[Announce] Cthangband 5.0.0 Released

[Nick]

Awesome, thank you

[HallucinationMushroom]

The wayback machine worked for me on this one. There is a snapshot on Sept. 19th that allowed me to download both files.

Edit: I used this as the website, I meant to add it. Need coffee.

http://www.gratisgames.webspace.virginmedia.com/cthangband.html

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.gratisgames.webspace.virginmedia.com/cthangband.html

[Nick]

Yes, it's been a while since the last release - fifteen years to be precise - but here is Cthangband 5.0.0!

Windows Console Version (this is an installer).
Source Code (this is a zip file).

If anyone maintains libraries of Angband variants, feel free to upload these and re-host them there. For my part, I've not yet put up a page on my website for Cthangband 5.0.0 yet. But the above links will remain valid when I do.

Did anyone get copies of these? I failed to, and the links have now expired.

[caruso]

That's strange. All the towns except Nir and Kadath have a bookstore, and the code explicitly disallows either of those two when picking a random starting town. Do you remember which town you started in?

I'm almost sure it was Dylath Leen. In any case, it was a town with at least three black markets, and I just could not find a library there while playing a high mage necromancer. By the way, I don't understand why arcane spellcasters should be forced to return to a town with a library, or at least back to the surface, to learn new spells

The run command - pressing '.' followed by a direction - should still work. It's just the shortcut of using <shift><direction> that doesn't. That's a known issue with the Windows Console code.

Ahhh... thanks, that's much better! I think that should go to the readme file. Also, sometimes there appears a fixme error message if I try shift-<dir>. Perhaps it should advise the player to use .<dir>.

Feature requests

• when looking through your 'i'nventory, selecting an item should give infos about it, like on which depth you found it (useful for classes with slow pseudo-id) and how much damage they cause (in case of offensive wands or weapons)
• dynamic level feelings
• new command: "list objects [on the level]". IIRC it is either '[' or ']' in Vanilla and some variants
• option to display the boundary of Detect Traps spells
• an option to disturb the player when crossing said boundary

Tweaks

• the eXamine command in shops should be more verbose - for example, what does a potion of Heroism do, apart from providing temporary rFear?
• when targeting a monster, make the game automatically choose the nearest monster (without automatically firing)
• add the "repeat" command to the in-game command list, (perhaps replacing "show last message") so that you need less macros - or no macros at all, which may be helpful for new Angband players
• indicate the radius of detection spells by a flash animation
• when browsing a spell book, give the radius of each spell already tried that affects an area
• when switching to the rogue command set, make the in-game command list change accordingly
• when trying to close a broken door, the game should tell you right away that the door is broken instead of prompting for a direction

[jevansau]

Sorry, failed to survive a 20 bone golems quest in the Necropolis.

[Dean Anderson]

I do have the "No query to destroy known worthless items" option set, and my experience was that it was happy to consider Terror Mask a worthless item. The second time I got it, I carefully avoided moving back onto it.

I've had another look in the code and it only prevents artefacts from being destroyed if Preserve Mode is off (because with Preserve Mode off there's no chance of finding a new copy if you destroy the wrong thing).

So that looks like it's working as intended:

With Preserve Mode on...
...an artefact won't be generated if there's already a copy in existence (in your inventory, on the floor, in a shop or your home).
...the generation of an artefact will increase the "feeling" of the level.
...you can destroy artefacts.
...artefacts that you destroy (or that are nuked when the level is destroyed, because you dropped them or never found them) may be found again later.

With Preserve Mode off...
...artefacts won't be generated if they've already been generated once during the current game; regardless of whether or not your character ever actually saw the artefact.
...the generation of an artefact will give the level a "special" feeling, rather than merely increasing it, to decrease the chance of you leaving the level without realising it was there (although pits and vaults might give a false positive "special" feeling).
...you can't destroy artefacts (but you can drop them).
...artefacts that are nuked when the level is destroyed because you dropped them or never found them won't be found again later.
Thanks for the detailed explanation of speed. I guess this makes movement speed much less valuable - perhaps this should be allowed for in pricing and randart generation.

I can attach the save file if you would like to have a look through it.

Yes please. Hopefully I can see what's gone wrong with the guardian code.

[jevansau]

Hi Dean,

I do have the "No query to destroy known worthless items" option set, and my experience was that it was happy to consider Terror Mask a worthless item. The second time I got it, I carefully avoided moving back onto it.

[QUOTE=Dean Anderson;101583]I'm not sure what you mean. Cthangband doesn't have squelching. It does allow you to destroy items, but artefacts are immune to that. So either way you shouldn't have been able to destroy the Terror Mask.



Thanks for the detailed explanation of speed. I guess this makes movement speed much less valuable - perhaps this should be allowed for in pricing and randart generation.

I can attach the save file if you would like to have a look through it.

[Dean Anderson]

I'm curious to try out this variant. But I have some questions

Is there a way that I can get the multi-window stuff going like the more recent code bases (on windows)?

Not on my pre-compiled Windows Console version (the Windows console doesn't support multiple windows from the same app), but I've not done anything to nobble the multi-window code; so if someone compiles the source on a different platform then multi-window should work fine.

Is there an option to always expand the Wield menu? (i.e. auto-hit * after w)

No. None of the menus auto-expand. I suppose it could go in as an additional option.

Is there a way to restart with the same character (i'm dying a lot after a very short amount of time while I get used to the system / variant)

Ye Olde Save Scumming - make a back-up copy the save file after creating the character, and then after you've died replace the original with the back-up.

Is there a point buy system instead of ye olde annoying auto-roller ?

There's some legacy point buy code in the source, but it's currently disabled.

Edit: uh... tried a chaos warrior, killed Grip, god awarded me with insta-death. Is the rest of the variant as silly as insta-deaths without any player control?

No, it isn't. Well, it has it's silly moments; but you shouldn't get that sort of insta-death (which is inherited from Zangband, not something I added) unless you're playing a chaos warrior or chaos mage. Those two classes are designed to be "live fast, die young" in that they get random bonuses and penalties. The bonuses can be great, but the penalties can kill you. The other classes are more serious.

[mrrstark]

I'm curious to try out this variant. But I have some questions

Is there a way that I can get the multi-window stuff going like the more recent code bases (on windows)?
Is there an option to always expand the Wield menu? (i.e. auto-hit * after w)
Is there a way to restart with the same character (i'm dying a lot after a very short amount of time while I get used to the system / variant)
Is there a point buy system instead of ye olde annoying auto-roller ?


Edit: uh... tried a chaos warrior, killed Grip, god awarded me with insta-death. Is the rest of the variant as silly as insta-deaths without any player control?

[Dean Anderson]

One small bug I've found - killed Ancalagon on L50 in the Dragon's lair, but it is still marked as having a guardian.

Without being able to debug through the save file I can't tell what's gone wrong here.

My advice for a workaround (assuming the character is still alive) is to go through the Dragon's Lair a second time and see if you find any guardian levels that it somehow skipped in your previous dive.

[Dean Anderson]

Once again, I hope the size of this feedback post is not too intimidating... Unfortunately I did not get very far in-game, because I spent most of the time auto-rolling up my characters (see below) and trying to play a high mage with arcane powers who started out in a town without a bookstore (I thought you always start out in the same town and so did not restart the game).

That's strange. All the towns except Nir and Kadath have a bookstore, and the code explicitly disallows either of those two when picking a random starting town. Do you remember which town you started in?

Does anyone know a workaround for the run command issue?

The run command - pressing '.' followed by a direction - should still work. It's just the shortcut of using <shift><direction> that doesn't. That's a known issue with the Windows Console code.

Bugs

• the run command does not work on my QWERTZ notebook, no matter whether NumLock is on or off
• once so far, when playing the game using Wine with curses, the screen did not refresh properly, instead leaving characters in place until they were overwritten

The first is a known issue with the Windows Console code.

The second is something I've not encountered. It might be something in the way Wine/curses handles Windows Console applications.

Documentation

• in the description of the Vampire race, mention that you can display the time of day by pressing 'G'
• please give the most important stats for each character class in the manual
• obsolete races in the manual: "Devilspawn" and "Nephilim"
• possibly obsolete terms used in the manual: "Diabolist" and "Demonologist"
• missing races in the manual: "Broo" and "Great One"
• in the section about character generation the manual says there is a point-based way to generate your character
• typo in the races (Golems) section of the manual: "... the [sic] do not get stunned or bleed."
• there is a ',' instead of a '.' at the end of the description of the Wisdom stat

Thanks for those. The documentation was taken from Hellband and I obviously missed a couple of things when updating it.

FYI Devilspawn = Broo; Nephilim = Great One; Demonologist/Diabolist = Chaos Warrior/Chaos Mage (but I can't remember which is which!)

Feature requests

• point-based character creation (pleeeease!)
• option to automatically display a dropdown list e.g. while issuing the 'w'ear command
• option to edit the player character's background

Tweaks

• Before starting the auto-roller, display the probability of matching or exceeding the minimum number for each stat. At least when using Wine, the auto-roller is very slow, and if you want to change the minimum requirements before the auto-roller aborts by itself - which takes several minutes -, you need to memorize the previous settings and restart the character creation from the beginning
• prevent the character generation process from starting all over again if you abort auto-rolling
• let the character always start in a town with a bookstore if s/he wields arcane magic
• option when resting: rest until dawn (useful for vampires)
• during character creation, make '?' open the manual in the correct chapter and ideally in the respective subchapter
• in the auto-roller screen, advise the players on how to use the auto-roller properly, e.g. how many stats should be maximized at the most etc.
• brief descriptions for the highlighted option in the options screen would be nice
• when a character buys something, give the maximum number of that item that a character can afford rather than the total number of exemplars in the shop
• when a character buys something, mention that you can buy 'a'll exemplars of a pile
• make the game interpret 'a' as "as many as possible"

Thanks for these - I'll take them into account (no promises!) for the next version.

Flavour

• The manual says that Draconians can avoid poison damage thanks to their wings. I don't see how these characteristics are related.

Huh. Never noticed that!

[Dean Anderson]

Been enjoying this very much. One oddity is that I have found Terror Mask a few times - bit sad as a Chosen One. Does squelching an artifact allow it to be regenerated?

I'm not sure what you mean. Cthangband doesn't have squelching. It does allow you to destroy items, but artefacts are immune to that. So either way you shouldn't have been able to destroy the Terror Mask.

I'd also love a more detailed explanation of how speed works for both player and monsters.
I saw monsters have a speed and an attack speed - does the attack speed mean that they get all their listed attacks that many times per turn, or is the attack speed the total number of attacks per turn?
How does speed work with Magic?
Is there any interaction between movement speed and attack speed, shooting speed and spell speed for players?

The game runs on a number of nominal "turns". Action speeds are measured in percentages of a turn (one "energy" used by an action is 1% of a turn). However, the game doesn't track time down to every percent of a turn - it counts up in 10% increments* which are unnamed in the source code but which I'll call "ticks" for the purpose of this explanation.

For example if you start at turn 1 and perform an action that takes 25% of a turn (i.e. 25 energy), your next action will be at turn 1.3 (the next tick after 25% of a turn has elapsed). If you then did something that took a full turn, your following action would be at turn 2.3.

Because of the way this is tracked, you never lose the odd bits of energy you haven't used due to the difference in scale between energy and ticks. For example in the above you should have actually gone on turn 1.25 and 2.25 rather than 1.3 and 2.3 because your first action took only 25% of a turn, not 30%. If you then did something that took 45% of a turn, your next action would be at 2.7 (only 40% of a turn later than 2.3) because the spare energy you had left over is taken into account.

When it comes to individual actions, they are as follows...

For the player:

• Moving normally takes a whole turn. If you're hasted this can be reduced to as low as 20% of a turn; and if you're slowed this can be increased to as much as 10 turns.
• Pausing for a turn (standing still) always takes a turn regardless of your level of haste/slow.
• Resting takes a turn per turn you decide to rest for.
• Shooting a missile weapon takes a fraction of a turn based on the number of shots per turn you have (e.g. with 4 shots per turn each one takes 25% of a turn).
• Making a melee attack takes a fraction of a turn based on the number of attacks per turn you have (e.g. with three attacks per turn each one takes 33% of a turn).
• Doing an "extra" attack from a mutation (e.g. horns, tail) when attacking adds 10% of a turn to the cost of the main attack.
• Casting a spell (or using a Mindcrafter power) of your level takes 100% of a turn. For each level that the spell is below yours it takes 5% less time (so if you're level 10 and casting a level 1 spell you get a ((10-1)*45)=45% reduction and it only takes (100-45)=55% of a turn. This is capped in that it never takes less than 10% of a turn to cast a spell even if you're more than 18 levels above the level of the spell.
• Refueling a light source takes 50% of a turn.
• Everything else (throwing an object, activating a mutation or racial power, searching, opening or closing a chest or door, disarming a trap, bashing a door, tunneling, jamming a door with a spike, wearing or taking off an item, destroying an item, quaffing a potion, eating food, reading a scroll, aiming a wand, using a staff, zapping a rod) takes a whole turn.

For monsters:

• Moving takes the same amount of time that a player with the same speed would take to move. So a monster with a speed of 100 takes a turn to move; a monster with a speed of 110 takes the same amount of time as a player with "Fast (+10)" speed; and so forth.
• Making a melee attack takes a fraction of a turn based on the number of attacks per turn the monster has (e.g. with two attacks per turn each one takes 50% of a turn).
• Because spell like abilities for monsters don't have a level, using one simply takes the same amount of time that the monster moving would take, rather than being compared with the monster's level.

*For technical (and legacy) reasons, it doesn't actually count up. It actually just compares the amount of energy each creature has to a fixed threshold. When a creature takes an action it loses energy equal to the percentage of a turn that the action takes; and every tick each creature is returned 10 energy and its energy level is re-compared to the fixed threshold. The effect is mathematically the same though, and it's easier to understand if you imagine it as constantly counting up.

[jevansau]

One small bug I've found - killed Ancalagon on L50 in the Dragon's lair, but it is still marked as having a guardian.

[caruso]

Once again, I hope the size of this feedback post is not too intimidating... Unfortunately I did not get very far in-game, because I spent most of the time auto-rolling up my characters (see below) and trying to play a high mage with arcane powers who started out in a town without a bookstore (I thought you always start out in the same town and so did not restart the game). What I find really good is the use command. That makes the game much more beginner-friendly

Does anyone know a workaround for the run command issue?

Bugs

• the run command does not work on my QWERTZ notebook, no matter whether NumLock is on or off
• once so far, when playing the game using Wine with curses, the screen did not refresh properly, instead leaving characters in place until they were overwritten

Documentation

• in the description of the Vampire race, mention that you can display the time of day by pressing 'G'
• please give the most important stats for each character class in the manual
• obsolete races in the manual: "Devilspawn" and "Nephilim"
• possibly obsolete terms used in the manual: "Diabolist" and "Demonologist"
• missing races in the manual: "Broo" and "Great One"
• in the section about character generation the manual says there is a point-based way to generate your character
• typo in the races (Golems) section of the manual: "... the [sic] do not get stunned or bleed."
• there is a ',' instead of a '.' at the end of the description of the Wisdom stat

Feature requests

• point-based character creation (pleeeease!)
• option to automatically display a dropdown list e.g. while issuing the 'w'ear command
• option to edit the player character's background

Tweaks

• Before starting the auto-roller, display the probability of matching or exceeding the minimum number for each stat. At least when using Wine, the auto-roller is very slow, and if you want to change the minimum requirements before the auto-roller aborts by itself - which takes several minutes -, you need to memorize the previous settings and restart the character creation from the beginning
• prevent the character generation process from starting all over again if you abort auto-rolling
• let the character always start in a town with a bookstore if s/he wields arcane magic
• option when resting: rest until dawn (useful for vampires)
• during character creation, make '?' open the manual in the correct chapter and ideally in the respective subchapter
• in the auto-roller screen, advise the players on how to use the auto-roller properly, e.g. how many stats should be maximized at the most etc.
• brief descriptions for the highlighted option in the options screen would be nice
• when a character buys something, give the maximum number of that item that a character can afford rather than the total number of exemplars in the shop
• when a character buys something, mention that you can buy 'a'll exemplars of a pile
• make the game interpret 'a' as "as many as possible"

Flavour

• The manual says that Draconians can avoid poison damage thanks to their wings. I don't see how these characteristics are related.

[jevansau]

Been enjoying this very much. One oddity is that I have found Terror Mask a few times - bit sad as a Chosen One. Does squelching an artifact allow it to be regenerated?

I'd also love a more detailed explanation of how speed works for both player and monsters.
I saw monsters have a speed and an attack speed - does the attack speed mean that they get all their listed attacks that many times per turn, or is the attack speed the total number of attacks per turn?
How does speed work with Magic?
Is there any interaction between movement speed and attack speed, shooting speed and spell speed for players?