[Announce] PosChengband 6.0.0 Released

[ianstonegray]

I noticed a lagging problem on the world map in 6.0.0. Then in 6.0.3 it seemed to clear up but recently it came back. Is anyone else having a very laggy world map?

[HugoVirtuoso]

No World Map lag whatsoever in my case

@Pete Mack:
I'll give 7zip a try and if successful, I'll post

Question about Skillmasters:
Should Skillmasters be able to learn skill ability/skill (via 'G') WHILE confused? Bumping into a Greater titan and thus getting confused didn't stop me from putting points onto the Speed Skill and thus giving me more time to use !CCW and quickly escape with Scrolls of Teleportation!

[clouded]

Artefact ammo doesn't work very well with the quiver, it always gets put in the 'a' slot (because it's a low base type) and there's no way to actually keep it out of the quiver because it gets put there every time you pick it up.

Honestly using the quiver and having 5 different stacks of ego ammo is more fiddly than just having two stacks of plain 99 ammo in your inventory, and that this came with a damage nerf for ranged puts a sour taste in the mouth. Not to mention the other interface losses for all the characters who don't even use ranged caused by the rewrites. Sorry to be so harsh but playing a sniper puts me in a bad mood.

To say it again: the solution I think is best is to make ammo infinite. That fixes all three points in the first posts in one simple change. I have experience with this from TomeNET, where archers are one of the most popular classes.

[wobbly]

There's a quiver bug with possessors. At some stage I lost my quiver but I still have the contents of said quiver.

[GenericPseudonym]

I noticed a lagging problem on the world map in 6.0.0. Then in 6.0.3 it seemed to clear up but recently it came back. Is anyone else having a very laggy world map?

It seems to happen when the player has some source of auto-identify. The game tries to ID everything in the player's pack each turn, which happens hundreds of times per world map step.
Something changed in 6.0.0 to make this happen, because it didn't before even in pseudoelliposchengband where auto-id has identified the player's pack for a long time.

Artefact ammo doesn't work very well with the quiver, it always gets put in the 'a' slot (because it's a low base type) and there's no way to actually keep it out of the quiver because it gets put there every time you pick it up.

Honestly using the quiver and having 5 different stacks of ego ammo is more fiddly than just having two stacks of plain 99 ammo in your inventory, and that this came with a damage nerf for ranged puts a sour taste in the mouth. Not to mention the other interface losses for all the characters who don't even use ranged caused by the rewrites. Sorry to be so harsh but playing a sniper puts me in a bad mood.

To say it again: the solution I think is best is to make ammo infinite. That fixes all three points in the first posts in one simple change. I have experience with this from TomeNET, where archers are one of the most popular classes.

Wait, why WOULDN'T you want your artifact ammo to go into the quiver? If I'm carrying around the Black Arrow of Bard I'd much rather it take up 1/120th of an inventory slot in my quiver than 1 entire slot in my main inventory.
Although I could see the constantly changing letter labels becoming a pain if you were trying to use those to select ammo instead of inscriptions. Even before 6.0.0 I always just inscribed @f0, @f1, @f2, etc on the various kinds of ammo so I could ignore their changing inventory positions and changing letter keys. Makes it much easier to use macros for shooting, too.

[Avenger]

Just wanted to report an apparent bug - as a High Mage of Hex, I don't seem to be able to 'G'ain any spells. The game doesn't appear to recognize my Handbook of Hex as a spellbook I can learn from.

Haven't done enough digging to tell whether this is specific to High Mages, Hex only, or a more general bug, but I suspect it's specific to Hex magic.

Edit: I haven't had issues with other types of High Mages, so it's fairly safe to assume this issue is unique to the Hex school.

[HugoVirtuoso]

Another probable long standing bug (involving game mechanics in a way):
Apparently, you can still get messages saying "You see [foo] on the ground" or something like that while blind. Perhaps, the messages should be changed to, 'You feel something on the ground' WITHOUT saying what's on the ground because you CAN'T SEE or something that makes more sense for the blind. A BLIND Hugo shouldn't be able to *see* a Power Dragon Scale Mail on the ground, for example. While blind, the 't'argeting and 'l'ook commands should be disabled (unless you have telepathy).

Better yet, how about making the entire screen going completely black while blind like in the Moria era aka 'You feel a veil of darkness surround you!'?? That 'black-out' will surely increase the dangers of Blindness by a huge amount because it definitely adds to the challenge and strategy of the game. If already have telepathy, you can of course see the monsters moving, but 'see' wall surroundings while 'blind'?...I don't know. I'm thinking semantics here.

Also this:
Going to the Town Hall to pick up a new quest causes nearby items and chasing monsters to disappear. This is probably working as designed. But in RL terms, if you've got a new mission, whatever awaiting monsters mobs should be in the same place before and after the quest assignment and reward pickup.

And this:
In the 2.x or 3.x era (I forgot which one), monsters could follow you through the stairs and even recall to town with you. How about re-instating this, especially the one with monsters recalling with you, or at least a chance of this occurring? Think of 8 GWoPs following you upon recall! Sounds awfully brutal, but that surely adds more adrenaline to what PosChengband stands for!

This:
Any thought of asking chem aka Entroband maintainer if The Mad Chemist from Entroband could be included for completeness sakes?

And notably this one - courtesy of clouded:
The Sniper class is seriously underwhelming. Check out clouded's Sniper here and you can see why: http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=20517

[murphy]

6.0.3 still has the bug introduced somewhere in 5.x where blue mage spells are omitted from the char dump

[HugoVirtuoso]

I'm not sure if Force-Trainer Spells are included in the 6.0.3 chardump either

[chris]

Version 6.0.4 is up at https://sites.google.com/site/poschengband/home

This is a quick update mostly because I integrated many contributions from pseudo and elliptic. Since cherry-picking commits generally involves manually fixing merge conflicts, I'm hoping to save others some tedium! I also converted some more quest changes (q_vapor2.txt and q_haunted_house.txt) and I resurrected the sdl port.

Here is a shortlog of changes:

GenericPseudonym (18):
Re-color some easily confused monsters.
Add a flag in autoinscription for weapons that inflict stun.
Fix the "odds" text in the casino's monster arena
*Recharging* fails if the player doesn't have enough sp.
Add display_race option to control the player's symbol
Metamorphosed draconians become D instead of @
add some MSVC 2015 stuff to .gitignore
Cancel fasting on anything that increases nutrition.
Fix spell fail messages for Sorcerors and Red Mages
ditch ""These resistances can be added to which from equipment for more powerful resistances. ""
Buff hephaestus demigod slightly, and give better messages.
Clarify some race descriptions.
Give snipers a different message at maximum concentration.
Rename sniper's "plasma bolt"
Let Psionic Speed override smaller speed buffs.
Dont lose turns when trying to zap a 0-charge device.
More informative failure messages for riding/rodeo.
Let wands of heal/haste monster target pets.

elliptic (5):
Add a few flags to monster recall.
Change Warning to apply only to traps.
Use the previous game's race/class/etc as default (if the same game mode).
Don't reduce weaponsmith essence gain due to removable curses.
Reimplement no_selling option.

poschengband (25):
Recharging: cherry-picked 61cb737 was broken. After clipping amt to max resource, it reset amt back to power.
Bump Version to 6.0.4
no_selling: minor wording changes
quickband: quicker stat gain (potions)
Quests: Replace Vapor Quest (st_)
Quests: New Haunted House by clouded
quests: display quest name when appropriate
py_display: add color to some notable options
-fsanitize=undefined on 1 << 31
mingw: improve my cross-compile script. prune Makefiles
quests: display monster level for random quests in quests_wizard (^Aq)
quests: remember last filter
sdl: make it compile ... still lots of warnings
sdl: compiler warnings
sdl: macros for arrow/numpad direction keys
sdl: tabs to spaces; reduce repeat rate
sdl: use Angband fonts
sdl: shift+numpad5 should recenter the viewport
sdl: other macros (home, end, etc). reasonable menu font
sdl: make inkey_special work
sdl: configure issues
sdl: experimenting with fonts. cleanup colors
sdl: reformat for the sake of sanity
Wilderness Centering
tiles: adam bolt's 16x16 tileset

[murphy]

the "identify possessions" service in the thieves den does not identify items in the quiver

[nikheizen]

Hey Chris. Compiling with gcc seems to be broken.

"pie and ld may not be used together"

I think because the latest gcc (6) uses pie automatically, so you may need to disable it explicitly in the build process.

Pleasee help, I really want to play the new versions wihtout downgrading gcc if possible!

[HugoVirtuoso]

Hey Chris. Compiling with gcc seems to be broken.

"pie and ld may not be used together"

I think because the latest gcc (6) uses pie automatically, so you may need to disable it explicitly in the build process.

Pleasee help, I really want to play the new versions wihtout downgrading gcc if possible!

Dude post this onto the PosChengband github bug tracker...Chris might notice it sooner this way

[Ironshod Al]

It looks like autoget in 6.0.3 will path through detected traps. The character will (attempt to) disarm traps, without using items, and continue towards the intended item. This could be a bit dangerous in some situations. In my first encounter with this situation there was plenty of space to navigate around the trap. My character also carried scrolls of disarm traps. Maybe traps could be marked as obstacles/walls in relation to autoget pathfinding.

Hibagon (apparently some japanese variant of yeti) has no description. Perhaps one of the descriptions from wikipedia could be used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibagon

A black creature with white hands and large white feet, standing about five feet tall.

or

The Hibagon has a large nose, large deep glaring eyes and is covered with bristles.

or

It has a chocolate brown face and is covered with brown hair, It has deep glaring eyes.

Suggestion:
Inscribing items with !* displays the message 'Do you really want to try [the item]'. This is a bit scary the first time you attempt to sell a cursed item (inscribed with !* to avoid accidental wear / wield) in a shop. Maybe it could be rephrased in some way to indicate that trying does not involve wearing / wielding the item.

Two things I really enjoyed in my latest game (half-troll warrior in 6.0.3): autoget is wonderful in combination with auto-pickup/squelch and quivers are great for the added inventory space.
I normally upgraded quivers (e.g. from [70] to [90] to [100]) by dropping all ammo, dropping the old quiver, wielding the new quiver, then picking up the ammo again. Perhaps there are better/less tedious ways to upgrade quivers. I used this method as I was uncertain what would happen to the ammo if I just dropped the old quiver.

[clouded]

I normally upgraded quivers (e.g. from [70] to [90] to [100]) by dropping all ammo, dropping the old quiver, wielding the new quiver, then picking up the ammo again. Perhaps there are better/less tedious ways to upgrade quivers. I used this method as I was uncertain what would happen to the ammo if I just dropped the old quiver.

You can equip the new quiver without doing anything else. The ammo isn't actually in the item, equipping a quiver just gives you access to a second inventory essentially.