[Announce] Poschengband 7.0.2 released

[Philip]

They are vulnerable to being eaten (as if they were food) and stolen (like any other object). There are other things that can destroy wanted corpses, but I don't know of any others that affect your pack.

[CyclopsSlayer]

They are vulnerable to being eaten (as if they were food) and stolen (like any other object). There are other things that can destroy wanted corpses, but I don't know of any others that affect your pack.

Ah, then likely the Cheerful Leprechauns... now I hate the little #^!%#@ even more...

[chris]

I really hesitate to say anything more on oook, but here is one last try.

Speaking as someone who hasn't played PosChengband in a long time, but has played an awful lot of roguelikes in general, I can say with good confidence that I just flat-out don't like having to identify items, and I have never seen a game that handles unidentified gear in a way that I felt was a net positive to the game -- Vanilla included! There are absolutely niche circumstances where having things in your pack that you don't know what they do can be an interesting issue, but they are always vastly outweighed by the tedium of having to figure out what all these items do before you can use them. ...

I think you are missing the point. I've had a lot of time recently to reflect on why I am so upset. Ultimately, what is really bothering me is a lack of respect for my creative efforts. This has been ongoing for 2 years and I have handled things very poorly. For that, I apologize.

The issue is not arguments for any particular design decision (which really should not be expected in a variant). Rather, what actually happened is that shortly after 4.0 was released, certain people, without comment or explanation, redesigned multiple significant aspects of my game. They did not create a variant. They didn't even bother to communicate with me at all. Instead, alternate versions of my game began appearing, and character dumps from these replacement versions began showing up on oook as Poschengband character dumps. It's hard to estimate how many, but I'd say at least 50%.

I was deeply hurt by this at the time. I don't handle these sorts of things well, so I just tried to accept and work with the situation. In fact, I took one issue in particular that people changed and tried to respond constructively, and that is the lore system. So when you read my two sharp edged questions above, keep that context in mind. Those questions are directed at a group of people who not only felt it was OK to change the work of others without comment, and then to present these changes as a replacement for the original, but who (probably) did not even bother to consider my 5.0 retort.

Let me ask you as a particular Angband developer. How would you feel if this happened on Angband? Suppose that without comment or explanation, I cloned the Angband repository and made extensive changes to game design, and then shared these changes with lots of other people. I'm not creating a variant, mind you, rather I'm creating an override version of Angband. My repository builds angband.exe and character dumps are posted on oook indistinguishable from real Angband dumps. Suppose that this went on for 2 years to the point where perhaps 50% of the dumps on the Angband ladder were other versions and not yours. Suppose that new players approaching Angband with a question are steered away from the original version to the replacement version. And finally, suppose that at this point, someone has the audacity to say to you that you have lost the spirit of Angband and that you really should not be working on it any more. Would you be hurt by this?

The bottom line is that I have spent 7 years and countless hours creating this game. I have no development team, so all the coding work is done by just me. I have strong opinions about what this game should be and that includes how it should be played. When all this happened, I was not really aware of what was bothering me, I simply turned to poison. Eventually I blew up. I definitely did not handle the situation well, and I apologize for that.

Creating variants is one thing, and is expected in rogue-like games. I encourage this. But variants should be variants. They should do something new, not override design decisions or undo a suite of commits. And they should never be posted on top of the original as was done here. They should not be presented as a replacement for the original either. In short, they should be a new game with original design goals.

The other issue is a new phenomenon, and that is that people are making extensive local mods and then posting as if they are playing my game. I don't think this is OK either. If you are changing game mechanics, are redesigning, then I think you are making a variant, in which case your results should not be posted as Poschengband. Even if all you are changing is lib/edit stuff. For example, Entroband was little more than edit file changes, yet was its own variant. You don't see Entroband dumps posted as if they were Hengband.

Ultimately, whether this sort of behavior is OK is up the oook community. Probably, there should be some sort of policy regarding these sorts of things so that players and developers alike can know what to expect.

[HugoVirtuoso]

chris, if you request us to communicate with you? What is the best way? PM? When you you told me the last time, email is not the way.

[krazyhades]

I'm sympathetic with your wanting variations to use different names. I agree they should. But your saying variations should also be required to be vastly different from the thing they fork from and not quality of life "I prefer it this way" tweaks that parallel the base game is simply not legitimate. If as you claim ~50% of dumps from your game are using these tweaks, well, it goes to show they are damn popular tweaks! And yes they should go under a different name, but it's totally insane to demand that a fork be a totally different game instead of quality of life changes.

You have a very particular vision of how your players are supposed to play and what types of fun are allowable. Great, that can guide your own play and development, but there's no reason others should be forced to take what they experience as the bad design choices with the good. One of the goals of open source is that people can tweak things to get the exact experience they prefer and not just use preexisting code for a very different project.

I don't want your feelings to be hurt. People tweak your game because they enjoy it enough to care about making their play experience even better. It's a tribute to you and your work that people care enough to mod it and keep playing at all. A name change for modded versions is a good idea, but demanding more than that is not okay.

[wobbly]

Chris do you mind looking at reforging sometime? For 320k on an elven cloak I get an anti-teleport cloak. For 420k on an elven cloak +4 search/stealth and si. If you look at the fame requirents for that power level it's not even close to keeping up. Outside of dark lights for ninjas I don't see what it does currently other then turn gold into trash.

[CyclopsSlayer]

Chris do you mind looking at reforging sometime? For 320k on an elven cloak I get an anti-teleport cloak. For 420k on an elven cloak +4 search/stealth and si. If you look at the fame requirents for that power level it's not even close to keeping up. Outside of dark lights for ninjas I don't see what it does currently other then turn gold into trash.

Every time I have tried reforging a non-light I end up with something inferior to what I started with.

[wobbly]

The new can't recall from the dungeon if you don't kill the stair guardian is buggy for things like the master lich & shadow lord which blink or teleport. If you kill it too far from the stairs it doesn't work. I've been up & down the stairs from dark caves multiple times trying to kill a guardian that likes to teleport away.

I seriously, seriously question the logic to this decision. A few versions ago I played a shrewd yellow mage sprite (nature/trump). It was a fun & interesting challenge to play a character so scrawny that was always in 1-shot territory or close & had to use it's wits to defeat much bigger enemies. I bypassed most of the dungeon guardians. Took careful attention, maneuvering & clever ideas. Was fun & interesting. A lone big bag of hps breather in an open space is *not* interesting. A guardian like anti-magic cave that sits still while you pelt it with sling shots is also not interesting.

Seriously look at the level where the littlest mages & sorcerers get the hps to take on bigger breathers like a drolem or an AMHD or an Etheral dragon in the open. I don't mind mages being slower to play then big warriors (which quite quickly get the hps to just belt through these guardians). I do mind them having their play killed completely.

Maybe you think it's scummy to bypass the guardians? Personally I think it's scummier to grind till you can just overpower them with raw force.

Edit: The guardian for R'lyeh also teleports away
Edit: mine guardian also blinks

[murphy]

Just a couple of random thoughts about the apparent rift in the PCB fanbase. From the perspective of someone who's gotten plenty of enjoyment out of the game, and by no means an expert at it but certainly an enthusiast.

1. Its an amazing game, and its free. As variants go its hugely popular and deservedly so.

2. Its the nature of open source software that it is easily modified. The developer wants to protect the integrity of the game he created by asking players who mod the game to be transparent about it and call their edited games by a different name. To me that seems like a totally reasonable thing to ask. poschengband has name recognition and a reputation in the band community. Calling a modded game by the name poschengband is kind of a selfish way to reap the rewards of name recognition that was built on someone else's work.

3. If someone hacked the game to the point they had hidden healing staves in their inventory, that really goes beyond modding the game, thats clear cheating. And if they get publicly shamed for it, it seems deserved to me

4. If there's one thing I have found a little frustrating about poschengband its the lack of a communication channel with the developer. I occasionally find a bug and have no idea how to go about reporting it. Sometimes I post it here in the forum, sometimes I put it on git, but I've never gotten any acknowledgement either way that the issue has been addressed or even seen

5. Maybe the communication problem even factors into the players interest in modding the game. Players find bugs and come up with feature ideas, and if there's no feedback channel to voice these issues then its kind of a logical step to start tinkering with things yourself

6. But then again, when most of the feedback you get is people finding flaws, I'm sure that gets frustrating. If the developer stays out of the public just so he doesnt spend all his time interacting with critics, that seems totally understandable.

The game is a masterpiece, thanks once again for all the work that went into it

[Gwarl]

Calling a modded game by the name poschengband is kind of a selfish way to reap the rewards of name recognition that was built on someone else's work.

I kind of want to point out that this is an inevitablility of band variants.

Most of what makes up poschengband was inherited from hengband, and most of the rest re-implemented from reposband, a re-implementation of posband, most of which was reimplemented features from tome and drangband. There are a huge amount of non-hengband things in poschengband, but an even larger amount of hengband things.

Most of what made up hengband was inherited from zangband. There were a huge amount of non-zangband things in hengband, but an even larger amount of zangband things.

Most of what made up zangband was inherited from kangband. There were a huge amount of non-kangband things in zangband, but an even larger amount of kangband things.

Most of what made up kangband was inherited from angband. There were a huge amount of non-angband things in kangband, but an even larger amount of angband things.

And of course angband itself was built over moria.

Chris has done some great work on poschengband, and has done a great job of improving it with features copied from vanilla. Vanilla has also taken things from poschengband. He deserves all the credit he gets. But it should be clear that it isn't his masterpiece, it's it's a legacy of a community of developers adding masterpiece to masterpiece for decades. As someone who's working with poschengband now, I'm seeing comments everywhere signed by Topi Yllinen, Leon Marrick, Ben Harrison, Robert Koeneke and others. We wouldn't have this legacy of variant soup if it weren't for Chris of course.

[Derakon]

Huh, I could've sworn that Kangband and Zangband were contemporary variants and cross-pollinated each other. But this is something like twenty years ago so my memory may well be fuzzy.

But yes, well said.

[Gwarl]

Huh, I could've sworn that Kangband and Zangband were contemporary variants and cross-pollinated each other. But this is something like twenty years ago so my memory may well be fuzzy.

But yes, well said.

They were. I was simplifying for rhetorical value.

[murphy]

Sorry if I was unclear. I didnt mean to say the code has only one author, but rather, that this code was released under a unique name, rather than using the same name as its predecessors. My impression is that chris wants to retain creative control of releases under the name poschengband, which seems like a reasonable thing to request

[debo]

2. Its the nature of open source software that it is easily modified. The developer wants to protect the integrity of the game he created by asking players who mod the game to be transparent about it and call their edited games by a different name. To me that seems like a totally reasonable thing to ask. poschengband has name recognition and a reputation in the band community. Calling a modded game by the name poschengband is kind of a selfish way to reap the rewards of name recognition that was built on someone else's work.

I'm certain that "mods" would be named more often if it were easier for oookers to set up their own variant ladders. (This isn't a slight to pav, he's already done a ton of work to set up what we have now.)

Chris also took exception to "variants" that simply undid or ignored some of his changes, though, so there would be conflict even if these "modded versions" were to be labelled.

3. If someone hacked the game to the point they had hidden healing staves in their inventory, that really goes beyond modding the game, thats clear cheating. And if they get publicly shamed for it, it seems deserved to me

clouded did not do this.

4. If there's one thing I have found a little frustrating about poschengband its the lack of a communication channel with the developer. I occasionally find a bug and have no idea how to go about reporting it. Sometimes I post it here in the forum, sometimes I put it on git, but I've never gotten any acknowledgement either way that the issue has been addressed or even seen

5. Maybe the communication problem even factors into the players interest in modding the game. Players find bugs and come up with feature ideas, and if there's no feedback channel to voice these issues then its kind of a logical step to start tinkering with things yourself

6. But then again, when most of the feedback you get is people finding flaws, I'm sure that gets frustrating. If the developer stays out of the public just so he doesnt spend all his time interacting with critics, that seems totally understandable.

If I were chris, I would go mad with all of the bug reports / requested changes that are made just on these forums alone.

Poschengband gained a lot of momentum in its early days in part because of how responsive chris was to including bugfixes or new content made by players. Even now, despite his disconnectedness, poschengband gets more changes more frequently than even Vanilla does, which is pretty incredible.

[Atopian]

When it comes to virtues, your options are either learning a bunch of deeply non-intuitive relationships (even by the standards of roguelikes) then significantly modifying your playstyle accordingly...
...or deactivating virtues.

Obviously by my presentation of the issue I favour the latter.