[Announce] Rocketband v0.0.1

[Derakon]

I'm pleased to announce the first* release of my new variant, Rocketband! This exciting variant gives you what you've always wanted: a rocket launcher. Get in there, shoot things up, and have fun! I've spent months...hours?... no, minutes working on getting the balance just right, so I'm confident that Rocketband will be a finely-honed experience that both novice and expert roguelike players can enjoy.

OSX Binary (in .tgz format -- uncompress and play)
Windows Binary (Thanks, Nick!)
GitHub (based off of current rune-based ID branch)
(Other builds welcome! I don't have the setup to build on Windows or Linux)

* and very possibly last

[debo]

Competition time!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Derakon]

Incidentally, while this is in part a joke, it's also a semi-serious idea I had about ways to tweak up Angband's combat in various ways. See, sure you have a rocket launcher, and it's obscenely powerful, but...

• You can easily kill yourself with it if you're caught in the explosion.
• Rockets destroy walls, doors, etc.
• You have no other means of effective attack, as all weapons, bows, and wands have been removed from the game. I guess you could play a mage or priest, but that's kind of ignoring the point isn't it?
• (And here's the real kicker) All spellcasting enemies have rockets too!

So, can you make it down to the bottom of the dungeon without getting tagged by another enemy, and then kill Morgoth without him rocketing you? Just one rocket will kill you, while Morgoth is made of sterner stuff...

[nikheizen]

Incredible, highly difficult, yet highly balanced variant. Very good work here.

[debo]

I guess hound packs are literally impossible now.

[Nick]

One of my aims with the restructure was to make variants easier to make - I'm starting to wonder about the wisdom of that now.

Seriously, this is awesome

(curse this forum's lack of a blink tag)

[Derakon]

One of my aims with the restructure was to make variants easier to make - I'm starting to wonder about the wisdom of that now.

Amusingly, the biggest problem I ran into with this project was figuring out how to make the rockets not explode immediately after being launched. I think making the player able to fire player-harming projections may have had something to do with it. The "fix" ended up being setting the tx and ty values in the call to project() to be 20 tiles out from source instead of immediately adjacent (as they were in the effect_BALL code I was copying).

Speaking of which, the modifications I made to the code are awful. Like, making rockets destroy walls was done by copying the stone-to-mud code wholesale and then tweaking the flavor text slightly. Do not learn anything from Rocketband's code.

[AnonymousHero]

Hey, man, what's with the low version number? This is obviously perfect[1] already, so why not call it v1.0.forever?

[1] Well, except for the version number.

[debo]

This is the best variant evarrrrrrr

[Derakon]

Hey, man, what's with the low version number? This is obviously perfect[1] already, so why not call it v1.0.forever?

[1] Well, except for the version number.

You know what? You're right. I'm now retroactively declaring this to be version ∞.

[HugoVirtuoso]

No Windows binary of Rocketband?!

[Derakon]

No Windows binary of Rocketband?!

If anyone who can build for Windows wants to make a build, I'll add it to the first post! I can't myself.

[Estie]

Who would voluntarily maintain such a variant ? ...

[HallucinationMushroom]

I'm with Hugo on this one... sadface. I want to play rocketband. It might just be the thing to cure my Devil Daggers obsession.

[Nick]

Windows version.

Don't say I never do anything for you.

EDIT: Tried playing a bit - killing Smeagol on dl4 with a single rocket felt pretty good.