Beleriand

[Nick]

For some time now, in threads like this one and this one, I've been talking about doing a complete revamp of FAangband. And I'm still going to. But I have decided I still want to keep the old one, too.

So, the old FAangband will continue to exist. But there will also be a new variant, Beleriand.

It has a home at github; not much has been done to it yet, but I'm planning to get cracking on it soon.

Although, who knows, I may change my mind again yet

[LostTemplar]

Nice. Your new features will break "angbandish" style of the game anyway.

[Nick]

Nice. Your new features will break "angbandish" style of the game anyway.

Yes, that was part of the reason. The other part was I was just reluctant to totally break FA for the second time in a year.

[Donald Jonker]

If you do decide to go whole hog, consider nerfing teleportation to the point of removing it entirely. Excepting recall, perhaps. IMO it's kind of a cheap method of compensating for difficulty spikes. To take alternatives from other roguelikes, it could be replaced with a wand of digging (which would take you to the underworld in the wilderness) or randomly placed teleport tiles.

[LostTemplar]

Recall is probably the worst thing here, it does not fit into adventure theme at all. Normal teleport can be replaced with invisibility, it can be something like 1d50 turns long, so it will not be completely safe, just like teleportation currently is.

[LostTemplar]

I want to make more contribution to FA/Beleriand.
I have made and tested some changes to FA, that seems good to me and can be added to Beleriand too, also I can find/fix bugz, btw I want to know if some parts of gameplay are planned to be completely changed, so I will not try to balance it.

[Nick]

I want to make more contribution to FA/Beleriand.
I have made and tested some changes to FA, that seems good to me and can be added to Beleriand too, also I can find/fix bugz, btw I want to know if some parts of gameplay are planned to be completely changed, so I will not try to balance it.

That would be excellent.

I am (slowly) rewriting a lot of basic stuff for Beleriand, so it won't be worth doing anything with that for a while.

FA, on the other hand, still has bugs, and still needs 1.1.6 features ported forward (like mouse support and working NDS and WinCE (maybe) ports). You have a fork on github, right? If you put stuff in that (preferably do a branch per change) then I can pull it in - including any gameplay stuff you thought was a good idea. That way any fixes that should go into Beleriand I can pull in there, too.

Looking forward to it

[LostTemplar]

Hmm, I just try to update my FA 1.2x fork and it fails with some commits, while I have done no changes to it, strange.

[Nick]

Hmm, I just try to update my FA 1.2x fork and it fails with some commits, while I have done no changes to it, strange.

Yeah, your fork seems to be in a weird state - might be simplest just to delete it and fork again.

[LostTemplar]

Btw, is FA 1.2x supposed to be something different from 1.16, except for code rewrite and new bugs, I mean any gameplay changes ?

[Nick]

Btw, is FA 1.2x supposed to be something different from 1.16, except for code rewrite and new bugs, I mean any gameplay changes ?

Almost none. There were some incidental changes from the trap layer, and a few places where code adopted from Vanilla has tweaked things slightly; but there were really no planned changes.

[LostTemplar]

Trying to merge my few changes, made after 1.16 with FA 1.26, so you can probably use them, if you like. I also have plans to seriously revisit monster.txt in "make game harder" manner generally by removing pitifull spells from powerfull monsters.

[joelsanda]

So, the old FAangband will continue to exist. But there will also be a new variant, Beleriand.

Wow ... this sounds great. Are you planning on a wilderness map that approximates Beleriand's regions? An unreachable Gondolin?

[Nick]

Wow ... this sounds great. Are you planning on a wilderness map that approximates Beleriand's regions? An unreachable Gondolin?

That's exactly what I'm planning - although High Elves will be able to get to Gondolin. It will be a while before I have anything playable, though.

[LostTemplar]

Well, it seems strange things happen with FA126, It does not work correctly on my linux system, while 116 have no problems at all. It seems it cannot create any file, e.g. cannot save game. Maybe I missed something obvious.

Oh, it seems it can create pref files, just not save. Vanilla 3.3.0 have this too.
trivial solution was to replace ANGBAND_SAVE_DIR with "./lib/save", it seems working now.

It also refuses to run in console mode, at least before I run FA116, it seems some pref files are missing or just deifferent.