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A new version, 6.0.0, is ready in the usual spot. This version breaks savefile compatibility so please finish your current characters before updating. This release is extremely beta ... I've playtested a bit, but not nearly enough to be sure that there are no showstopper bugs.
The main point of this release is an attempt to address some of the archery complaints. Based on comments and my own playtesting, I see the following problems, and have attempted to address each of them:
[1] Ammo breakage is too high. Players need to town scum in order to have enough ammo.
To address this, I made ammo breakage dependent upon archery skill. As your skill improves, ammo breakage will decrease. Archers are slightly worse off from this change, but every other class benefits greatly, assuming they have reasonable archery skill. Remember, arrows break twice as often as shots or bolts.
[2] Picking up ammo after a battle is tedious.
To address this, I turned the 'g'et command into super-get. This command combines the travel code ('`') with the auto-picker ('_') to automatically get all interesting objects in line of sight. The player travels to the next nearest object until there are no more interesting objects. The options auto_get_ammo and auto_get_objects control this behavior. This might surprise you the first time you use this command, but once you get used to it, you'll love it. I promise
If there are a large number of objects to pick up, then you will see multiple -more- prompts. I recommend g<Esc> to deal with this. As you know, <Esc> automatically dismisses all -more- prompts until the next prompt for a top-level command.
[3] Ammo makes inventory management tedious. Ego ammo is seldom used since there are not enough inventory slots (exception: Holy Might). Artifact ammo is completely non-usable since wasting a slot for a 65% chance to hit is not worth it.
Enter the quiver. I implemented this as a new equipment slot for every body type with a bow slot. There is a new object type (TV_QUIVER) and you must buy/find a quiver and then equip it. Doing so gives the player access to a separate set of object slots for their ammo, reducing the strain on your normal pack slots. Ammo is added to the quiver by 'w'ielding it, and removed from the quiver by 'd'ropping it or 't'aking it off. You cannot take off a quiver with ammo inside it, but you can wield a new quiver provided that its capacity exceeds the current quiver contents. You can shoot ammo from either the quiver, your pack, or the floor. There is no penalty for shooting ammo that is not inside your quiver.
The quiver has a large number of slots (currently 26, but could be infinite if desired). However, the quiver has a fixed capacity, such as 60 arrows. This means you can carry many different types of arrows for specialty situations (e.g. various slaying ammo in case you run across a matching monster) without penalty. 60 arrows is a low capacity that you can buy in town. You can find or buy higher capacity quivers during the game. There are even a few ego quivers.
Implementing the quiver was a large amount of work and required me, for purposes of sanity, to break savefiles. During this process, I completely re-wrote the inventory management code and the shop code (e.g. your home is now infinite). You'll notice a new UI for selecting objects for the various commands. Press '?' for help the first time you see it so that you can learn the various command keys.
Note: I made a bold change for this release that will probably require some getting used to. When prompting for an object, the lettering always begins with 'a' and has nothing to do with where the object happens to currently reside in your pack. For example, eating food is always 'Ea' no matter how many spellbooks you are currently carrying (Of course, picking up mushrooms might move the choice, but you'll see this on the screen when you press 'E'). This change will burn you if you have the bad habit of memorizing slots on the 'i'nventory display (I speak from experience). Stop doing this! Please read the prompt when ever you are quaffing potions, reading scrolls, etc.
Note: On any object prompt, the uppercase for a choice no longer prompts for confirmation, but instead inspects the object.
[4] Archery is boring. Ammo is much less interesting then the shooter. Once you have an awesome shooter, then vanilla seeker ammo, enchanted in the town, and carried in stacks of 99 is all there is to the game.
I rewrote ammo egos and the archery damage calculations. The goal is to make ammo much more important. Ammo dice, previously completely irrelevant, now features prominently. Damage is calculated similar to melee, where the slays and criticals multiply the damage dice roll. Criticals are now much much more common, and archery skill, previously irrelevant, is now the single biggest determinant of critical frequency. If you must know all the details, damage is now M*(XdY*C*S + D1) + D2 where:
M is the bow multiplier
XdY is the ammo damage dice
C is the critical multiplier
S is the slay/brand multiplier
D1 is the ammo bonus to damage
D2 is other bonuses to damage (shooter, rings, equipment)
Archery damage has also been reduced a bit. The numbers I work with for design purposes are now 1000 max melee and 700 max archery. These are soft maximums which you can break with awesome finds, but I get slightly alarmed every time I see this. Good end-game numbers are more like 700 melee and 500 archery. And, for archery, you are going to need slaying ammo to achieve this. We'll have to see if I went too far with this, but archery needs to be weaker than melee since you are fighting from a distance.
Another major change for this release: I completely rewrote the quest system. A long time back, I beefed up v_info.txt for new non-vault rooms, and created a nicer syntax for defining 'map letters'. But all the town and quest files continued to use the old syntax. I finally converted everything over, and tried to make the quest system something I'd be willing to add content for. If you are interested in designing quests then take a look at q_info.txt and follow the links to the various quest files. Setting up the town quest sequences is still annoying since you need the quest ids defined in q_info.txt, but the rewards are now part of the quest file (so they can be shared with t_lite and the normal wilderness towns). There are a few new quest surprises, but this release was mostly a herculean effort to convert to the new system. New content will follow in a future release. Failing a quest in a series no longer terminates the series. But intentionally failing quests makes me sad ...
This release also has many bugfixes, many grabbed from PosChengband R (Thanks!). I can't list all the changes. If you are curious, just checkout the commit history on github.
The main point of this release is an attempt to address some of the archery complaints. Based on comments and my own playtesting, I see the following problems, and have attempted to address each of them:
[1] Ammo breakage is too high. Players need to town scum in order to have enough ammo.
To address this, I made ammo breakage dependent upon archery skill. As your skill improves, ammo breakage will decrease. Archers are slightly worse off from this change, but every other class benefits greatly, assuming they have reasonable archery skill. Remember, arrows break twice as often as shots or bolts.
[2] Picking up ammo after a battle is tedious.
To address this, I turned the 'g'et command into super-get. This command combines the travel code ('`') with the auto-picker ('_') to automatically get all interesting objects in line of sight. The player travels to the next nearest object until there are no more interesting objects. The options auto_get_ammo and auto_get_objects control this behavior. This might surprise you the first time you use this command, but once you get used to it, you'll love it. I promise
If there are a large number of objects to pick up, then you will see multiple -more- prompts. I recommend g<Esc> to deal with this. As you know, <Esc> automatically dismisses all -more- prompts until the next prompt for a top-level command.
[3] Ammo makes inventory management tedious. Ego ammo is seldom used since there are not enough inventory slots (exception: Holy Might). Artifact ammo is completely non-usable since wasting a slot for a 65% chance to hit is not worth it.
Enter the quiver. I implemented this as a new equipment slot for every body type with a bow slot. There is a new object type (TV_QUIVER) and you must buy/find a quiver and then equip it. Doing so gives the player access to a separate set of object slots for their ammo, reducing the strain on your normal pack slots. Ammo is added to the quiver by 'w'ielding it, and removed from the quiver by 'd'ropping it or 't'aking it off. You cannot take off a quiver with ammo inside it, but you can wield a new quiver provided that its capacity exceeds the current quiver contents. You can shoot ammo from either the quiver, your pack, or the floor. There is no penalty for shooting ammo that is not inside your quiver.
The quiver has a large number of slots (currently 26, but could be infinite if desired). However, the quiver has a fixed capacity, such as 60 arrows. This means you can carry many different types of arrows for specialty situations (e.g. various slaying ammo in case you run across a matching monster) without penalty. 60 arrows is a low capacity that you can buy in town. You can find or buy higher capacity quivers during the game. There are even a few ego quivers.
Implementing the quiver was a large amount of work and required me, for purposes of sanity, to break savefiles. During this process, I completely re-wrote the inventory management code and the shop code (e.g. your home is now infinite). You'll notice a new UI for selecting objects for the various commands. Press '?' for help the first time you see it so that you can learn the various command keys.
Note: I made a bold change for this release that will probably require some getting used to. When prompting for an object, the lettering always begins with 'a' and has nothing to do with where the object happens to currently reside in your pack. For example, eating food is always 'Ea' no matter how many spellbooks you are currently carrying (Of course, picking up mushrooms might move the choice, but you'll see this on the screen when you press 'E'). This change will burn you if you have the bad habit of memorizing slots on the 'i'nventory display (I speak from experience). Stop doing this! Please read the prompt when ever you are quaffing potions, reading scrolls, etc.
Note: On any object prompt, the uppercase for a choice no longer prompts for confirmation, but instead inspects the object.
[4] Archery is boring. Ammo is much less interesting then the shooter. Once you have an awesome shooter, then vanilla seeker ammo, enchanted in the town, and carried in stacks of 99 is all there is to the game.
I rewrote ammo egos and the archery damage calculations. The goal is to make ammo much more important. Ammo dice, previously completely irrelevant, now features prominently. Damage is calculated similar to melee, where the slays and criticals multiply the damage dice roll. Criticals are now much much more common, and archery skill, previously irrelevant, is now the single biggest determinant of critical frequency. If you must know all the details, damage is now M*(XdY*C*S + D1) + D2 where:
M is the bow multiplier
XdY is the ammo damage dice
C is the critical multiplier
S is the slay/brand multiplier
D1 is the ammo bonus to damage
D2 is other bonuses to damage (shooter, rings, equipment)
Archery damage has also been reduced a bit. The numbers I work with for design purposes are now 1000 max melee and 700 max archery. These are soft maximums which you can break with awesome finds, but I get slightly alarmed every time I see this. Good end-game numbers are more like 700 melee and 500 archery. And, for archery, you are going to need slaying ammo to achieve this. We'll have to see if I went too far with this, but archery needs to be weaker than melee since you are fighting from a distance.
Another major change for this release: I completely rewrote the quest system. A long time back, I beefed up v_info.txt for new non-vault rooms, and created a nicer syntax for defining 'map letters'. But all the town and quest files continued to use the old syntax. I finally converted everything over, and tried to make the quest system something I'd be willing to add content for. If you are interested in designing quests then take a look at q_info.txt and follow the links to the various quest files. Setting up the town quest sequences is still annoying since you need the quest ids defined in q_info.txt, but the rewards are now part of the quest file (so they can be shared with t_lite and the normal wilderness towns). There are a few new quest surprises, but this release was mostly a herculean effort to convert to the new system. New content will follow in a future release. Failing a quest in a series no longer terminates the series. But intentionally failing quests makes me sad ...
This release also has many bugfixes, many grabbed from PosChengband R (Thanks!). I can't list all the changes. If you are curious, just checkout the commit history on github.
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