FAangband 1.3

[Magnate]

Congrats on the release (and on the rapid production of RPMs!). What made you decide to make autoscum switchable? (And doesn't the new "hard mode" somewhat duplicate it? How do they interact?)

[Nick]

FAangband 1.3 is now available from the download page. Thanks to pav for hosting, and to everyone who has sent feedback.

The big changes for this release are:

1. A compressed wilderness map - the wilderness and all the dungeons except Angband have had levels cut out, and it is much quicker for any character to get to the first dungeon (Amon Rûdh);
2. Autoscum has gone back from being a birth option to being a switchable option; also there's a new "hard mode" (also switchable) where levels have a much higher rate of interesting rooms, pits and vaults;
3. Shockbolt's tiles are included, and default in windows, and Nomad's tiles now work much better;
4. The new trap handling (although introduced in some 1.2.x) is probably worth a mention, as traps and objects can now exist in the same grid.

I have also updated the page summarising the state of play with Shockbolt's tiles - there are gaps, but mostly I've plugged them with 32x32 tiles. Obviously I would like to see them filled properly, but I expect Shockbolt may have one or two other things to be doing

It's worth noting too that there are RPMs for a number of linux distributions, and both Carbon and Cocoa versions for OSX.