Z+Angband 0.2.1 (beta) released!

[Mangojuice]

Hey folks.

Z+Angband 0.2.1 is now available, at

http://tinyurl.com/5pq2bd

The new program is savefile-compatible with the old one. Again, there's a .tar.gz source package and a .zip Windows executable, and I'd love it if anyone could compile on other systems, but this is all I've got.

Changes are detailed in the download file and on the website. In brief, there were a lot of relatively simple bugs that got ironed out of various degrees of importance. Most critically, a few quite annoying game-crashing bugs have been fixed, which is why I'm ready to call this a beta release. There have also been some adjustments for game balance.

Please let me know any issues you have with the new release, but do check the changes file so you know what I intended to fix. Hope you all like it!

Special thanks to my early playtesters, I appreciate the feedback and it keeps me interested in this project.

--MJ

[Mangojuice]

Compiles out of the box

Incidentally, for those of you who have had a hard time compiling this variant from the source code out of the box, I am pretty sure I've now fixed the problem. I wish I understood what I had done wrong, but I just manually isolated the file that was causing a problem and then manually isolated the section, and reverted to the old Zangband version, and it worked.

[Donald Jonker]

Thanks for the continued development. Still having a blast with the game. I like the hack with the 'old tiles' graphics for walls (winhack2) - like it even better than normal block walls.

A few little things I've noticed from a little play (other than that I suck at Z)...

-The vaunted, revamped Trump magic doesn't seem to be accessible..
EDIT: I see it's been renamed "Conjuration." Nevermind!

-Early quests give {average} equipment as rewards. They really should at minimum give {good} - average crap is the stuff you find or buy before your first dive.

-The dark grey dot of explored but out-of-sight floors is nearly indistinguishable from visible floor, making use of the 'remember torchlit grids' option very hazardous. Maybe there's a way to make the visible floor dots pure white by interacting with colors? (I'm not savvy enough to figure it out on my own.)

-I fail around 30% of the farm quests because I can't find all of the monsters. Didn't the 0.20 have them swamp you? I liked that better.

-Early characters get swamped by hatchets and padded armor. After clearing 4 or 5 levels I'm routinely left with 6-8 hatchets and 4-5 padded armors.

Quibbles aside, nice job. Keep up the good work.

--J

[Mangojuice]

Thanks for the continued development. Still having a blast with the game. I like the hack with the 'old tiles' graphics for walls (winhack2) - like it even better than normal block walls.

A few little things I've noticed from a little play (other than that I suck at Z)...

-The vaunted, revamped Trump magic doesn't seem to be accessible..
EDIT: I see it's been renamed "Conjuration." Nevermind!

-Early quests give {average} equipment as rewards. They really should at minimum give {good} - average crap is the stuff you find or buy before your first dive.

-The dark grey dot of explored but out-of-sight floors is nearly indistinguishable from visible floor, making use of the 'remember torchlit grids' option very hazardous. Maybe there's a way to make the visible floor dots pure white by interacting with colors? (I'm not savvy enough to figure it out on my own.)

-I fail around 30% of the farm quests because I can't find all of the monsters. Didn't the 0.20 have them swamp you? I liked that better.

-Early characters get swamped by hatchets and padded armor. After clearing 4 or 5 levels I'm routinely left with 6-8 hatchets and 4-5 padded armors.

Quibbles aside, nice job. Keep up the good work.

--J

Early quests may give mediocre items; the items you get are generated OOD compared to the quest's level, but more out of depth for harder quests. But they should also give experience and gold, and often stat gains, so it sort of works out. In my latest playtest I got a Warhammer (chaotic) for a relatively easy level 9 quest.

Farm quests: No change was made here. I bet the monster you got this time has a more erratic movement pattern. Also, if you move too far in one direction, monsters in the opposite direction can disappear, that may be your problem.

Haven't looked at the visible floor question. Yeah, I recommend not choosing "remember torch-lit grids", until that gets fixed. (It now defaults to off, if you were to start without a savefile.)

Hatchets & Padded armor: Later on things get more diverse, I promise. (Hey, at least it's not broken swords!) At that level, though, there aren't very many varieties of weapons or armor that wouldn't be out of depth.

[JustinH]

Just a quick note to say well done! I've been waiting for an update to Zangband for a few years now so it's good to know you've picked it up and are working on improving things!

J

[perost]

I totally agree with JustinH. My first and actually only win was in zangband a couple of years ago, and it made me sad that the development stopped on it. It's great that you have decided to continue with the development.

However, I had some trouble getting Z+Angband to run. It seemed to simply hang after the basic questions about race, class and such. I tracked it down to the RNG that had some problem with my 64-bit system. I found a very simple fix here, which only involves adding 4 lines of code to h-type.h. I tried it and can confirm that it works.

[Mangojuice]

I totally agree with JustinH. My first and actually only win was in zangband a couple of years ago, and it made me sad that the development stopped on it. It's great that you have decided to continue with the development.

However, I had some trouble getting Z+Angband to run. It seemed to simply hang after the basic questions about race, class and such. I tracked it down to the RNG that had some problem with my 64-bit system. I found a very simple fix here, which only involves adding 4 lines of code to h-type.h. I tried it and can confirm that it works.

Thanks for that, I will include it in the next official release.

[perost]

Thanks for that, I will include it in the next official release.

Great, I'm looking forward to your next release

However, I've been playing Z+Angband a bit now, and I can't find the command to repeat the previous command. I play on a laptop and prefer the rogue keyset (yeah, I use both 64-bit and roguekeys so that I can feel special ), but from what I can see there is no equivalent in the rogue keyset to the normal keysets 'n'-command. In Vanilla it's ctrl+v for the rogue keyset, but that combination seems to be used for something else in Z+Angband. Is there really no way of repeating the previous command with the rogue keyset in Z+Angband?

[Mangojuice]

Great, I'm looking forward to your next release

However, I've been playing Z+Angband a bit now, and I can't find the command to repeat the previous command. I play on a laptop and prefer the rogue keyset (yeah, I use both 64-bit and roguekeys so that I can feel special ), but from what I can see there is no equivalent in the rogue keyset to the normal keysets 'n'-command. In Vanilla it's ctrl+v for the rogue keyset, but that combination seems to be used for something else in Z+Angband. Is there really no way of repeating the previous command with the rogue keyset in Z+Angband?

I'll take a look, but you can always do \n (\ bypasses keymaps, including the whole roguelike keyset). I'm pretty sure you need to bypass the keymaps to use the squelch commands, too, since 'K' and '^U' are used for running up and tunneling northwest.

[perost]

I'll take a look, but you can always do \n (\ bypasses keymaps, including the whole roguelike keyset). I'm pretty sure you need to bypass the keymaps to use the squelch commands, too, since 'K' and '^U' are used for running up and tunneling northwest.

Yes, \n would work, but that's three keypresses on a swedish keyboard. The case where I most often want to repeat the previous command is when I cast spells, which is often three keypresses too. As for squelch I've never used it, so I didn't notice that.

But in my opinion both keysets should offer the same functionality, which is clearly not the case here. It's not really a critical feature, but it would be nice.

[Mangojuice]

Yes, \n would work, but that's three keypresses on a swedish keyboard. The case where I most often want to repeat the previous command is when I cast spells, which is often three keypresses too. As for squelch I've never used it, so I didn't notice that.

But in my opinion both keysets should offer the same functionality, which is clearly not the case here. It's not really a critical feature, but it would be nice.

Ah... European keyboard combined with Roguelike keyset = tough. You should be able to do this through "interact with keymaps", which you can do through the '@' command. For a cleaner fix, here's what you can do. Edit lib/pref/pref-key.prf, and add to the end:

A:\n
C:1:^V

and that should do it for you. I'll put it in the next release, too. In general, I think the roguelike keyset needs some rethinking, because a LOT of people play on laptops these days.

[ekolis]

You mean like making it a true alternate keyset, instead of a hack which just maps keys to the "real" keyset (something which I didn't realize until now, since I never cared for the "roguelike" set)?

Ideally instead of mapping keys to other keys in the pref files, we would map keys to actions - I'm not familiar with the pref file syntax, but maybe if there were some standard syntax for actions and keyboard keys... sort of like how in ToME you can map a key to a specific spell, regardless of which inventory slot the spellbook holding that spell happens to be in!

Something like this perhaps, to assign some function keys to some common actions:

# simple cure spell
K: F1
A: cast/Prayer for Beginners/Cure Light Wounds

# try to detect traps in whatever way possible
K: F5
A: cast/Some Spellbook/Detect Traps | use/rod/Detect Traps | use/staff/Detect Traps

# buff the player!
K: F12
A: use/potion/Heroism & use/scroll/Blessing

The first example simply means, "when you press F1, you should cast CLW out of the prayer for beginners book". The second example is a bit more interesting - perhaps a key mapping could have "fallback" actions in case the first one is not possible? (hence the pipe symbols which mean "or".) The third illustrates some other interesting feature which could be added - chained commands (hence the ampersands which mean "and".)

[perost]

Adding A:\n to pref-key.prf didn't work, but A:n did. ctrl+v now repeats the previous command. Now my mage will be unstoppable! Thank you for the fix

[pampl]

It's cool to see zangband getting updated again, but I keep running into this nasty bug in the windows version: every few hours the game will crash and corrupt the save file so that any attempt to load it will just make it freeze. Last time it happened when I was just running around in the wilderness with a level 23ish vampire rogue. Is this a known issue, and is there a way to avoid it?

edit: ah sorry, I thought for sure I had read all the previous thread but I must have skipped that post where you mentioned this

edit2: to make it up to you, here's a bug which I'm pretty sure wasn't mentioned: using vanilla_town really messes up the lighting in the dungeon. Walls and the floor don't show up except for in lighted rooms, and those areas are revealed on the map as soon as you enter the floor

[Mangojuice]

edit2: to make it up to you, here's a bug which I'm pretty sure wasn't mentioned: using vanilla_town really messes up the lighting in the dungeon. Walls and the floor don't show up except for in lighted rooms, and those areas are revealed on the map as soon as you enter the floor

Fixed. That was a tough one, since I never touched the vanilla_town option.. but I did touch dungeon generation.. the dungeon of the vanilla town was never being defined, because the data needed was generated on the fly at dungeon generation. But my changes made the data in the actual dungeon more necessary.

That said, I think vanilla town is a strange way to play Z+ since you miss out on all the quest stuff.