[Announce] FrogComposband 7.1.salmiak released

[archolewa]

Messing around with the latest version. One thing that I very much miss from (modern) Angband is that a weapon's damage and blows are shown in the weapon description.

It would be *really nice* if we could have that in Frogcomposband as well. As it is now, I need to equip the weapon and then jump down to the Melee category to see what my blows and damage are. Putting it in the weapon description would save me a bunch of key strokes (w,aCmEscw,a).

Modern Angband also provides how much more strength and dex you need to get the next tier of blows (i.e. with +1 Dex you would get 1.5 blows with this weapon). That would also be really nice to have visible, especially when deciding which stat to increase after clearing a dungeon or on level up.

[CyclopsSlayer]

I recently itroduced an old friend to Frog. He had played Moria/Vanilla/Zang/Heng back many years ago. He asked a few questions about things I had just taken for granted.
This made me think of a few quality of life things;

1. (X, Y) It isn't definitively stated anywhere I've seen how Melee Weapons and Combat items only add to melee to-hit and to-dmg, Archery items only to Ranged combat, Wizardry items only to Magic.

1a. What all counts as Ranged Bows/Slings, sure. Thrown? Does that Spike add +Y damage? That flask of oil?

1b. Is it definitively stated somewhere that when dual-wielding Rings only affect the matching hand's weapon? Or that other items bonuses are split?

2. Armor limitations. Should there be a display indicator somewhere that says 'this char can only wear 14.4 Lbs before suffering detrimental effects'

I am sure that there are more, but damned if I can think of them right now.

[Bucephalus]

Potions of invulnerability reduce satiation, despite this not being documented anywhere and not making sense.

The action cost for movement affects how far a player can walk on the map before getting hungry. Speed doesn't.

The "decrease mana" flag reduces spell failure rates by 3% although it's not clear why. (OK. Nevermind. You quietly fixed this in Salmiak.)

"Hellfire" is described as doing extra damage to good monsters, but doesn't. (You... fixed this, too. Whatever.)

Jewelry of wizardry with bonus damage has a nominal to-hit bonus, but the bonus is always 0 and spells don't miss.

Cockatrices are still in the game despite being the worst

[HugoVirtuoso]

Cannot be destroyed...by chaos? Lightning?

[Sideways]

Thanks for the quick reply. Another question - are rods a straight upgrade to staves because of their weight, even when taking the increased charges into account?

There are not very many rods with effects similar to a staff, so a direct comparison is seldom necessary.

When the comparison does happen (e.g. with Illumination or Enlightenment, or Staff of Speed vs. Rod of Heroic Speed) the rod does usually win, but not because of the weight. The biggest selling points of a rod compared to a staff (or wand) are that it cannot be destroyed, only stolen, and that it recharges much faster. That the rod wins is not a given, though - sometimes a staff is better, either because you anticipate having to use it many times in quick succession or because it has so many more charges as to outweigh the faster recharging on the rod. The staff might also have lower fail rates, since many of the best rod effects are very high-level and difficult to use - characters with so-so device skill often find Rods of Angelic Healing too unreliable for combat and prefer to carry Staves of Healing.

The FAQ has a more detailed comparison which also covers potions, scrolls and wands.

[Firons2]

You get 20% of the XP and the pet gets the remaining 80%, except on Quylthulgs (both you and the pet get the full XP) and Rings (same as Quylthulgs in the special case of the ringbearer). Note that what you get is 20% of the XP that would otherwise go to the pet; that might be higher or lower than 20% of the XP you'd get for scoring the kill yourself, since monster XP calculations are not quite identical with player calculations, and the monster's level likely does not equal your level. There are also some additional tweaks for the faster game speeds.

It might be technically possible to win using only pets - people have done stranger things with the game... - but I would not recommend it except on a Quylthulg.

Thanks for the quick reply. Another question - are rods a straight upgrade to staves because of their weight, even when taking the increased charges into account?

[budswell]

Ive also noticed that pets cannot kill most uniques.
Its why I think chaos+trump is a good mix for a mage. Pets do all the work, and you can just lob a "Fist of Force" over the top once uniques are down to their last HP.

[Sideways]

What is the percentage reduction of EXP gain for pet kills? Is it possible to play using only pets? I seem to be gaining very little to none EXP both from my necromancy rat summons and animated corpses. Thanks.

You get 20% of the XP and the pet gets the remaining 80%, except on Quylthulgs (both you and the pet get the full XP) and Rings (same as Quylthulgs in the special case of the ringbearer). Note that what you get is 20% of the XP that would otherwise go to the pet; that might be higher or lower than 20% of the XP you'd get for scoring the kill yourself, since monster XP calculations are not quite identical with player calculations, and the monster's level likely does not equal your level. There are also some additional tweaks for the faster game speeds.

It might be technically possible to win using only pets - people have done stranger things with the game... - but I would not recommend it except on a Quylthulg.

[Firons2]

Necromancy

What is the percentage reduction of EXP gain for pet kills? Is it possible to play using only pets? I seem to be gaining very little to none EXP both from my necromancy rat summons and animated corpses. Thanks.

[chem]

Thanks for reporting, and welcome to oook!

Not sure how well I can fix this stuff without a similar system to test on (and tile-related problems in general are not a top priority unless they also interfere with ASCII play), but I'll try to fix the compile error and the nonexistent reference to David Gervais' tiles at least.

it's pretty easy to spin up a linux virtual install in windows these days. vmware player, virtualbox, windows subsystem for linux, etc.

fixing all the gcc warnings may be a bit more of a pain

[invisibletroll]

Thanks for reporting, and welcome to oook!

Not sure how well I can fix this stuff without a similar system to test on (and tile-related problems in general are not a top priority unless they also interfere with ASCII play), but I'll try to fix the compile error and the nonexistent reference to David Gervais' tiles at least.

Thanks for answering. You have disabled issues on GitHub so I thought it's better to disturb you here. sulkasormi gives an impression that you are from Finland.

I understand the tile issue. Tiles won't exist for everything so why bother displaying only part of them? Same goes with sounds. If there's no sounds, why disabling the mixer should break compilation? Just ditch the unused code.

Using SDL interface doesn't necessarily add anything to the gameplay. Someone with debugging skills could check out what causes the crash.

[Sideways]

The new option to show energy used is cool.

Why is the energy-used display sometimes orange though?

It turns orange if the last action consumed more than 100 energy (or more than 13,200 energy for players on the overworld map).

[Sideways]

Compiling and playing with SDL enabled on Ubuntu 20.04 has lots of issues.


First of all, GCC 9.3.0 gives lots of warnings.

Disabling SDL mixer will result in compilation error.

./autogen.sh && ./configure --enable-sdl --disable-sdl-mixer && make
src/main-sdl.c:3165: undefined reference to `play_sound'

Compiles fine with SDL mixer, but...
Tile graphics doesn't seem to work at all and 32x32 refers to David Gervais tiles. (Do sounds work?)

Can't find file lib/xtra/graf/32x32.png - graphics mode '32x32' will be disabled.

Then change the font size with mouse many times in a row.
This should lead to crash with various messages.

Thanks for reporting, and welcome to oook!

Not sure how well I can fix this stuff without a similar system to test on (and tile-related problems in general are not a top priority unless they also interfere with ASCII play), but I'll try to fix the compile error and the nonexistent reference to David Gervais' tiles at least.

[Sideways]

Did anything change on the effectiveness of Identify? It feels like more items than before still have unknown attributes (the "?") after identifying than before. And I'll go broke fast if I have to spend $3,000 for *Identify* on every random piece of Elemental Protection armor for example to see what it resists, or every weapon with a Slay brand to find out what it slays. Another example, I could have sworn before that if I Identified Bolts of Slaying, it would tell me who the Slay applied against, while now it requires me to *Identify* it or sell one to the shop.

Is that a change? I didn't see anything about that in the changelog other than the Dragon Armor change.

Nothing changed except the dragon armor thing (which is optional), but since you're playing on angband.live it's still fairly clear what's happening. *Identify*ing attributes on artifacts and ego items helps you recognize the same attributes on the same ego more easily the next time you see them. Your old savefile had presumably accumulated a lot of such object lore over time; it is only wiped between characters if you turn the empty_lore option on; but since Gwarl did not copy your old savefile to salmiak, your object memory is now empty again.

Oh and unrelated question: the description of Balrog says they need to get nutrition from sacrificing humans, but it looks like they can sacrifice gnomes and elves as well. Is it really just tied to the symbol "p" or "h"? I.e. when it says they need to sacrifice humans, they meant humanoids?

Yes, that is what it means. Townspeople ('t') are okay too.

[GrimaTheBold]

Did anything change on the effectiveness of Identify? It feels like more items than before still have unknown attributes (the "?") after identifying than before. And I'll go broke fast if I have to spend $3,000 for *Identify* on every random piece of Elemental Protection armor for example to see what it resists, or every weapon with a Slay brand to find out what it slays. Another example, I could have sworn before that if I Identified Bolts of Slaying, it would tell me who the Slay applied against, while now it requires me to *Identify* it or sell one to the shop.

Is that a change? I didn't see anything about that in the changelog other than the Dragon Armor change.

I had to recreate all my preferences on angband.live with the new version, so it's possible I missed something in the preferences that's causing this, but I don't see it. And I didn't play with Easy Identify on because that feels like cheating to me.

Oh and unrelated question: the description of Balrog says they need to get nutrition from sacrificing humans, but it looks like they can sacrifice gnomes and elves as well. Is it really just tied to the symbol "p" or "h"? I.e. when it says they need to sacrifice humans, they meant humanoids?