[Announce] PosChengband 4.0.0 Released

[wobbly]

I'm reading the resist of a 5.x character with full monster memory of the 2 purchased at the beastmaster.

[HugoVirtuoso]

I wonder if this was even changed in 5.x

[wobbly]

Wraithform is good, but the majority of death is really shitty lategame. Pretty much everybody who wants it has access to plenty of regular Genocide at similar spellpower with the staves. Early game their AoE and Maledection are good, and as I already said yes their early buff spell is good, but haste is unexciting (literally every character that makes it to high level is already permahasted very very easily), their damage spells are heavily resisted by almost every relevant late enemy (demon/undead/serpent), vampirism true is great but only works on life-bearing monsters (which are by far the least important type to care about).

Death later on is far far worse on hybrids than life, and far far worse on pure casters than chaos.

I know this is pretty old but I remembered the conversation & thought I'd dig it up & point out that Oberon is not in fact Nether resistant (except a partial for the evil flag, but nether storm is 750 to start with & cheap with a massive radius) nor is he darkness resistant (& darkness storm is pretty cheap & reasonable against something with out the resist).

Interestingly enough the serpent himself doesn't have darkness resist though it would take a fair few dark storms to bring him down that way.

[HugoVirtuoso]

Found a bug with monks in 5.0.0:
Assume posture doesn't work one-handed if the Shield is on the Right Hand (i.e., character melees left -handed)

[raz]

Not quite. There's also the player,various tiles for empty squares and other features. It'd be a whole lot easier just to use the same pref file.

OK, will do. Thanks for the help!

[Pete Mack]

So, I was able to compile poschengband using gcc, in Seeing whether it's easy to allow other tile sizes.
1. Fix dir_exists in init2.c so it doesn't use stat(). Just return true. (I have no idea how to get this to compile correctly. I tried using _stat, and a whole lot of other things.)
2. Fix makefile.win so it _actually works_. The one in there is horribly stale.
3. Replace main-*.c with more recent versions--pick the one from angband-3.1v2, as that is fully compatible. This lets you select any of the other bitmap sizes, though it still requires bmp and mask files--and the names are 'Adam Bolt' and 'David Gervais', and 'Shockbolt', not 8x8, 16x16, and 32x32. (It'd take a very little more work to allow png files--just add readpng and libpng.)


In passing I noticed some really strange stuff. It uses "software" 64-bit numbers, rather than using the 64-bit built-ins from even C89. And it is just plain mean about assigning exp for summoned uniques, giving them even less relative EXP than for ordinary monsters. Allow me to observe that it is IMPOSSIBLE TO FARM SUMMONED UNIQUES. At least I think that's what's happening. That stretch of code in xtra2.c is under-commented, and for no particular reason, it uses RSHIFT(1), iterated n times, rather than just RSHIFT(n).

Edit: I will further note that dependencies are horribly messed up in Makefile.inc. Really, all files should depend on z-*.h, just on general principles. It beats spending time trying to figure out why your exe doesn't link.

[Pete Mack]

Not quite. There's also the player,various tiles for empty squares and other features. It'd be a whole lot easier just to use the same pref file.

Are these two links accurate for everything that is included in PCB?

http://mikedebo.ca/files/poschengband-spoilers/mon-desc.spo

http://mikedebo.ca/files/poschengband-spoilers/obj-desc.spo

If so I can just position them in order as I see them in those two files and someone smarter than me can help with making the game read them in the correct order later...

[Pete Mack]

Correct. The number is the position in the file, indexed from 0 (black/unknown grid). It's sequential order, not x,y. The pref file already is exactly what you want. It looks like the file is already sorted by index.

[raz]

Are these two links accurate for everything that is included in PCB?

http://mikedebo.ca/files/poschengband-spoilers/mon-desc.spo

http://mikedebo.ca/files/poschengband-spoilers/obj-desc.spo

If so I can just position them in order as I see them in those two files and someone smarter than me can help with making the game read them in the correct order later...

[raz]

Thanks, forgive me for being ignorant, but how should I be reading the .prf? If I open it in Notepad I get a bunch of numbers along with the tile names, I assume these are like grid references?

I was planning on blowing up the 8x8 tileset included with PCB in Photoshop and using that as my reference. Is there a way of outputting the tile order as they appear in the 8x8 set?

Sorry for not knowing this. I draw, I don't understand the technical stuff...

[Pete Mack]

The pref file has all this information. You may need to massage it with Unix commands sort, tr, and join.
If you like, I can work up a script to do it.
Edit: Just looked.
The file graf-xxx.prf in lib/graf already has all this info, incusing the names. No massaging necessary.

does anyone know a way of getting a list of the tiles in order from PosChengBand for the purposes of making a new tileset?

[raz]

does anyone know a way of getting a list of the tiles in order from PosChengBand for the purposes of making a new tileset?

[HugoVirtuoso]

That's all well and good, but the playtime required for getting all those resists and speed can be hugely variable depending on character.

You often don't get much speed before you start hitting the later dungeons (i.e. Arena and later) and if you have done all the early and midgame dungeons (low bosses down sans Utgard, not getting much out of anti-* caves, deeper glass castle is suicidal), but can't yet go to arena the game gets incredibly boring.

I strongly feel that the 28-40 stretch is place where the progression needs the most work.
On the other hand, the game after CLvl 45 or so is probably the most fun, since the big draws of PCB for me (and others, I'm sure) is fighting huge monsters and getting huge loot.

Point taken. This should be on the PosChengband 5.0.x (and future versions) to-do list. Chris should consider this at some point. If not, one of us should remind him.

[nikheizen]

In my experience, the clvl 28 - 40 span can be sped up once you are stocked with resistances and have good speed (base speed = 10+). Then, you can start taking on the Arena dungeons and fight dudes for good leveling-up

That's all well and good, but the playtime required for getting all those resists and speed can be hugely variable depending on character.

You often don't get much speed before you start hitting the later dungeons (i.e. Arena and later) and if you have done all the early and midgame dungeons (low bosses down sans Utgard, not getting much out of anti-* caves, deeper glass castle is suicidal), but can't yet go to arena the game gets incredibly boring.

I strongly feel that the 28-40 stretch is place where the progression needs the most work.
On the other hand, the game after CLvl 45 or so is probably the most fun, since the big draws of PCB for me (and others, I'm sure) is fighting huge monsters and getting huge loot.

[HugoVirtuoso]

In my experience, the clvl 28 - 40 span can be sped up once you are stocked with resistances and have good speed (base speed = 10+). Then, you can start taking on the Arena dungeons and fight dudes for good leveling-up