difficulty of the game feel less random and more fair. This is harder than it sounds, though, since it also means reworking escape mechanics (particularly teleport, teleport away, and teleport level). At the very least, a long cooldown gives us the ability to give a big heal to non-priests without breaking the game completely.

In what way do they feel weird?

I still get caught up on an Ent using the same gear as other characters. I know the answer may be "get over it", but I have struggled with this.

Would you really pick martial arts, if it needed an additional specialty?

To be clear, I am not sold on that change. But you might well still do it. MA is really quite good. Somehow, something is wrong with druids:

- Second best attack spells, both for hard targets and for large groups
- Second best heals
- Great utility spells (hard to argue about "best" here)
- Versatile shape shifts
- Unarmed melee is good enough to be a primary attack from beginning to end.

Maybe they just need general tone-down of both MA damage and spell damage.

Well, I prefer to get more specialities rather than over-tweak them. I tend to mod the game so I get them more often. Since, after all the more the merrier.

[CJNyfalt]

It is a given that nothing major can happen without balance changes to compensate.

I also did not say "remove"; if they can be reinvented in a better way, great. For teleport away, I wonder if we can (1) remove beaming completely, (2) offer a partial saving throw to reduce the range.

Beaming removal might be a good idea.

Banishment is the biggest candidate for removal.

Agree on that, it feels like a hack to deal with overpowered stuff instead of fixing the issue.

Attack spells: Your biggest effects don't have to be spammable - you can use a larger rotation of spells. This also allows "Casting Speed" buffs to turn into "Spell Cooldown Reduction" buffs, which moves in the direction of all actions taking equal time.

Buffs: High cooldowns enable more varied and powerful buffs. For example, you could have a low level Haste spell that lasts for say 10 base speed turns and due to uptime tops out at 10% up time. I won't even speculate if you could bring back GoI in some form...

Debuffs: Really reliable debuffs have to either be weaker or less spam-able. This can also be implemented by giving the monster resistance to repeated debuffing.

Healing (spells and potions): Limiting the frequency of the biggest heals, while also limiting the most "spikey" damage is a way to make the difficulty of the game feel less random and more fair. This is harder than it sounds, though, since it also means reworking escape mechanics (particularly teleport, teleport away, and teleport level). At the very least, a long cooldown gives us the ability to give a big heal to non-priests without breaking the game completely.

Now, I am very skeptical about these changes. It feels like there was added too much stuff for variety, and then forcing people to use worse stuff just so that it gets used. Consider for example attack spells:
Mages & Druids tends to have elemental attack spells, which encourages them to find out about resistances and pick the right one.
Priest & Necromancer have few attack spells, so they tend to use the same ones over and over.

Now, what will happen if you add cooldowns? I suspect that we will see people either use spells that gets resisted, start to melee or use any wands they have. Only the last seems fine, and only if they have wands.

I still get caught up on an Ent using the same gear as other characters. I know the answer may be "get over it", but I have struggled with this.

That is a valid concern.

To be clear, I am not sold on that change. But you might well still do it. MA is really quite good. Somehow, something is wrong with druids:

- Second best attack spells, both for hard targets and for large groups
- Second best heals
- Great utility spells (hard to argue about "best" here)
- Versatile shape shifts
- Unarmed melee is good enough to be a primary attack from beginning to end.

Maybe they just need general tone-down of both MA damage and spell damage.

I think that it is the attack spells that is the issue. Druids should not be second best - I would expect both Mages and Necromancers to be better.
As for unarmed melee, you miss out any resists from the weapon if you go unarmed.

[Derakon]

For what it's worth, Vanilla development versions have non-beaming Teleport Other, and it hasn't horribly broken the balance.

[CJNyfalt]

I have been busy cleaning up the code and removing ports that are no longer supported in vanilla.

However, there is something I can not do myself, and that is testing on OS X and Windows.

So, could someone test those ports, please? I suspect that OS X will not work, but AFAIK I have done nothing that would break Windows.

[Philip]

Sure, I can test windows if you like. O 1.1.0u doesn't work on OSX but 1.1.0 might. Nick knows more about what changed though. What am I supposed to test and where do I find it?

[CJNyfalt]

Sure, I can test windows if you like. O 1.1.0u doesn't work on OSX but 1.1.0 might. Nick knows more about what changed though. What am I supposed to test and where do I find it?

The code can be found here:

https://github.com/oangband/Oangband

This thread has instructions on how to get the code, for Vanilla, just replace angband with Oangband and oangband at the appropriate places:

http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=4302

As for what to test, I am mostly interested if you are able to compile and play, or if there are any gruesome errors that prevent it from working.

[CJNyfalt]

I have been thinking about my current goals of development, and the following are in or under consideration:
- Upgrade and sync code with Vanilla, focusing on the main-xxx and z-xxxx files.
- Study how pseudo-id works in Vanilla and if it is appropriate to adopt it.
- Remove amnesia attacks.
- No sell option.
- Look over the build system and consider possible replacements for GNU autohell.

[Magnate]

- Study how pseudo-id works in Vanilla and if it is appropriate to adopt it.

I suggest waiting until we've got rune-based ID and then see if you want to adopt that.

- Look over the build system and consider possible replacements for GNU autohell.

Now that would be interesting. Please post if you find an alternative.

[Nick]

- Upgrade and sync code with Vanilla, focusing on the main-xxx and z-xxxx files.

This is a lot of work - I have mostly done this up to V3.2 for FAangband, but I'm still sorting out bugs and V is a rapidly moving target. See here for more detail.

- Study how pseudo-id works in Vanilla and if it is appropriate to adopt it.
- Remove amnesia attacks.
- No sell option.

All these have been dealt with in FA too - I would recommend looking at how.

I will have more to say on this at some point

[CJNyfalt]

This is a lot of work - I have mostly done this up to V3.2 for FAangband, but I'm still sorting out bugs and V is a rapidly moving target. See here for more detail.

So, far things progress nicely, but the big challenge ahead is updating input handling.

All these have been dealt with in FA too - I would recommend looking at how.

I will have more to say on this at some point

I will take a look at some point. BTW, how did you fix unlight in FA & 1.1.0u? I know that I have done something that makes playing without light more viable, but I am not sure if it is the same solution.

[CJNyfalt]

I suggest waiting until we've got rune-based ID and then see if you want to adopt that.

Well, what I have heard about the rune-based id sounds interesting so far.

Now that would be interesting. Please post if you find an alternative.

I know of one alternative that I uses for another project, so I will try it out at some point.

[Nick]

I will take a look at some point. BTW, how did you fix unlight in FA & 1.1.0u? I know that I have done something that makes playing without light more viable, but I am not sure if it is the same solution.

Basically the player gets RDark and +3 stealth, plus when not wielding a light

• Vision radius 2;
• Terrain bonus of ac/8 + 10 (for melee) when on an unlit grid;
• Damage reduction of 1/4 (against spells) when on an unlit grid;
• no_lite is always false (so you can read in the dark)
• Additional +3 stealth when on an unlit grid