[Announce] PosChengband 1.0.0

[chris]

Not sure if I missed it, but don't see any way to turn off the buyout button, or force it to prompt. Didn't see anywhere in the options to remap the key either.

Does such an option exist?

No, but I can add a prompt for next release if desired. I assume you accidentally pressed 'b' and spent a bunch of gold?

[Qyx]

Not sure if I missed it, but don't see any way to turn off the buyout button, or force it to prompt. Didn't see anywhere in the options to remap the key either.

Does such an option exist?

[AnonymousHero]

Chengband spoilers will only mislead you for PosChengband as their have been literally hundreds of changes. Personally, I'm not a fan of spoilers and would rather the help files give enough info so that the player can make informed choices without giving everything away. But I'm still working on getting the help files into shape and promise to have that finished by 1.1.0. So my apologies in the meantime!

Fair enough.

For Wierd Mind, the confusion resistance still showing up in the player dump is a bug which I fixed for next release (1.0.4). The talent grants immunity to the Eldritch Horror and immunity to hallucination, but no longer grants resistance to confusion or stuns. As for whether that is useful or not, well, it depends how much you hate the Eldritch Horror Also note that immunity to hallucination is rather useful in my opinion. If you only have a single source of chaos resistance you can still be made to hallucinate if you fail a saving throw (about 9%). Hallucination can be quite fatal later on in the game.

Fair enough about the changes -- it was just the inconsistency that I thought was a bug.

I haven't really played any characters to the end game, so I'll take your word that it might still be useful. Will two sources of RES_CHAOS prevent Hallucination completely?

[chris]

So theres been a change I want to request for every variant with "personality".
Reduce munchkin bonuses by at least half. It doesn't allow newbies to learn how to play the game since the stats are so out of alignment with a regular character's stats. The only way to make it remotely fair is to have a pathetic race/class combination like yeek tourist or such. +2/+3 every stat and more hit dice and good skills is plenty.

Good idea. I went with +3 to all stats and about half the current skills bonus.

It appears that there's a bug with WEIRD_MIND in 1.0.3. (Compiled on 64-bit Linux from source.)

The description off the old Chengband wiki says it grants RES_CONF, but it doesn't any longer (apparently). However, the character sheet shows a "+" in the "@" column even though the percentage is "0%".

I don't know if the removal of RES_CONF was intentional (it does seem to make the Weird Mind ability pretty useless), but there's some inconsistency here that should probably be fixed.

Chengband spoilers will only mislead you for PosChengband as their have been literally hundreds of changes. Personally, I'm not a fan of spoilers and would rather the help files give enough info so that the player can make informed choices without giving everything away. But I'm still working on getting the help files into shape and promise to have that finished by 1.1.0. So my apologies in the meantime!

For Wierd Mind, the confusion resistance still showing up in the player dump is a bug which I fixed for next release (1.0.4). The talent grants immunity to the Eldritch Horror and immunity to hallucination, but no longer grants resistance to confusion or stuns. As for whether that is useful or not, well, it depends how much you hate the Eldritch Horror Also note that immunity to hallucination is rather useful in my opinion. If you only have a single source of chaos resistance you can still be made to hallucinate if you fail a saving throw (about 9%). Hallucination can be quite fatal later on in the game.

Thanks for the feedback!
Chris

[chris]

For races with evolution, it helps to add more intermediate steps.
The joy of evolution is awesome, and its one of my favorite pieces of PosBand.
Aka, Jellies where they only gain like 1 equipment slot per evolution, but more steps.
Or Demons that slowly get worse stealth and better stats/resists over several evolutions. This might make endgame easier, but that is okay because being doublemoved by endgame uniques already makes endgame extremely dangerous.

Demons definitely need more steps, but in all cases, I am limited by the content of the bestiary since each form currently requires a corresponding monster to exist. Adding more steps would require adding more monsters as well (Which might be OK). Also, Hengband has the concept of monster evolution (monster pets gain experience and evolve into higher forms) so for the most part, I tried to stay true to what the game already offered. But there is really no strong reason to do this, and I did deviate in several cases (Hounds and Jellies come to mind).

Some monster races already have fairly good evolution. For example, Angels evolve as Angel -> Archangel (L10) -> Cherub (L20) -> Seraph (L30) -> Archon (L40) -> Planetar (L45) -> Solar (L50). Other good examples are elemental dragons that have 5 forms (4 evolutions). But I guess the races with only 1 or 2 evolutions could use some work. I do find that the early evolutions can blur by since leveling to 30 can be done fairly quickly. But early weak racial forms can provide a bit of satisfaction once you overcome them.

I should also point out that for most monster races some things improve gradually with level as well. For example, any race with innate melee attacks will have their attacks improve using a level based formula. Dragon breaths do damage based on level (and hp). Giant boulders do damage based on level. And number of innate blows are calculated based on player stats rather than automatically granted based upon the corresponding monster. Also, demons get speed bonuses as well as some resistance bonuses based on level in addition to evolution in order to compensate for their lack of monster forms.

I'll try to come up with some more intermediate steps for the sparse monster races, but I'd be OK with at least 4 forms apiece. Thoughts?

[emulord]

For races with evolution, it helps to add more intermediate steps.
The joy of evolution is awesome, and its one of my favorite pieces of PosBand.
Aka, Jellies where they only gain like 1 equipment slot per evolution, but more steps.
Or Demons that slowly get worse stealth and better stats/resists over several evolutions. This might make endgame easier, but that is okay because being doublemoved by endgame uniques already makes endgame extremely dangerous.

[AnonymousHero]

It appears that there's a bug with WEIRD_MIND in 1.0.3. (Compiled on 64-bit Linux from source.)

The description off the old Chengband wiki says it grants RES_CONF, but it doesn't any longer (apparently). However, the character sheet shows a "+" in the "@" column even though the percentage is "0%".

I don't know if the removal of RES_CONF was intentional (it does seem to make the Weird Mind ability pretty useless), but there's some inconsistency here that should probably be fixed.

[emulord]

So theres been a change I want to request for every variant with "personality".
Reduce munchkin bonuses by at least half. It doesn't allow newbies to learn how to play the game since the stats are so out of alignment with a regular character's stats. The only way to make it remotely fair is to have a pathetic race/class combination like yeek tourist or such. +2/+3 every stat and more hit dice and good skills is plenty.

[chris]

Thanks, I did use that method, but wasn't sure if it had implications since I'd been using the "easy autopicker settings" til then.

Also, just noticed, had a thief (Bullroarer) steal some money, but when I killed it, it didn't drop the money. Is that intended?

Yes, you lose any stolen gold permanently. However, stolen objects can be retrieved by killing the thief.

[Qyx]

Thanks, I did use that method, but wasn't sure if it had implications since I'd been using the "easy autopicker settings" til then.

Also, just noticed, had a thief (Bullroarer) steal some money, but when I killed it, it didn't drop the money. Is that intended?

[chris]

Minor bug (or perhaps not, but seems like it might be):

Confusion affecting target after already slain:

>>You have slain the Novice rogue.
>>Your Claw stops glowing.
>>The Novice rogue appears confused.

That's a bug ... It will be fixed for next release.

[chris]

Maybe a dumb question... is there an easy way to avoid destroying scrolls of summons?

Do you mean Scrolls of Summon Monster? An easy way is to open up your pickup preferences file (Press '_') and simply type

summon monster

on a blank line.

[Qyx]

Minor bug (or perhaps not, but seems like it might be):

Confusion affecting target after already slain:

>>You have slain the Novice rogue.
>>Your Claw stops glowing.
>>The Novice rogue appears confused.

[Qyx]

Maybe a dumb question... is there an easy way to avoid destroying scrolls of summons?

[AnonymousHero]

BTW, I've seen a lot of %ld and casting things to long throughout the code base. This makes me nervous as a long is 64 bits for 64-bit compiles while an int is still just 32 bits.

Yeah, this is really an annoying part of the C89 standard printf(). The only really portable way to get this working properly (without always casting) on 32 and 64 bit is to use format string defines, so something like:

#ifdef ON_64_BIT_PLATFORM
#define FMTs32 "%d"
#define FMTu32 "%u"
#else
#define FMTs32 "%ld"
#define FMTu32 "%lu"
#endif

and then use them as follows:

     int32_t foo = 123;
     printf("something " FMTs32 " something something.", x);

(note that int32_t is also C99.)

The only other way is simply using "int" everywhere, but that may not be sufficient on all compilers/platforms.