[Announce] Poschengband 3.0.0 Released

[Nick]

You absolutely do not need to *identify* every object in the game. You absolutely do not need to never miss a particular goody in order to win the game. You will never clear every level, nor clear every vault, nor slay every unique, nor kill every monster you meet, nor find every artifact nor every once in a blue moon awesome object. It's not possible to do so, and not even remotely necessary for success. Optimal play is not required (nor even possible, IMO)!

This is great stuff, and IMHO shows the essential difference between V and the Z-evolved variants (particularly the Hengband ones). V is certainly a big, chaotic-seeming game, but what you're aiming to do is impose order on that chaos - collect yourself a kit that covers every eventuality, at which point you're ready to win, and you're kind of done. In Poscheng, though, you're never done - you're always a small fish in a big pond.

[getter77]

What about some sort of Rolling ID metric to further reckon things? IE: When you've ID'd or especially *ID'd* some random artifact or whatnot, the type of modifier(s) become known to you, at least on that character, going forward----from there you'd certainly still have a great variety to "discover" but then there'd be no retreading and it could allow for more strategic use of the full ID since situations would come up where your partial info could make a difference between discerning an unknown power versus unknown powers.

[clouded]

Something I've been meaning to do for a while, I have done an update to t_lite.txt, it hadn't been updated for quite a while by the looks of things. Here is a diff or here is the raw file, which ever you find easier to work with.

I changed the quests around, now there are two quest chains: Thieves > Dark Elves > The Vault > The Barrows > The Cloning Pits > The Old Castle and Orc Camp > Doom Quest I > Tengus > Mimics > Doom Quest II. This splits things into Outpost/Telmora and Morivant/Angwil, omitting a few quests. All the rewards are updated to the current ones. I replaced the Thieves reward with the current Wargs reward where appropriate and replaced the reward for the mimic quest with a rod of detection because I didn't want to put the vapor quest in.

I altered the services a little, combining a few in order to make room for a few absent ones, the arena and the gambling shop, which now appear. I adjusted the prices a little to make it similar to Morivant's prices.

I redesigned the map to make sure all the services were within the town walls and took care to put the most used ones right next to the home. The tower of sorcery being a million miles away from everything was the main reason I wanted to do this.

[chris]

Something I've been meaning to do for a while, I have done an update to t_lite.txt, it hadn't been updated for quite a while by the looks of things. Here is a diff or here is the raw file, which ever you find easier to work with.

I changed the quests around, now there are two quest chains: Thieves > Dark Elves > The Vault > The Barrows > The Cloning Pits > The Old Castle and Orc Camp > Doom Quest I > Tengus > Mimics > Doom Quest II. This splits things into Outpost/Telmora and Morivant/Angwil, omitting a few quests. All the rewards are updated to the current ones. I replaced the Thieves reward with the current Wargs reward where appropriate and replaced the reward for the mimic quest with a rod of detection because I didn't want to put the vapor quest in.

I altered the services a little, combining a few in order to make room for a few absent ones, the arena and the gambling shop, which now appear. I adjusted the prices a little to make it similar to Morivant's prices.

I redesigned the map to make sure all the services were within the town walls and took care to put the most used ones right next to the home. The tower of sorcery being a million miles away from everything was the main reason I wanted to do this.

Berserkers rejoice!

Very nice ... I confess that I seldom think about light or vanilla town modes in Poscheng, and the former has become rather out of date. Your changes look awesome! Thanks for bringing in the Arena, Gamble and Reforge options as well as The Cloning Pits quest, all of which were sadly lacking before

I pushed your changes to the current Develop branch. Next release is pending an attempt to redress some of the {cursed} criticisms mentioned above in this thread (when I finally get back into coding mode ...).

[Avenger]

Chris, what are your thoughts on reinstating multiple levels of pseudo-id for cursed objects?

[chris]

Chris, what are your thoughts on reinstating multiple levels of pseudo-id for cursed objects?

Keep in mind that not every class has high level pseudo-id. Priests/Monks/Mages etc will still pseudo-id cursed egos and artifacts as {Cursed}, so having these automatically destroyed is problematic. Having them not be automatically destroyed leaks information, effectively rendering the pseudo-id strong, at least wrt cursed items. This was the main reason for the change and I somehow managed to talk myself into the logic that cursed items mask player's knowledge as part of the curse, at least for classes with strong sensing.

I'll try to come up with a different mechanism, and might just give everybody strong sensing of cursed items. After all, a priest should be able to tell if a curse is minor or really bad!

Edit: Here is my original code comment for the change:

/* CTK: Worthless and Terrible may now actually be useful. The problem is, that
 *      the game often tries to auto destroy all cursed objects, and this is rather
 *      hard to avoid satisfactorily. One approach is to change the way unidentified
 *      but sensed objects value. However, this leaks information for weakly sensing 
 *      classes (or we destroy useful objects). Given a choice between removing the 
 *      easy destroyer altogether and nerfing heavy sensing of cursed objects, I am
 *      temporarily choosing the latter pending a more creative solution. */

Edit2: One solution would be to add a new indeterminant pseudo-id sense level for weakly sensing classes and to hack the auto-destroyer to not destroy these items. So classes with weak sensing will play as the game is currently, but classes with strong sensing can regain their powers of discrimination and automatically destroy bad items (i.e., cursed but not an ego or an artifact).

Edit3: To clarify,

/* For strong sensing, we have now have (3.0.3 and later):
 *
 *                    egos         artifacts
 *                    =========    =========
 * average -> good -> excellent -> special
 *         -> bad  -> awful     -> terrible
 *
 * For weak sensing, we have:
 *
 * FEEL_NONE -> uncursed
 *           -> cursed */

[Avenger]

One odd thing about weak pseudo id is average items. They have no ID sense whatsoever, which is... somewhat unexpected, or at least it was the first time I encountered it as a priest in the latest MAngband.

I was rather surprised to find out that I could be sure that all uncursed items were actually good or better, and even more surprised that average items never got a feeling no matter how long you hold them.

I would personally be more comfortable with either the reintroduction of the average feeling to the weak pseudo-ID scheme, or the extension of uncursed to include average items as well... having an item that never id's at all feels very unusual to me - but that may just be me.

Additionally, what are your thoughts on extending a weak pseudo id for jewelry to classes that currently have a strong pseudo for armor/weapons?

What I've noticed is that, in PosCheng, there doesn't seem to be a good sense for jewelry, and I don't believe(though I could be mistaken) that there are any jewelry ego types. I suppose that, if both of those things are true, giving other classes a weak pseudo ID would be rather pointless, since it's effectively the same as strong pseudo ID(barring artifacts which may still ID as special - I have yet to find them, and I don't actually know if you left room for artifact jewelry the way you've overhauled the jewelry system).

[chris]

I'll consider further pseudo-id changes for a future release as I'm trying to take a break from coding for a bit.

The current weak pseudo-id behavior is historically consistent but I wouldn't mind changing it. Currently, whenever I play a priest, I simply rest for N turns and then destroy anything in my pack that did not pseudo-id in the allotted time. N can be decreased with level. Finally, 'uncursed' doesn't make much sense now that you mention it. Let's call this category 'enchanted' instead.

As for jewelry, many classes have sensing (rogues, mages, priests) and many do not (warriors, etc). It really is all or nothing with regard to jewelry as anything not average is at least an ego item.

But be warned, if I do make pseudo-id changes I'm likely to rollback the CL35 instantaneous underfoot sensing to respect class restrictions (currently, priests get upgraded to strong pseudo-id). Also, I'm considering some sort of drawback for The Stone of Lore as it really stands out at the moment. Perhaps it should only pseudo-id underfoot and regain its perilous activation? Finally, I'd like the sensing to take account of class specific favored items (probably by leaning on the information in the weapon skills tables). For example, a mage should get strong sensing on wizardstaves and maulers should have no sensing on daggers. Ninjas should not sense weapons they cannot wield. And so on.

[chris]

A minimally tested new release is available here. I only recommend upgrading if you like any of the following changes:

* Strong sensing of cursed items has been restored where appropriate. Some of the feeling names have been changed. If you turn on the Easy Destroyer ('=' '6') and enable the leave known worthy items option, then anything that pseudo-ids as 'bad' will get destroyed automatically. These options are on be default.

* Weakly sensed non-cursed items are now labelled as 'enchanted' rather than 'uncursed'.

* The autopicker ('_') now has a verb for cursed items (called 'cursed'). This includes anything known to be cursed. Here are some samples:

#Destroy cursed items that are not egos or artifacts
!cursed nameless items

#Leave cursed ego items on the floor.
~cursed ego items

#Pickup cursed ego weapons whenever dd*ds >= 30
cursed ego weapons more than 29 dice

* Fire Elementals can teleport onto deep lava. Their fiery touch will no longer destroy scrolls of destruction.

* Clouded provided an awesome new Light Town redesign. If you are put off by the wilderness in Poschengband, then give this option a try!

* The Vampire Lord in The Arena now drops a scroll of mundanity.

* Aggravate, Permanent Curse and Ancient Foul Curse are now much more rare, and should no longer generate on weak cursed ego items.

* Back to the autopicker, corpses and skeletons now have separate names to support the possessor (who only cares about corpses, after all). If you don't use the default pickpref.txt, be sure to change your lines for wanted corpses to

wanted corpses#Wanted!k!k!k
wanted skeletons#Wanted!k!k!k

For a possessor, try something like (note order matters!):

#always pickup wanted corpses
wanted corpses#Wanted!k!k!k
#leave all corpses on the floor whose monster level is >= 30
~corpses more level than 29
#destroy any others
!corpses

Of course, you will want to change the level threshold (29 above) throughout the game.

* The demigod Loremaster talent now functions the same as the Stone of Lore

[Arjen]

Btw Chris,

The Blade of Chaos of Sharpness you get when starting as a Servant of Korne doesn't have the vorpal_flag. Is that on purpose? If it is, why not make it a weapon of Armageddon?

[chris]

Btw Chris,

The Blade of Chaos of Sharpness you get when starting as a Servant of Korne doesn't have the vorpal_flag. Is that on purpose? If it is, why not make it a weapon of Armageddon?

That's a bug. Also, Angels should start with a mace rather than a long sword since they have priestly weapon skills.

[Arjen]

If we are noting bugs, a minor one: The Death Swords quest and Mimic were switched a while back, but the descriptions weren't.

[Avenger]

Btw Chris,

The Blade of Chaos of Sharpness you get when starting as a Servant of Korne doesn't have the vorpal_flag. Is that on purpose? If it is, why not make it a weapon of Armageddon?

*starts a chaos warrior, scums for Khorne

*wonders where my blade of chaos is

[HugoVirtuoso]

I noticed that Farmer Maggot is no longer seen in the 'regular' wilderness these days. But, he is still around in the 'lite' wilderness. The same is probably true for the Lionheart. Battle-scarred veteran, and some other town monsters. Is this intentional?

[chris]

I just uploaded a new minor release (3.0.4) in the usual place. Source code is also avavailable.

This update adds a new player monster race: The Vampire!

Vampires are powerful, undead creatures of darkness and shun the light. They are vulnerable to light based attacks and this vulnerability can never be fully overcome. They feed on the blood of the living and managing their food state is an important aspect of gameplay, so the vampire will want to enable the display_food_bar option under 'Text Display Options.'

The vampire also has limited shapeshifting abilities, and you may notice that re-equipping gear upon transformation can be a bit tedious. To help with this, you may inscribe the name of the appropriate form (vampire, bat or wolf) in lower case on your gear and the game will automatically equip that object from your pack whenever you enter the inscribed form. For example, a wolf cannot wield a weapon, but the vampire can, so inscribe 'vampire' on your weapon to have it automatically re-equipped when shifting out of the wolf form back into the vampire form.

Vampires use Charisma as their spellcasting stat. They have a powerful gaze ability can dominate their enemies and they can also create vampire servants by killing humans with their bite attack. Their bites are vampiric, of course, but the vampire only regains hitpoints with this attack if they are not full. Thus, you need to manage your food status a bit more aggressively than with other characters who might be in the habit of filling up every time their stomach rumbles in the slightest manner.

Vampires are strong and quick, but don't have a lot of hitpoints. So you will need to play somewhat cautiously. They are, of course, very stealthy as they are quite comfortable moving about in complete darkness.

Other changes for this release include the following:
* Farmer Maggot and Lionheart are back in town (Thanks for pointing that out, Hugo)
* Hydras now get fractional blows.
* Angels start life with a mace.
* The Servant of Khornes starting weapon of sharpness now actually has the sharpness attribute.
* Golems get a "two handed" punching bonus when forgoing a shield.
* Golems are stupid.
* Fixed infinite loop bug when killing a pet that drops loot.

Enjoy!