[Announce] PosChengband 1.0.0

[chris]

Thanks for the responses, especially on the criticals. I'll have to get back to you on the savefile because I'm not on that computer at the moment. But I did want to ask you about the rationale for the 50% -> 65% -> 72% progression. It looks a lot like the Sil progression (1/2 -> 2/3 -> 3/4 -> 4/5 etc or 50% -> 66% -> 75% -> 80% etc), but seems less... streamlined? I'm curious about this.

Well, I'm not familiar with Sil, so I'll take your word on that. The progression you give is sort of similar to what we have, but gives nearly 10% higher resists in the high end. That might be OK since it is rare to have more than 3 sources of any resist in my experience (perhaps 4 if you can cast Resistance).

Also, I think the element of randomness is very important. Even if you have 72% resistance and are feeling bold, it is still possible (though unlikely) that that Storm Wyrm could breathe for 450. (Of course, it might breathe for 150 as well ... It works both ways). I'm not sure what Sil does in this regard but Angband has always had random resists for the some forms of attack (Nether, Nexus, Chaos, etc).

Does the extra energy use on a ?Tele penalize you before or after you teleport?

You read the scroll and teleport as a single action. Then you get charged energy. So the penalty will occur when you land. If you fail the scroll, then you don't pay extra energy.

As an aside, there are a couple of demigod powers that can mitigate this. One gives faster teleportation and another (coming next release) gives quicker reading of scrolls. But I realize not every character will be a demigod

Also, using a staff does not incur the penalty so if you are paranoid, you can use those.

my gameplay methods are particularly conducive to being short of cash

Yeah, playing with Vanilla town is almost a different game altogether. In normal town mode with Hengband you get virtually infinite quantities of the basics and the game is hard enough that you need this. Chengband tries to restrict town scumming a bit by limiting the restock triggers such that players need to explore the dungeon a bit. PosChengband goes further and drastically reduces the stack size of various town essentials, but added stacks of certain objects in the dungeon. I'd rather players played to find resources rather than shop scummed.

But I'll need your feedback on whether Vanilla town is playable or not. Lack of the town recharging ability is pretty huge and makes devices other than rods rather worthless in my experience.

[Djabanete]

Thanks for the responses, especially on the criticals. I'll have to get back to you on the savefile because I'm not on that computer at the moment. But I did want to ask you about the rationale for the 50% -> 65% -> 72% progression. It looks a lot like the Sil progression (1/2 -> 2/3 -> 3/4 -> 4/5 etc or 50% -> 66% -> 75% -> 80% etc), but seems less... streamlined? I'm curious about this.

Edit:
> As for rationale, my main reason was extreme annoyance that even a mage with a Teleport spell prefers to carry and use scrolls instead. At
> least until the fail rate goes to 0%. For many classes, this will never happen. So the spells never get used, except perhaps for lazy dungeon
> exploration late in the game.

Ah, that does make sense. As a cash-strapped novice mage I often cast Teleport instead of reading the scroll when the situation is ugly but non-lethal --- so I find that there's still game depth when ?Tele is failproof --- but then again, my gameplay methods are particularly conducive to being short of cash, whereas in the default game that's less of an issue. I'll definitely play some more and figure out what I think of the new fail rate after more experience.

Edit2: Does the extra energy use on a ?Tele penalize you before or after you teleport? (Relative to before the change, does it increase the likelihood of dying to monsters in the vicinity you're trying to escape, or in the new place you arrive in?)

[chris]

After playing a bit, here's my braindump. I hope some of it might prove helpful.

[Nitpick] In character dumps: under the Powers section it's "Lvl", but under the Spells section, it's "Lv". Under Powers, "Desc", but under Spells, "Effect".

[Nitpick] When not wielding any weapon, pressing "w" from the character screen gives no response. Perhaps a screen or message could appear that says "You are not wielding a weapon." (Or something to that effect.)

[Nitpick] When you try to invoke your racial/class powers, powers that are too high-level for you to have yet are displayed and greyed out if they are class powers, but not displayed at all if they are racial powers. Seems weird.

Done, done and done (1.0.9).

[Reaction] Fail rates on scrolls? Seriously, Chris? Oh God. This is
going to be very, very painful. I'm really not sure this is needed, but I
expect you have a rationale. (True, ?Tele has long been an easy get-out-of-jail-free card. But if that bothers you, I prefer the Crawl approach of adding a time lag without making all other scrolls inconvenient to use. Also, I don't even think ?Tele was unbalanced, because you could land in hotter water than where you started.)

Well, I've played quite a bit after this change, and the effects are rather small. Its only killed me once (summons RNG wrath!) but that was very early on, and I failed twice in a row. Of course, you might consider bailing sooner than previously for some fights.

As for rationale, my main reason was extreme annoyance that even a mage with a Teleport spell prefers to carry and use scrolls instead. At least until the fail rate goes to 0%. For many classes, this will never happen. So the spells never get used, except perhaps for lazy dungeon exploration late in the game.

As a side note, scrolls of teleportation now have another huge drawback: Reading them takes 50% more energy! Be warned ...

[Reaction/Question] Percentile resists. I like it, although some aspects remain obscure to me. When you're examining an item, how do you know how much resistance it provides?

Underneath it all, resistances are still flags. So, objects either have the flag, or they do not. The change is that we now count up the number of sources of resistance and use that count to determine a resistance percent. But there are diminishing returns: 1 source gives 50%, 2 gives 65%, 3 gives 72%, etc (Subject to change in future releases, of course). Also, whenever resistance is applied for damage reduction, we use a normal distribution about the mean value, so you may take more or less damage then you think. Whenever resistances are applied for a saving throw (Confusion, Poison, Disenchantment, Hallucination, etc), we use the stated value as is.

[Question] I don't understand what the "Crits" section of the weapons panel means, or what the bracketed numbers mean.

These are critical hits (e.g., "It was a good hit."). Whenever the player scores a critical hit, they get an extra "slay" that stacks on top of other slays. Good hits, for example, give a 2x slay and also add a bit of extra damage on top. *GREAT* hits are 3x slays with a higher plus to damage.

So for example, if your crit line reads: "Crits : 1.13x + 1.01" this means that, after averaging many hits, you get an effective 1.13x extra slay and an effective +1 to damage. Of course, critical blows either happen or they do not, so most strikes will be normal hits (1x slay) while occasionally you get a good (2x slay) or *GREAT* (3x slay) hit.

Bracketed numbers are the effective slay, averaging the effects of criticals and vorpals, and applying any force brand as well. For example, consider:

Crits  : 1.13x + 1.01	
Normal : 402 (310-495) [1.87x]
Evil   : 542 (355-730) [3.74x]

The weapon is Vorpal Blade which normally has a 2x slay evil. However, the sharpness of vorpal blade gives an extra 1.66x slay (not displayed ... sharp weapons normally give 1.22x but Vorpal Blade is special!) and the criticals give an extra 1.13x slay. So, versus an evil opponent, it does 2 * 1.66 * 1.13 = 3.75 (rounding error?) times whatever is rolled up by the damage dice. Obviously, this is much better than the expected 2x slay from slay evil alone. For non-evil opponents, instead of getting 1 times whatever the damage dice roll, you get 1.66 * 1.13 = 1.87 times whatever the damage dice roll. Could I cast Force Branding, yet another multiplier would be applied (Alas, this character cannot). And of course, these are not per hit multipliers, but statistical averages over a large number of hits.

[Question/Nitpick] How does two-handed wielding work now? When I'm empty-handed and try to wield a cutlass, I can choose my right hand or left. If I choose right, I end up single-wielding, and if I choose left, I end up two-handed wielding. If two-handed wielding still confers a benefit, wouldn't I want to just two-handed wield by default? And if not, isn't left/right a sort of veiled and obscure way to present the choice to the player?

I cannot reproduce the situation you describe. Whether I wield a cutlass in my left hand (with right hand empty) or wield the cutlass in my right hand (with left hand empty) it displays as "both hands" in the equipment list. As it should. Can you confirm that it is really not working and send me your savefile?

[Djabanete]

After playing a bit, here's my braindump. I hope some of it might prove helpful.

[Nitpick] In character dumps: under the Powers section it's "Lvl", but
under the Spells section, it's "Lv". Under Powers, "Desc", but under
Spells, "Effect".

[Nitpick] When not wielding any weapon, pressing "w" from the
character screen gives no response. Perhaps a screen or message
could appear that says "You are not wielding a weapon." (Or
something to that effect.)

[Reaction] Fail rates on scrolls? Seriously, Chris? Oh God. This is
going to be very, very painful. I'm really not sure this is needed, but I
expect you have a rationale. (True, ?Tele has long been an easy get-out-of-jail-free card. But if that bothers you, I prefer the Crawl approach of adding a time lag without making all other scrolls inconvenient to use. Also, I don't even think ?Tele was unbalanced, because you could land in hotter water than where you started.)

[Reaction] Character creation interface overhaul; character dump overhaul; character screen overhaul; dedicated weapons panel: Sweet!!! I really like seeing this kind of improvement. I'm sure it's less fun for you to implement than some other stuff, but it adds a lot to the game. Thanks for doing this. (IMO, even more could be done in this direction, but it's a great improvement already.)

[Reaction/Question] Percentile resists. I like it, although some aspects remain obscure to me. When you're examining an item, how do you know how much resistance it provides?

[Nitpick] When you try to invoke your racial/class powers, powers that are too high-level for you to have yet are displayed and greyed out if they are class powers, but not displayed at all if they are racial powers. Seems weird.

[Question] I don't understand what the "Crits" section of the weapons panel means, or what the bracketed numbers mean.

[Question/Nitpick] How does two-handed wielding work now? When I'm empty-handed and try to wield a cutlass, I can choose my right hand or left. If I choose right, I end up single-wielding, and if I choose left, I end up two-handed wielding. If two-handed wielding still confers a benefit, wouldn't I want to just two-handed wield by default? And if not, isn't left/right a sort of veiled and obscure way to present the choice to the player?

... Everything here is meant in the spirit of constructive critique, of course. Thanks again for all your efforts. PosChengband remains a very fun and deep game with many surprises!

[Djabanete]

in Notepad or whatever

Revelation! I didn't know I could edit that stuff using Notepad. That's just what I was hoping for.

I think you helped out quite a bit on Chengband. If it weren't for you, we'd all be wielding rand-art phials of pizza! I can take you off if you like, but I think you certainly belong on the credits. And everyone should realize that Chengband was built on the mountain of efforts by other developers on other variants, all the way back to Moria. What I have added has been small by this measure as well

All right! I spoke not out of a particular desire for anonymity, but just because I figured you'd spent gazillions more hours coding than I ever did suggesting. But if my feedback has been helpful, that's great

drain life

Cool. Never knew.

Edit:
@Chris: I encountered a bug with the Time-Lord's "Bolt" ability. Sometimes it would work fine, but sometimes it would shoot in a seemingly random direction without asking me which direction I wanted. Like an idiot, I quit and started a new character in that same savefile, in order to hunt down the exact circumstances that produced the bug, without copying the savefile for you to see it. Then I failed completely at reproducing the bug. Somehow, "Bolt" glitched on that one character (even when I stopped and restarted the game), but I can't make it happen again.

Edit2: Ignore the above "bug". I had "repeat old target" on "yes" by mistake. I never use that option and became very confused by it, and I'm sure that's the source of the error. My mistake

[chris]

Does anyone (especially Chris) know if there's a way to edit my autosquelch preferences from outside the game? I find the in-game interface a bit cumbersome; I wouldn't complain about it if I didn't download new versions so often. Ideally there would be a text file somewhere in the file structure?

The global pickup preference file is in lib/pref/pickpref.prf. You can edit this file once and it will be used as the basis for all *future* characters. This file is distributed in the zipfiles so if you don't like what I am sending, build your own version but keep it off to the side someplace to copy back after installing.

When you press '_' to invoke the in game editor, lib/pref/pickpref.prf is copied to lib/user/pickpref-PLAYER.prf where PLAYER is your current character's name. This is the file that is actually read and processed by the game so is the file you must edit for *current* characters.

You may edit this file outside the game, but I'm not sure what happens if you do this while the game is currently running. I usually stop the game, hand edit lib/user/pickpref-PLAYER.prf in Notepad or whatever, and then restart the game.

@Chris: I'm very much gratified that you have me on the credits screen, but now that there is no longer space
for the "great ideas by..." clause (which was already generous!), I seem to appear on the same footing as many
vastly more essential people (developers of Moria, Hengband, Posband, etc.) Since my contributions have been
so minor, especially compared with the efforts you've put into this project, I don't think that I really belong on the credits screen anymore

I think you helped out quite a bit on Chengband. If it weren't for you, we'd all be wielding rand-art phials of pizza! I can take you off if you like, but I think you certainly belong on the credits. And everyone should realize that Chengband was built on the mountain of efforts by other developers on other variants, all the way back to Moria. What I have added has been small by this measure as well

Edit: Great UI changes in character setup and character sheet. But what does it mean when "The Large brown snake appears weakened"? I'm playing a Wild Talent with Vampiric Drain. (Who's already dead, by the way. Must purchase a sling next time.)

Drain Life lowers a monsters max hitpoints. So, if you let that large brown snake regenerate, it would never regenerate all the way back to full health. Most of the time, this side effect of drain life is meaningless, but it is important for fighting battles of attrition versus monsters you couldn't otherwise kill. It is the only way to kill Demeter in Chengband, for example. Its also important when it happens to your mount if you are playing a Beastmaster or Cavalry.

[Djabanete]

Does anyone (especially Chris) know if there's a way to edit my autosquelch preferences from outside the game? I find the in-game interface a bit cumbersome; I wouldn't complain about it if I didn't download new versions so often. Ideally there would be a text file somewhere in the file structure?

(For all I know this already exists.)
Thanks!

@Chris: I'm very much gratified that you have me on the credits screen, but now that there is no longer space
for the "great ideas by..." clause (which was already generous!), I seem to appear on the same footing as many
vastly more essential people (developers of Moria, Hengband, Posband, etc.) Since my contributions have been
so minor, especially compared with the efforts you've put into this project, I don't think that I really belong on the credits screen anymore

I do appreciate the thoughtfulness though.

Edit: Great UI changes in character setup and character sheet. But what does it mean when "The Large brown snake appears weakened"? I'm playing a Wild Talent with Vampiric Drain. (Who's already dead, by the way. Must purchase a sling next time.)

[buzzkill]

Ah, they're after me lucky charms. Sounds awesome!

[chris]

1.0.8 is available here

* Capture Balls should now be working. Note: Capture Balls go in your shield slot, so if you play a monster race that cannot use shields, then you cannot use Capture Balls either.

* Rebalanced the Hydra monster race.

* Added a new monster race: The Leprechaun. Leprechauns start the game with a pot of gold, possess the luck of the Irish, are fast and stealthy. Many of their powers are influenced by how much gold they have on hand. But they are rather small and weak. If the leprechaun does not wield a normal weapon, then they have low damage innate attacks that pilfer items and gold from their foes.

[chris]

1.0.7 is available in the usual place:

* Fixed a nasty bug for Shadow-Fairy light vulnerability. Thanks to r@ss.com for pointing this out.
* Added Hydras as a player monster race just so this release would have some heft. Hydras can get up to 5 helmet and amulet equipment slots, and up to 11 attacks per round. Getting enough speed for the endgame might be problematic, though. The boss is The Lernean Hydra and the reward was suggested by Djabanete a long time ago.

[AnonymousHero]

I don't have a repository on the web at the moment and am resisting putting one up. I used Google Code in the past and its amazing how often it is down and how fantastically slow it can get. If people are interested in long term collaboration on features and what not, I can put one up.

I'm guessing you used Subversion?

If so, I'd really recommend that you use git instead. When using git you don't really need the repository servers to be up all the time (or even much of the time for that matter). Having said that, I think github.com is pretty dang reliable. There's also bitbucket.org. (You can even have the code hosted in both places -- git makes this pretty easy too.)

[AnonymousHero]

EDIT: There are ~4,100 format strings in the code base. Also, one needs to be able to handle fixed width fields. There are an awful lot of "%4d" and the like ...

Yay C!

(Filler for anti-spam filter.)

[chris]

Anyway, I'm sure I can fix these pretty easily myself if you have a repository somewhere that I can base my work on....

I think I have them all this time. I uploaded (1.0.6) source code here. The only changes should be changes to format strings for 64-bit compiles so I did not upload a Windows binary. Next release will be 1.0.7.

I don't have a repository on the web at the moment and am resisting putting one up. I used Google Code in the past and its amazing how often it is down and how fantastically slow it can get. If people are interested in long term collaboration on features and what not, I can put one up.

[chris]

Don't have a screenshot at hand, but it should be pretty easy to recreate on a 64-bit compile: Enable the "exp_need" option and level up. This causes a very long number to be displayed -- in fact it "spills" into the column which is supposed to be the gap between stats and the dungeon/map.

Anyway, I'm sure I can fix these pretty easily myself if you have a repository somewhere that I can base my work on....

Oh, OK. I thought you meant the experience field on the character dump. The one you are referring to is

static void prt_exp(void)

in xtra1.c and it looks like I missed this one! (I know why now ... I searched globally for %ld and this one has %8ld ... sigh):

(void)sprintf(out_val, "%8ld", exp_requirement(p_ptr->lev) - p_ptr->exp);

If you replace the ld with d in this routine, you should work. exp_requirement returns an int and p_ptr->exp is a s32b (which is also an int).

I guess I'll do another regexp search through the code to see what else I find. There are a lot of printf's in the code (thousands!) and it would take a long time to change them all. Are you sure you want to do this?

Aside: I looked thru the format() code and it ultimately ends up calling sprintf and otherwise seems to be OK.

EDIT: There are ~4,100 format strings in the code base. Also, one needs to be able to handle fixed width fields. There are an awful lot of "%4d" and the like ...

[AnonymousHero]

I'm not sure about the XP, HP issue. Can you post a screen dump? The code is not using printf for these fields, but rather Angband's hand-coded printf substitute: format.

Don't have a screenshot at hand, but it should be pretty easy to recreate on a 64-bit compile: Enable the "exp_need" option and level up. This causes a very long number to be displayed -- in fact it "spills" into the column which is supposed to be the gap between stats and the dungeon/map.

Anyway, I'm sure I can fix these pretty easily myself if you have a repository somewhere that I can base my work on....