[Announce] PosChengband 6.0.0 Released

[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.

[wobbly]

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

[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.

[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!

[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?

[Pete Mack]

What a pain! less than 10% too big.

Try 7zip. It has a notably better compression ratio than zip, and it's a more standard program than winRAR. zip -9 does do somewhat better than the default.

[HugoVirtuoso]

@Hugo--
you'd do better to just zip the original file. Compressed save files fit on the forum just fine.

Apparently, it didn't fit...because the actual zipfile of that Heritage 107 save was ~105 KB, which exceed the limit of 97.5KB. I'm using WinRAR btw. If there is a better substitute let me know.

[Pete Mack]

@Hugo--
you'd do better to just zip the original file. Compressed save files fit on the forum just fine.

[HugoVirtuoso]

More 6.0.3 bugs:
1) Saw this one on wobbly$oul001's chardump comments (http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=20511):

"On 7.4.2017 21:49 wobbly wrote:
Locations for quests in possession history are listed wrongly"

2) Apparently, there's some kind of bug with un-IDed ammo:

Check this out:

http://angband.oook.cz/screen-show.php?id=4268

...
You see 23 Bolts (3d5).
You get 23 Bolts (3d5).
Quantity (1 to 23): 23
Really sell 23 Bolts (3d5) for 2254 gp? [y/n] => y. You sold 23 Bolts
of Endurance (3d5) (+5,+2) for 2254 gold.
You have nothing to sell. (x2)

Again...I didn't even ID those Bolts prior to selling!!

[HugoVirtuoso]

6.0.3 bug (can be severe):
Entering a wilderness Temple '4' crashes the game to desktop. i.e. "gruesome bug"

I have the savefile ready here if anyone wants to test.

I used HJSplit (http://www.hjsplit.org) to split the savefile (into 4 files, heh) to even meet oook.cz forum filesize limits. To open my savefile, here's what you need to do:

1) Download all 4 files (these are 4 parts to 1 file)
2) Rename files EXACTLY as follows --

Heritage 107a.zip => Heritage 107.001
Heritage 107b.zip => Heritage 107.002
Heritage 107c.zip => Heritage 107.003
Heritage 107d.zip => Heritage 107.004

**These are not actual zip files. I put a .zip file extension to allow these to upload onto the angband.oook.cz forum**

3) Download and extract HJSplit (http://www.hjsplit.org)

4) Run HJSplit, click on "Join", locate 'Heritage 107.001', and then the 4 parts (.001 - .004) will be combined into 'Heritage 107' which you can then load with PosChengband 6.0.3

[GenericPseudonym]

Dungeon guardians do the opposite: they force you to become powerful too early in the game.

It's true: dungeon guardians force the player to go more slowly and level up in safer areas instead of e.g. diving straight into Dragon's Lair as soon as they own a -detectmons

I think the removal of the (pretty inaccurately named) ironman_quests option does this too. If you can't leave a random quest without failing it, you're encouraged not to go down to the quest floor in the first place until you're strong enough for every possibility, whereas before with the option enabled you could potentially dive much deeper into Angband and only stop when you found a quest monster you couldn't fight.

[Pete Mack]

Dungeon guardians do the opposite: they force you to become powerful too early in the game.

I think Chris wanted to reduce the likelihood of becoming too powerful too early in the game. i.e. game balance in his terms. What can I say.... But also, the entrance guardian idea came from me, apparently.

[HugoVirtuoso]

What do guardians achieve though?.... I think they are actively bad for gameplay.

I think Chris wanted to reduce the likelihood of becoming too powerful too early in the game. i.e. game balance in his terms. What can I say.... But also, the entrance guardian idea came from me, apparently. Why? This was actually a normal part of Zangband 2.7.4-2.7.5 and Z+Angband dungeon encounters. e.g. think of Great Wyrms guarding a dlvl 80 dungeon. I was impressed about the idea because it added suspense and strategic component to the game to make players pay attention more. I liked the idea ever since Chris implemented those entrance guardians. That said, to each their own.

On a different note, here's a YouTube of the Running the World Map bug (i.e. SHIFT+DIRECTIONAL KEY on the WORLD MAP) I found in 6.0.3 (probably in all older versions of PosChengband too):

https://youtu.be/dxO-EramlvY?t=1m52s

Notice that doing this doesn't probably elapse Game Time (look at how I get to Mt Olympus and then "cross country", etc.) and, more significantly, DOESN'T trigger wilderness ambushes at all!!

[clouded]

giving recall access to all dungeons from the start allowing you to bypass the guardians

What do guardians achieve though? The player shouldn't be stopped from going to DL60 before they can survive 450 damage breath attacks, that encourages boring and safe play. It's not like you can't dive in Angband to DL98 at level 35 if you want to. I removed dungeon guardians from my copy of the game, I think they are actively bad for gameplay.

[wobbly]

Ah ok the rod & the wand have the same name, so I've always assumed their the same. Thanks.

That juggernaut of Khorne guardian, it'll just sit there if you use a shooter.