[Announce] PosChengband 1.0.0

[clouded]

My first Q died trying to do The Vault early, nasty troll king spawn. RIP. They seem completely insane to play, it is pretty fun though (in an appropriate to poscheng way).

Elves seem like the best early summon in my short playtesting, a fleet of mages blast everything to death and you can carry around a couple of named druids, who will quickly spiderflood enemies for you, after which you can dismiss all unnamed guys. It's *really* hard to tell what's going on sometimes, a high delay is unplayable so I was using 0 delay, and you can't tell what is friendly or not at a glance. How easy would it be to make all friendly monsters have a darkgrey background?

Is it possible to have your Quylthulg able to control their pet while riding? I have no idea about riding mechanics.

Edit: Also, perhaps unnamed summons should be dismissed when you leave their level; it's very clunky to have to dismiss everything when you go down stairs, especially in a place where you want to dive quickly.

Also, perhaps the final stage of giants could all be various titans. Pantheon of Titan uniques to go along with the Olympians.

[chris]

It's *really* hard to tell what's going on sometimes, a high delay is unplayable so I was using 0 delay, and you can't tell what is friendly or not at a glance. How easy would it be to make all friendly monsters have a darkgrey background?

Display code is not my forte ... However, for displaying text, there is currently no mechanism to control the background color. Adding this would require:
[1] Augmenting z-term.*
[2] Changing the text hooks for all clients to support the added info.

And, this would only work for non-graphics. For tiles, the way the code is currently setup, a new tile needs to be painted for each monster. And new mappings ... Yuk! A better approach would be to pass "effect options" or what-not, again requiring a change to both z-term and all of the platform dependent clients.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that it is extremely easy to tweak the foreground color used to draw monsters in non-graphics modes, and this will work on all clients. So, I added a new pet option: Highlight Pets. You can toggle it back and forth really quickly. When turned on, all of your pets draw in yellow (TERM_YELLOW). When turned off, all of your pets draw normally. Perhaps this would be enough? Of course, this option only works for ASCII display.

Is it possible to have your Quylthulg able to control their pet while riding? I have no idea about riding mechanics.

Nope. Actually, I don't think Q's should be able to ride at all as it lets them circumvent their true weakness: horrible speed! But perhaps it is OK to let them ride seeing as they can't control their mount anyway?

Aside, to control your mount, you need a free arm. But Q's don't have any arms

[chris]

Last release for a bit, I promise 1.0.33:

* Added new player monster race: The Golem. Yet another melee build, golems possess the awesome power of "Slow Walk". In fact they are so slow, that they never can get more than just a single attack per round. They prefer to fight with their massive golem fists, and strike powerfully enough despite their limited attacks. Another unique golem attribute is the presence of magic resistance, which reduces the effectiveness (damage) of their opponent's spells. The golem race has 3 subraces: Colossus (biggest and hardest hitter, but the slowest), Sky Golem (Resist Time, Breathe Time, weakest in melee) and the Spellwarp Automaton (Middle of the road, but very high magic resistance).

* Added new options to highlight pets when playing in ASCII mode

* Added new giant monsters, new giant evolutions, new giant powers and a whole new giant subrace: The Hru.

* Added new troll powers.

[Derakon]

Sounds like golems should get the "trample weaker foes" ability at some point.

[Nick]

Sounds like golems should get the "trample weaker foes" ability at some point.

What I would like to see is giants getting the ability to throw small monsters at other monsters for damage to both

[HugoVirtuoso]

What I would like to see is giants getting the ability to throw small monsters at other monsters for damage to both

It would be fun to see Giants throw yeeks or snotlings left and right.

[Pete Mack]

What I would like to see is giants getting the ability to throw small monsters at other monsters for damage to both

And well-balanced damage if they toss non-elven 'h' characters.

[chris]

What I would like to see is giants getting the ability to throw small monsters at other monsters for damage to both

I'm not sure if you are joking or not, but I actually really like this idea! I'm just trying to think of a nice way to determine "small" for purposes of throwing without running thru r_info adding some sort of size attribute ... But if there were a weight attribute, then that could factor into the damage calculation as well as the "permissible" calculation (influenced by Str and level).

Throwing Snaga Sappers would be fun

[Derakon]

As a first pass, you could restrict it to monsters that are no more than, say, half the character's level, and only from certain symbols (e.g. o, h, p, j, etc.).

[debo]

What I would like to see is giants getting the ability to throw small monsters at other monsters for damage to both

I asked that Yeeks be allowed as sling ammo in V for 3.4. It never happened

I see Yeeks as Popples in my head.

[Nick]

I'm not sure if you are joking or not, but I actually really like this idea!

I was kind of serious. It was an idea from my Creative Consultant (my son) from a while ago, and his ideas are often at the imaginative end of the spectrum. And then Derakon's comment reminded me of it, and I thought that PosCheng could just possibly pull it off

[Djabanete]

My creative consultant (girlfriend) --- also on the imaginative end of the spectrum --- independently voiced this monster-throwing suggestion to me for PosCheng. I thought it was too far out there, but now I'm tossing it in the ring! (Actually what I thought at the time was that Chris probably didn't have time to implement something so seemingly convoluted... ^^)

Of course... she was thinking that it would be a monster that would throw other monsters at the player, and that the thrown monsters could very well be large, like dragons. And the monster's name was to be Xoctagar the Powrahowse. Basically an incarnation of pure dynamism and destructive energy. We figured out what flags and stuff the Xoctagar would have... Ah, I found the document.

Xoctagar the Powrahowse
Active powers: haste, invulnerability, hurl boulder, breathe shards, breathe sound, breathe disintegration, breathe force, throw monsters at player
Passive powers: chew through rock, crush items on floor, push past weaker monsters*
Melee combat: punch to shatter, punch to shatter, crush to cause earthquakes, crush to cause earthquakes

*Not crush weaker monsters because that paradoxically takes longer.

[chris]

OK, for fun, I uploaded 1.0.34 here. This is a beta release and only adds the giant's Throw Monster power.

How does it work? Well, after activating the power, you are prompted to choose an adjacent monster to throw. If the monster is too heavy, or can't be thrown for some reason, the toss fails. Also, you need to successfully grab the monster, and this depends on your melee skill and the monster's AC. How big a monster you can pick up as well how far you can throw it depend on your Strength, your level and the monster's weight.

After you have successfully grabbed an adjacent monster, and lifted it over your head, you are then prompted for a target (Try turning on the Show Path option so it becomes obvious how far you may throw). Throwing the monster will hit the first thing along the path. If this is a monster, you might miss it (i.e. there is another combat roll, this time using your shooting skill vs the target monster's AC). If you miss, the target monster takes no damage, but the tossed monster might take a little damage. If you hit, both monster take equal damage, the amount dependent on the weight of the thrown monster as well as your experience level.

If there isn't a nearby target monster, then you can still use this power to get rid of nearby enemies, sort of as a short range line of sight teleport away power. Alternatively, you can bash the monster into a nearby wall. I recommend this option

Ideally, monsters could also do this to the player, but that will have to wait a bit until my coding batteries recharge ...

Thanks for the idea, Nick!

[HugoVirtuoso]

Whatever happened to version 1.0.33?

[chris]

Whatever happened to version 1.0.33?

It got announced here. I think it just got lost with all the giant tossing banter.

You can always download old releases here, but Google Sites doesn't give much storage space so I have to delete them eventually.

For those who like to build, I'm trying very hard to remember to tag each release here.