[Announce] Poschengband 3.0.0 Released

[Nick]

I do it with the following changes to parse_v_info():

snipped

I can't remember exactly what it looked like before this change, but you can probably work out the diff yourself. As an extra bonus, differing length D: lines cause a parse error instead of trashing the dungeon layout and having to be spotted in debug testing. That said, with the DEBUG attribute that would get easier!

In fact the Vanilla (and FA) parse code has gone through some changes, but the principle is the same. I have just found 15-20 FA vaults (and one in V) with incorrect height or width

[dzhang]

Hi Chris et al!

I really haven't had the time to play at all lately, but I was wondering, has anyone (ahem, Chris) thought about doing meta-game "Achievements" like all the other games do these days? These could be per character (listed on the Winning chardump), or accumulated over all characters. Here's a few off the top of my head:

- Close Call: Be at exactly 0HP.
- Extreme Survival: Be at exactly 0HP, have Cuts > 0, AND be stunned.
- Super Lucky Guy: Find a Power Dragon Scale Mail and a Diamond Edge on the same level.
- Masochist: Kill the Serpent of Chaos while not wearing any armor (shield is OK, since there are ShieldMasters).
- Miss Angband: Find a Sexy Swimsuit as a Sexy female character.
- Allergic to Potions: Consume no potions during an entire game and kill the Serpent of Chaos
- Olympian Bane: Kill all 12 Olympians with the same character
- Gambler: Win at least 1,000,000 gp in a single gambling session in the Gambling Den
- Save the Uniques: Kill no Uniques except Oberon and the Serpent of Chaos.
- Unique Extermination: Kill every unique, including at least 1 instance of every Unique2 (Golden Angel, ZSoC, GCWADL).
- Toughing it out: Kill the Serpent of Chaos on a character with Life Rating less than 80/100.
- Rooted in Reality: Do not Phase Door or Teleport until killing the Serpent of Chaos.
- Precocious: Kill the Serpent of Chaos while never reaching higher than CL 39.
- Living Statues: Be statue-fied by Amberite Blood Curse 7 times, and live to tell the tale! (Does not require killing Serpent of Chaos)
- Transient Embodiment: Polymorph into every possible species on the same character.
- We Die Together: Die immediately after killing the Serpent of Chaos (but before taking another action).
- Chaotic Patron: Suffer 10 terrible effects from Chaos Patrons (e.g. Curse Weapon, Curse Armor, Ruination).
- Nightmare Mastery: Beat the game in Nightmare Mode

Thoughts?

[HugoVirtuoso]

Thoughts?

Good ideas. But to encourage this, there should be incentives. The achievements that kill the player outright are extreme, imo. For achievements like Nightmare Mastery, a ulimate-mega-uber-artifact should be generated to be picked up, at say Outpost's inn, to compensate. Or perhaps after Nightmare Mastery conditions are met, maybe player should then automatically gain telepathy AS WELL AS both teleport and light up level at will to make nightmare mode worthwhile? Perhaps, the achievements (including fatal ones) should provide a big boost to the final score?

[Patashu]

DoomRL has a good, working model for achievements, because it tiers achievements by how hard they are to do, from bronze 'anyone can get these' to diamond 'you are a literal god of gaming for doing this'

[dzhang]

Good ideas. But to encourage this, I *really* think anyone who achieves ANY of the ABOVE deserves a mega-uber-artifact in compensation.

Hm, I actually tend to disagree... these are for PosChengband experts who want a challenge, so the reward shouldn't be to make the game easier.

But a "cosmetic" reward might be nice. Maybe the Mayor of Morivant will let you rename any one Artifact you find into a name of your choice?

> You have chosen to rename: The Long Sword 'Ringil'
> You are wielding (a) The Long Sword 'Schwartz'

OK, maybe that wouldn't be a great idea either...

[chris]

I was wondering, has anyone (ahem, Chris) thought about doing meta-game "Achievements" like all the other games do these days?

From a coding perspective, this is one of those things that requires sprinkling lots of code throughout the system, so I want to make sure it is worth it (Compare it to the Virtue system).

My initial reaction is that if players are doing things like measuring turn counts or what not, then the game is waaaaay too easy. In fact, I do think that Poscheng has drifted towards the easy end of the spectrum.

That being said, there are of course many self imposed challenges that players can currently undertake, and they can simply brag about these on the ladder:

- Masochist: Kill the Serpent of Chaos while not wearing any armor (shield is OK, since there are ShieldMasters).
- Save the Uniques: Kill no Uniques except Oberon and the Serpent of Chaos.
- Precocious: Kill the Serpent of Chaos while never reaching higher than CL 39.
- We Die Together: Die immediately after killing the Serpent of Chaos (but before taking another action).
- Nightmare Mastery: Beat the game in Nightmare Mode

All of these would show up in the final posted character dump. Simply brag loudly as you post on oook

- Allergic to Potions: Consume no potions during an entire game and kill the Serpent of Chaos

Tough ... as a middle ground, somebody still needs to win with an Earth Elemental.

There are also plenty of absurd race/class/personality combos that players may undertake. In fact, one even surpasses the Lazy Yeek Tourist. Also, a true iron man might hand edit k_info.txt to remove scrolls of phase door and teleport (Just comment out the A: lines by prepending a '#' character) or similar stuff.

Anyway, everything you list is certainly possible to do without too much difficulty if there is a strong demand for this type of meta-game. However, tracking player achievements would most likely be tied to a particular savefile and many players, including myself, routinely start with fresh savefiles each game, or have multiple savefiles running concurrently.

[yrriban]

Tough ... as a middle ground, somebody still needs to win with an Earth Elemental.

Hmm, I still have an earth elemental character kicking around from the competition earlier this year, but haven't gone back to it since. Maybe I should dig that save out and see if I can do something with it.

[chris]

I just uploaded a minor bugfix release here (3.0.1):

* Vanilla Town and Light Town options now work.
* Monster List ('[') no longer exposes shadowers.
* Monster List ('[') and Object List (']') are not available while hallucinating.
* Cold resistant monsters resist ice bolts (again).

In addition, clouded was kind enough to design more than a hundred new room types, so there is currently quite a lot of new rooms to explore (over 260 at the moment). I did make a few minor changes to some of the new rooms as they tended to have lots of out of depth monsters!

Finally, I made a minor effort at cleaning up some of the many thousands of compiler warnings that I inherited from Hengband. Unfortunately, a couple very minor changes caused the game to become unstable, but I think I fixed all of the obvious new crashes (This, btw, is one reason why I have made minimal efforts at a legacy code cleanup.)

Source code can be found here and I think we should be working on Linux again. I fixed the curses port to use an 80x27 window size to accommodate the enhanced pack size.

Enjoy!

[HugoVirtuoso]

FYI, the title screen of newest version (3.0.1) shows up as 3.0.0!! Oops..

[caruso]

many players, including myself, routinely start with fresh savefiles each game, or have multiple savefiles running concurrently.

Why is that? For playtesting purposes?

[chris]

Why is that? For playtesting purposes?

Well, obviously if you have multiple characters running simultaneously, then you need multiple savefiles. I've had as many as twenty at a time running (mostly for playtesting purposes)!

As for starting a new character, creating it with a new savefile is just easier and cleaner. Your macros and customized pickup preferences get reset to the defaults. Also, I like my monster memory to reset as well. The only exception is if I am quick starting after an early death (This is actually quite common now that I think about it).

[Flauterfiddle]

Just to say thankyou...

Just wanted to say hi to the Angband forums and a huge thankyou to Chris for Poschengband.

In what must be nearly 20 years of playing (I've been with the game since Angband), this has to be one of the most fun variants, and I mean the Possessor...

Hugely enjoyable at the moment ... from CL10 wild rabbits onwards (shades of Monty Python) and it's so great to see the 'Band story going on and on and on...

[HugoVirtuoso]

Just wanted to say hi to the Angband forums and a huge thankyou to Chris for Poschengband.

In what must be nearly 20 years of playing (I've been with the game since Angband), this has to be one of the most fun variants, and I mean the Possessor...

Hugely enjoyable at the moment ... from CL10 wild rabbits onwards (shades of Monty Python) and it's so great to see the 'Band story going on and on and on...

The fun doesn't stop there...wait until you possess bodies like Kenshirou the Fist of the North Star, Nidhogg the Hel-Drake, Wahha-Man the Golden, and so on...

[chris]

Just wanted to say hi to the Angband forums and a huge thankyou to Chris for Poschengband.

In what must be nearly 20 years of playing (I've been with the game since Angband), this has to be one of the most fun variants, and I mean the Possessor...

Hugely enjoyable at the moment ... from CL10 wild rabbits onwards (shades of Monty Python) and it's so great to see the 'Band story going on and on and on...

Thanks! I wish I could take credit for the Possessor idea, but its been around for quite some time. I think Posband had it first but I'm not sure.

[chris]

I just uploaded another tiny update here. Source code can be found here.

* The main change for this release was a reworking of monster AI to better handle passwall characters as well as anti-summoning corridors.

* Some minor additions including giving Hrus (Race = Giant, Subrace = Hru) the option to use innate shatter based attacks. These attacks are only available if the player is not wielding a melee weapon.