[Announce] PosChengband 1.0.0

[Arjen]

I'll try to answer some.

I figured that I should get used to swinging two weapons before loading myself down with four of them. No problem! I've played a couple of 'zerkers and they'll swing a pair of pole arms without blinking. Not so much my Umber Hulk, it seems.

1) I'm "Unskilled" at dual wielding. Will a set number of two weapon attacks bring this up to "Beginner"? Does it matter if its a pile of white worms or do I need to keep diving to find tougher foes?

I think you need to fight monsters above your own levels to increase fighting skills and dual wield skills So worms don't work.

2) With two long swords (starter sword and first quest reward) I see a "skill" indicator on the weapon screen of my character sheet. Big fat 11%. One in twenty chance to hit the broad side of a barn. I need to hit non-trivial monsters to raise this, right? Is this skill number in any way connected to my dual wielding skill?

It is indeed connected with your (crappy) dual wield skill, if you unequip one you will see it will be raised a lot.

3) The effects of low "skill" and low "dual wielding" seem to be a measly 5% hit chance on everything and a highly reduced bonus to my damage. I also have a Ring of Damage. Should the ring increase the damage of both of my weapons or just the one held in the hand wearing the ring?

The ring works for the hand you are wielding the weapon with.

I think that's it. If somebody could answer my question marks and offer any info that I didn't think to ask, I'd be very thankful!

In general, if I have a character who will be using dual wield, I'll try to dual wield as fast as possible. If you have trouble hitting that barn, try !oHeroism and ?oBlessing (or better). You will get a very much needed boost. You might even consider using a ring of Accuracy.

Also try to use 2 weapons of the same kind for a long(ish) period of time as you will get better at dual wield AND that type of weapon, boosting your accuracy a lot. But I almost never dual wield unless I'm a berserker. I've never tried Umber Hulks.

[Brouhaha]

Fun with four arms!

I've got a big old X running around the first couple of dungeon levels, eating doors and confusing the heck out of the locals. He's tons of fun and I can't wait for him to sprout arms three and four. The only problem is that I have NO idea how some of the game mechanics of dual wielding work.

I figured that I should get used to swinging two weapons before loading myself down with four of them. No problem! I've played a couple of 'zerkers and they'll swing a pair of pole arms without blinking. Not so much my Umber Hulk, it seems.

1) I'm "Unskilled" at dual wielding. Will a set number of two weapon attacks bring this up to "Beginner"? Does it matter if its a pile of white worms or do I need to keep diving to find tougher foes?

2) With two long swords (starter sword and first quest reward) I see a "skill" indicator on the weapon screen of my character sheet. Big fat 11%. One in twenty chance to hit the broad side of a barn. I need to hit non-trivial monsters to raise this, right? Is this skill number in any way connected to my dual wielding skill?

3) The effects of low "skill" and low "dual wielding" seem to be a measly 5% hit chance on everything and a highly reduced bonus to my damage. I also have a Ring of Damage. Should the ring increase the damage of both of my weapons or just the one held in the hand wearing the ring?

I think that's it. If somebody could answer my question marks and offer any info that I didn't think to ask, I'd be very thankful!

[chris]

Awesome - I was having the same issue in linux, and this fixes it.

OK, I think I know what happened (Thanks to Darin for figuring it out for me

I used to build the source archive manually and zip it up. That archive had a lib/save directory. But when I switched to git, I never created a dummy delete.me file in that directory. In fact, I needed to .gitignore the directory entirely since git picks up all my savefiles while I play otherwise (I'm too lazy to not do git add *, and .gitignore works off file extensions which our savefiles don't have). I forced a delete.me passed my .gitignore so now their is a lib/save/delete.me on github.

Apologies for the trouble, and thanks again for debugging my bugs

[Nick]

Edit2: I think I figured it out. For some reason there was no save directory in the lib directory. D'oh!

Awesome - I was having the same issue in linux, and this fixes it.

[Darin]

Not having access to a Mac, I'm not sure how much help I can be.

I'm not sure from your post the exact wording of the error, but if it is:

Error: There are old temporal files.
Make sure you are not running two game processes simultaneously.
If the temporal files are garbages of old crashed process, 
you can delete it safely.

Then you might try debugging why the call to fd_make is failing. In particular, it might help to know the name of the file it is trying to create. For example, try changing init_saved_floors in floors.c to output the filename. Perhaps the savefile global variable is not getting set properly?

Yup, that is the error message. For fun I tried compiling 1.0.25 and got the same issue. The last version I compiled before this one was 1.0.23, and I vaguely remember being able to play the game. So maybe the issue happened somewhere around there. Unfortunately I stupidly deleted that archive, and it doesn't appear to be in the repository, so I can't confirm that.In the meantiime I will try getting the filename out of floors.c.

Edit: I had floors.c print out the save file name, and it is "./lib/save/501.Dtake.F00", which looks normal except for the .F00 suffix. Then I get that set of error messages. Once I delete the temporal files I get a series of files which are the same except that the suffix cycles from .F01 through .F18. As I remember the save files in previous versions had been something like "./lib/save/501.Dtake" without the suffix. It doesn't make sense to me that the suffix would make any difference for saving, but I don't know much about the internals of the OS.

One other thing. I am using 10.6.8, so there shouldn't be any sandboxing issues.

Edit2: I think I figured it out. For some reason there was no save directory in the lib directory. D'oh!

[chris]

I compiled a version for Mac OS X (using makefile.linux). but when I fire it up it complains about corrupted temporal files, either using X11 or GCU. To continue I have to delete the "corrupted" files, but then when I save and quit the game saving fails.

Not having access to a Mac, I'm not sure how much help I can be.

I'm not sure from your post the exact wording of the error, but if it is:

Error: There are old temporal files.
Make sure you are not running two game processes simultaneously.
If the temporal files are garbages of old crashed process, 
you can delete it safely.

Then you might try debugging why the call to fd_make is failing. In particular, it might help to know the name of the file it is trying to create. For example, try changing init_saved_floors in floors.c to output the filename. Perhaps the savefile global variable is not getting set properly?

[Darin]

I compiled a version for Mac OS X (using makefile.linux). but when I fire it up it complains about corrupted temporal files, either using X11 or GCU. To continue I have to delete the "corrupted" files, but then when I save and quit the game saving fails.

[chris]

I'm playing as the Troll Monster for Competition 143. On the birth screen, I picked the Spirit Troll (that's what I remembered!). Upon reaching clvl 20, I became an Ice Troll!! Is this part of the Spirit Troll evolution?! I don't recall this being part of the Spirit Troll evolution or even any other form? I was expecting to be an Algroth...

You get Ice, Fire or "Poison" as a random branch point in the middle. Don't worry, evolution converges back on the Olog form soon enough. The form you pick (Spirit in this case) only influences the final evolution for trolls.

Take a look at your weapon branding, though. An Icy touch is pretty nice

[HugoVirtuoso]

I'm playing as the Troll Monster for Competition 143. On the birth screen, I picked the Spirit Troll (that's what I remembered!). Upon reaching clvl 20, I became an Ice Troll!! Is this part of the Spirit Troll evolution?! I don't recall this being part of the Spirit Troll evolution or even any other form? I was expecting to be an Algroth...

[AnonymousHero]

I'm not sure I follow ... There are blocks of code for both of those forms, they are just empty placeholder blocks in case, during design, I add a new ability that requires an update to the character sheet. Also, the Spellwarp Automaton gets resistance to teleportation and stun, and these are currently not showed to the player, but should be. So in the future, there should be some code in at least the Spellwarp's code block.

Sometimes I leave empty stub functions in the code as well, for similar purposes of reminding a forgetful developer (me!).

I didn't realize that RES_TELE/STUN didn't show up in the character sheet. But surely, the speed flag should be showing up as it does for the other golem forms? (This whole "do-modifications-to-player-and-flag-grid-separately" thing screams out for a refactoring so everything doesn't have to be done twice, but I must admit I don't currently have any good ideas of exactly how to do it.)

Reporting bugs here is more likely for me to notice as I don't check the Issue Tracker on Github (though perhaps it will email me?).

It should email you, I think, but I'll keep the bug reports here. (I think you can also disable the Issue Tracker completely for your project if you don't want people to accidentally report bugs on github.)

[chris]

I copied this from another thread

Originally Posted by Nick:
Er, like now. I'll set it up soon; continue changing or not as you choose

No, I'd rather take an entire month off from coding!!

I was hoping to finish some cosmetic changes to helpfiles, but that is such dry tedious work that its hard to stay motivated. Anyway, I pushed one last release (1.0.37) here:

* 1.0.36 fixed a bug with Quylthulgs entering the town Arena. Normally, the town Arena blocks character and monster summoning rendering our poor Q hero defenseless. But now, I enabled both player and monster summoning whenever the player is a Quylthulg.

* 1.0.36 fixed a bug with new virtue effects causing any monster to become friendly. The monster selection is supposed to be themed to the virtue in question (e.g. Unlife influences undead, Faith influences angels, etc).

* 1.0.37 fixes a stupid coder error for the reforging service. Reforging is supposed to limit the maximum object creation depth to 100, and did so by applying the MAX function. Of course, when you want to set a max, you need to use MIN.

* 1.0.37 also adjusts the reforge power down a bit. Fame is more important and you should probably try for at least 100 fame before doing anything big. The town service now tells you your numeric fame value.

* 1.0.37 improves the in game helpfiles, adding more information on some new monster races (Quylthulg, Elemental, Golem, new Giant evolutions).

You can pretend I uploaded this last release last night before the new competition started if you like

[chris]

I got a long sword of slay demon as a quest reward! Ate the thing and didn't get Slay Demon as an ability. My average damage did go up slightly, though I didn't gain any visible pluses or base damage (still 2d5 +2/+4).

Check out the Extra Character Info display (Press '~' then 'x'). Here you will see a list of all the essences you have drained, as well has how many you need in order to receive a bonus. Slay Demon is probably 1 essence if you are still a Broken Death Sword and 2 essences if you are a Death Sword and even more essences if you have evolved further.

[Arjen]

I got a long sword of slay demon as a quest reward! Ate the thing and didn't get Slay Demon as an ability. My average damage did go up slightly, though I didn't gain any visible pluses or base damage (still 2d5 +2/+4).

You have 2 types of to-hit to-dam as Death Sword monster. The ones you can see on your sword (the +2 +4) and the ones gained from draining weapons who are shown in the abilities menu (~x) with the other abilities like the slayings.

The first one will grow with levels or scrolls/service.

And I think you need 2 sources of slay demon before you actually get the appropriate slay. You will even need more when you evolve further.

[chris]

A minor buglet with Golems: It seems that _get_flags() is missing a couple of blocks of code, specifially for the "Eog Golem" and "Spellwarp Automaton" forms.

(Btw, do you prefer bugs be reported here or should we use the Github issue tracker thingy?)

I'm not sure I follow ... There are blocks of code for both of those forms, they are just empty placeholder blocks in case, during design, I add a new ability that requires an update to the character sheet. Also, the Spellwarp Automaton gets resistance to teleportation and stun, and these are currently not showed to the player, but should be. So in the future, there should be some code in at least the Spellwarp's code block.

Sometimes I leave empty stub functions in the code as well, for similar purposes of reminding a forgetful developer (me!).

Reporting bugs here is more likely for me to notice as I don't check the Issue Tracker on Github (though perhaps it will email me?).

[Brouhaha]

Death Sword bug?

I got a long sword of slay demon as a quest reward! Ate the thing and didn't get Slay Demon as an ability. My average damage did go up slightly, though I didn't gain any visible pluses or base damage (still 2d5 +2/+4).