Swamp vs. Deserts

Greetings,

after reading that there is no more auto-scum and there are no more great drops I got reminded of this little pearl written by Hajo in 2002. The pearl is a little bit hidden and only talks about OO design but really it talks about all design, so I extracted the part that struck me right between the eyes and rewrote it a little :

But in the meantime I think to get anything finished, creating perfection isn't the optimal approach.

Most other RL games are quite messy, code-wise, but they are all prosper and evolving.

Currently I'm trying to find a golden path between the desert of perfect theory and the swamps of usable reality. The swamps will in the end swallow you, but perfection can be like a desert that is very hard to cross (= takes a long time to implement properly).

Between the swamps and the desert there must be a temperate zone, which is easier to walk than the deserts and less dangerous than the swamps. Now the question is, how far should you stay from the swamps, and how deep should you travel in the desert?

This could be applied to anything in design, but specially to roguelikes. The Vanilla team is right now too much in the desert; it is a noble place to be, but us lesser players cannot always see where you're going to or have the patience to wait for the final product.

The other thing I'd like to say is dont be like the French, I will never forget working for a French company that did not like their email system, they were going to replace it. So since they were going to replace it, they cut the current email system without replacing it first. This stock quoted company went without email for 2 days (!!!) before realizing that you know, maybe they should have the replacement first... Taking out the auto scummer without first re-designing level generation is 'being French about it'. Refusing to give people a buy out button and also not redesigning shops is 'being French about it'. Refusing to give 'great drops' because long term you're going to fix item distribution is also pretty French.

Now, I've worked in a few countries since then and whaddayouknow, it's not just the French ;) If you've found a better term for this behaviour, let me know, I love and adore the French, I'm even married to one of them.

T.

Bounty!!

So,

probably a first in banding ( and roguelikes ? ), I am providing bounties. Bounties are issues which have the 'Bounty' status :

http://code.google.com/p/hellband/issues/list

So far there is only 1 bounty : get big screen working.

Bounty would be for getting the windows port, using main-win-old.c, to have a resizable window that shows as much of the dungeon as the window is large. Bounty is 50 USD on paypal.

If you want to work on a bounty issue, shoot me an email first.

Cheers,

T.

Getting close to 0.8.8

Greetings,

The earlier mentioned 'myshkin' has not only fixed the mac build for Snow Leopard with a case sensitive file system but also is finishing up a Leprechaun Mystic, reporting all bugs and balance issues he finds.

At this point I'd like to finish all object descriptions and release 0.8.8. And of course fix any bugs that might come up.

Cheers,

T.

I sense a minor disturbance in the force

So,

Sentient weapons are in and working in svn, so are 2 'new' classes and a rewrite that deleted tons of duplicated code thanks to a hint of myshkin on oook.

Part of the cygwin build process updates a stat file with the new executable size since I dont want to inflate executable size:

01/27/2010 03:03 PM 2,002,859 hellband.exe

02/02/2010 10:18 PM 2,002,572 hellband.exe

Mission Accomplished ;)

T.

Next..

So,

in free time development I always hit at some point an assignment that I keep avoiding, which is in this case the XP weapons. So if folks are reading this blog and they want me to do XP weapons or instead fix the bug that's been driving them crazy or do the long promised bloodmages or even shadow mages or even hedge mages, let me know.

Enjoy your weekend,

T.

Choose a destination

Greetings,

demonic weapons are in, they dont get xp or powers yet, but at least warlocks no longer need chaotic weapons and they dont start bare handed any more. I've started play testing a Lilli Warlock to see whether things hold together with the new leveling rewards and recent changes. They do.

Link : http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=9859

One thing I noticed with this character is that when casting 'Sleight of Hand' the phrase 'Choose a destination' stays on screen, even after teleporting. So I Control Shift F for the sentence 'Choose a desti" and lo and behold:

Find all "Choose a desti", Subfolders, Keep modified files open, Find Results 1, "Entire Solution"

C:\cygwin\hellband\src\cmd5.c(1394): msg_print("You open a dimensional gate. Choose a destination.");

C:\cygwin\hellband\src\cmd5.c(2374): msg_print("You open a dimensional gate. Choose a destination.");

C:\cygwin\hellband\src\cmd5.c(2810): msg_print("You focus your Chi. Choose a destination.");

C:\cygwin\hellband\src\cmd5.c(3473): msg_print("Choose a destination.");

C:\cygwin\hellband\src\cmd6.c(4770): msg_print("You open a dimensional gate. Choose a destination.");

Matching lines: 5 Matching files: 2 Total files searched: 72

The same exact code has been copy pasted 4 times, and, 1 of those times it was copy pasted by yours truly...

I guess my 'destination' at this point is to create a common routine and add some message flushing after the teleport is done ;)

T.

Bleeding edge download

Greetings,

for people who live on the wild side, I'm providing a 'wheneverly', which really is a 'nightly' whenever I remember to upload one ;)

Basically it is a bleeding edge binary of the Hellband game, Windows only, with all the new shiny features ( and bugs ) inherent to wheneverlies.

Link : http://download.hellband.net/hb_bleeding_edge_win.zip

Bugs, praises and philosophic discussion is always welcome. Bleeding edge has full screen and allows testing of the new patron level rewards in debug mode.

T.

Bye bye angband look ;)

So,

all bands except Un sport the stat bar on the left, no one knows why really ;) I think part of the 'uh, another band variant' syndrome is because of this unthinking assignment of 1/3rd of the screen real estate to something that really isnt that important to the player..

Anyway, Hellband has fullscreen dungeons now, screenie :

Of course, bland dungeon generation algorythms become more apparent this way, I guess I will keep stealing from Un for some time ;]

T.

On Fury and Un

Greetings,

updates to Hellband have slowed down to a more sustainable rhythm, partly because of I've been busy with competition 80 and 81. I was second in 80 until the very end and currently am on the number one spot for 81.

Fury is a fun variant for people, like me, that liked ToME when it was growing and changing every week. It ads more craziness like Jedi Knights, and does it properly. Great games can add unbalanced features without making the game easier to win. I've been kicking ass but still haven't won the game.. I will steal the exp weapons from Fury, with only minor modifications ( who doesn't hate it when the poison realm gets assigned to your kick ass weapon.. ) 7/10 for Fury, had he not stopped development on it, it would be 9/10.

Un has been surprisingly good. I remember previous attempts with distaste and a sense of 'I want my time back'. The idea to 'find' notes all over the towns and dungeons is great, although I wish I'd actually find the actual note on the floor so that I could carry it and re-read it. I play so fast in town that the note is gone before I realize it is a note. Anyway, notes -> great idea, something to remember for Hellband. The other thing is that Un has done away with the left hand side stats part of the screen and it looks beautiful, which motivates me even more to do the same for the 0.8.8 release.

Still, Un remains bizarre. Apparently NO_TELEPORT is an upside when the item is uncursed.. Notice that others disagree :

q_ptr->art_flags3 |= TR3_NO_TELE; /* How's that for a downside? */

This code comes from Zangband where Stormbringer was deemed too powerful and got balanced by giving this flag, in Unangband it would be considered more powerful..
See comments. Still, point remains that every ego item I wear I now need to read a scroll of Phase Door or read spoilers to find out what the second ego item is that might have NO_TELE.

Still, I enjoyed the dungeons very much and the spells of competition 81 fit well together and Un gets a solid 7/10. Andrew is too much strolling from the beaten path and expects the player to either read change logs or read his mind ;)

And I have also still been coding in Hellband, current progress;

* No more warnings under Cygwin

* No more warnings under MSVC

* Demon Patrons are much revamped and as functional as before, still want to add more new stuff

T.

Servants

Greetings,

Patron rewards are pretty much on track to be finished this week. All the changes I proposed are in except for Demonic and Undead Servants.

Servants as hinted to in my previous post will be based on player ghosts. Basically there is space reserved in Hellband for 800 monsters, but only 697 are used, so there can be 102 servants and 1 player ghost at the time of writing. Obviously Servants will need to be stored in the savegame, since they are different from game to game. I’ve cloned the player ghost code for this purpose which violates one of my personal and corporate coding rules : no copy-pasting.. I might still re-visit this and merge player ghost and Servant code at a later point.

I’ve also checked the xp gaining weapons in Furyband and I think importing them into the Hellband codebase should be a fairly straight exercise. I will write up some design document before starting coding for player feedback.

T.

*Curse Weapon*

So,

after reading this , it confirmed my thoughts about curse weapon: it can make you quit the game in disgust..

As I am reworking patron rewards, I've upgraded curse weapon so that the concentration of destructive forces actually give resistances/immunities.

a) The Long Sword 'Ringil' (4d5) (-1,-2) (+10 speed) {cursed}
    Heavily cursed.
    +10 speed.
    Slays evil creatures, undead, trolls.
    *Slays* demons.
    Branded with frost.
    Provides resistance to cold, fear, light.
    Cannot be harmed by acid, electricity, fire, cold.
    Blessed by the gods.  Slows your metabolism.  Speeds regeneration.
    Prevents paralysis.  Grants the ability to see invisible things.

This is the new cursed Ringil for 0.8.8 :
The destroyed damage dice might still need addressing ;]

Examining a Long Sword (Shattered) (0d0) (-7,-5) [-3] {cursed}...
9:27 AM
15th Sep       This sword is commonly found all over Europe, it's long and
<DEBUG MODE>   has a cruciform hilt. All parts of the sword are used for
LEVEL     50   offensive purposes, including the pommel and crossguard.
Exp ********
AU  12345678   It weights 13.0 lb
|}=="*(()]]]   It does extra damage from frost.
str!    40+    It poisons your foes.
INT:    40+    It drains life from your foes.
WIS:    40+    It is very sharp and can cut your foes.
DEX:    40+    It provides immunity to cold.
CON:    40+    It provides resistance to life draining.
CHA:    40+    It provides resistance to nether.
              It provides resistance to disenchantment.
Cur AC   293   It renders you incorporeal.
Max HP   878   It slows your metabolism.
Cur HP   847   It is cursed.
Max SP   563
Cur SP   563   [Press any key to continue]

In the end, this cursed ringil gives on average only half the damage output of the old ringil, but gives immunity to cold, some high resists and ( this happens 1 in 3 ) constants wraith mode. Ringil is now at least a good swap weapon.

Thoughts are welcome, I do think I will make the damage dice reduction less drastic, maybe keep 1/3 of the dice + 1, so 4d5 becomes 2d2 instead of 0d0.

T.

Demonic Patrons

So, as discussed on oook, I've been wanting to separate chaos patrons from infernal patrons. Only Chaos Knights and maybe Devil Spawns would have chaos patrons everybody else would have Demonic Patrons. Demonic Patrons will be close to Chaos ones ( different names, stats and preferences of course ), but they dont do morphing of the player, they might be a little less chaotic as well.

One thing I want to remove is pointless rewards. I really hate getting 'REW_HEAL_FULL' when my health is full and my stats are at max.. Or getting REW_EXP when I just turned level 50... So more checks need to be coded and if the reward is pointless, a different reward should be chosen.

Another thing I want to avoid with Patrons is that they mess up awesome characters. POLY_SELF with its chances of getting 2500 damage is not fun. CURSE_WEAPON and CURSE_ARMOR which blast items into something terrible and useless is not fun, especially once the player starts finding awesome artefacts..

Something I want to consider adding is preferences of Patrons for certain classes/races, so that conservative players can game the chances of getting punishments vs rewards. Also, players should be able to choose their own Patron unless of course if you're a DevilSpawn ;)

I've categorized current Chaos Patron rewards & punishments:

* Give Servants ( only Demonic and Undead, needs Fallen Angels and Devils for Demonic )
* Dispelling ( Banishment, Dispel, Mass Banishment, I think the first 2 should destroy rather than banish, giving the loot to the player )
* Gifts ( Objects , Stats, Experience )
* Theft ( Stats, Experience, Hitpoint )
* Give Opponents ( Locals and OOD's only for now, I'm thinking of more tailored results )
* TY_CURSE, everyone likes the TY_CURSE ;)
* Morphing ( wounds, race , mutations )

Changes planned :

+ I like the servant idea a lot, but not the way it is now, I am definitely planning to take the Player Ghost code and make custom made servants. Because the levels in Dis are shielded, no one shows up till level 30 when servants are given.

+ Dispelling I like, but objects should be dropped, the odds are low of this happening anyway, the player should experience 'w000000t!' or something.

+ Gifts ( yes, and none of that 'good object drop' stuff ! )

+ Theft ( I dont mind extra stat stealing, in fact I dont mind even some permanent stat damaging, especially since alchemy exists in hellband, so the player has access to more stat potions at some point ).

+ Give opponents is ok, I think there should be way more opponents though, maybe just blast away a large circle around the player and put tons of monsters with 1 or 2 turns of confusion ;] Also, in shielded levels, sometimes nobody shows up, that has to be fixed

+ TY_CURSE is so classic, I cant touch it.. Maybe check on cyberdemons though, not sure that part of the code still works in Hell. There were no cyber demons in Dante's work that I can recall.

+ And of course, last but not least, add support for reward testing in debug mode.

I need some fresh ideas on punishments for the character that do not kill the character but are still pretty damn annoying and more importantly allow the character to recover. To start off I am pretty open to dungeon/recalling/monster modifications. I'm pretty confident that I can code staircases that run away from the player, burn all scrolls of recall in inventory, replace all monsters on the dungeon with something ten levels OOD. Force a scroll of Descent on the player etc etc.

Your thoughts and ideas are most welcome.

For Linux Players

Greetings,

for new players on linux using the curses/gcu version, there is a trick needed to make Control S ( save ) and Control Q ( save and quit ) work.

As per the words of Pete Mack :

$ stty raw

before running the program

and
$stty sane at the end.

This should fix any Controls S/Q problems that you might encounter. Apparently Vanilla has this solved in their GCU build, I will find their solution and implement it in Hellband as well.

T.

Smokin' !!

Current changes:

* Screenshots can now be in html or forum code, based on Vanilla

* Viewable items sub screen, sorted by price in shop

* Resistance to blindness as a temporary effect

* Show negative temporary effects in 'C'haracter overview

For the wishlist of 0.8.8 there is only one item left which is already in progress : nicer item description.

Any ideas, concepts or musings about the item overview screen are very welcome.

T.

New Mac version

Changes:

* player dumps and screenshots are now in a new folder called 'dump'

* on Mac OS X, this folder is now created and its in ~/Applications/angband/Hellband087/dump

* no need to log in with root ;)

* does not crash with a mysterious 'bus' error ;)

Now, I still need to sync back to svn and see if I broke Windows or not, probably not ;)

T.

Band debugging of Mac

As we all know,

There are three kinds of developers, the kind that thinks debugging is for wusses, the kind that thinks graphical debugging is for wusses and finally there are productive developers ;)

For Mac :

* create your project with all your source code

* compile your project with debugging support, use the -ggdb compile option, it provides more information than -g

* Run your app

* Start xcode, open your project, click 'Run' , attach to process, choose your *band

* At this point you are debugging your game, click continue to keep playing and start putting breakpoints where you have problems

Observations:

* Sometimes the process is finicky, keep trying ;)

* Sometimes breakpoint de-activate themselves, when clicking a breakpoint, it should turn dark blue, not light blue or orange.

Cheers,

T.

Mac Version, Hallelujah!

Yes!,

I finally managed to compile and package the band from Hell ;)

For your downloading pleasure : Hellband-0.8.7-osx.dmg

Thanks to all those Mac experts in general and Pete Mack in specific!

T.

Mac : almost there

So,

Successes thus far:

• Hellband compiles on Snow Leopard, God bless Pete Mack
• Hellband.app can start, initialize, create character and save
• Hellband.dmg works fine now

It however does not find the /save directory to load an existing character!!

Once that is fixed, I will release Hellband for Mac as well.

T.

Hello item descriptions, good bye katana's

So,

item descriptions..

Based on an email someone sent to me years ago I did most of the item descriptions in ToME.

Now, having lost that email and armed with wikipedia and google I am doing item descriptions again ;)

So far only mushrooms have been impacted sideways by this activity, good mushrooms got better, bad mushrooms got worse. And I got rid of Katana's, I doubt any were to be found in the late Middle Ages in Italy. I also changed bastard sword into Gladius since bastard sword really is the same as long sword. Even a broadsword is really a longsword..

Tulwars ( curved blades from India ) pose an interesting question, there are over a dozen Indian blades with an interesting story and unique qualities:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talwar#See_also

But will I include them in Hellband ? No.. Because people already consider Hellband over the edge and at least the weapons keep things familiar. Still, its a shame. Now kids out there think that bastard swords, broadswords, long swords and "2 handed" swords are different things.

T.

Release HellBand 0.8.7

Hi,

this is the official release of Hellband 0.8.7, since its been a while I've first pre-released it and it seems to work fine. The most important fix here is stability, there should be no more crash bugs. I've been flooding levels with monsters and items in wizard mode and hellband is now responding properly to abuse.

Links :

Download : http://hellband.net/downloads.html

Bugs: http://code.google.com/p/hellband/issues/list

OMG I want to subcribe to a zombie list : http://groups.google.com/group/hellband/topics

*Creatures

- 0.8.7 Quite a few creatures had double genus flags, some even

contradictory ones

- 0.8.7 Uniques that only drop gold drop much more gold now

- 0.8.7 Added Babylonians on level 24 to speed up level generation,

Nimrod was feeling lonely

*Story

- 0.8.7 Story added for the Heretics level

- 0.8.7 Story added for the Satan level

- 0.8.7 Story added for the first pos Dis level

*Equipment

- 0.8.7 Added the infamous white banner of hell, when carrying you

should experience 'hmm','cool!','wot?','f!!','oh','heh'

*Character Building

- 0.8.7 Restarting character creation allows you to re-choose stats

- 0.8.7 Mindcrafters can now be generated again, *blush*

- 0.8.7 The temple can now remove all your corruptions for 1.500.000

gold

- 0.8.7 Werewolves did not get random names

- 0.8.7 Skeletons no longer have the Second Sigh but Second Sight

now ;)

- 0.8.7 Profile file names are now based on the safe name instead of

hard core player name

- 0.8.7 Potential crash bug found and removed for custom names

- 0.8.7 Player names can now be up to 40 characters because of the

Italian names

- 0.8.7 Italian name generator added ( male and female )

- 0.8.7 Fearless and coward mutations could not be gotten, they were

their own opposite

- 0.8.7 Removed reference to 'Draconian', it should all mention

Draco now

- 0.8.7 Minor background spelling mistakes and punctuation fixed

- 0.8.7 Random characters work now

- 0.8.7 Fixed missing space in Ogre descendant description

*Wizard Commands

- 0.8.7 ']' now induces amnesia so I can test graphic effects with

telepathy and squelching better

*UI

- 0.8.7 Editing colors now shows the colors against the 3

differently lit dungeon floors, so the effect can be

measured

- 0.8.7 Added support for 32px tile set and made it the default in

fact

- 0.8.7 Since nothing except floor/walls/doors is done, support for

transparent ASCII symbolds is coded for windows

- 0.8.7 casting *id* now only shows items that have not been *id*'d

yet

- 0.8.7 casting id now only shows items that have not been id'd yet

- 0.8.7 Picking up from the floor now presents a list if more than 1

item is on the floor

- 0.8.7 Ring choosing now asks left or right while showing the rings

in those locations

- 0.8.7 Dragon Armor no longer gets squelched

- 0.8.7 Squelch no longer squelches boots of speed, even if set at

'keep artefact only'

- 0.8.7 Squelch will not squelch terrible artefacts.

- 0.8.7 Native Mac support for intel macs <- broken, sorry

*Help Files

- 0.8.7 Alchemy command key is now integrated into interactive help

* Stuff

- 0.8.7 Chests are now much more interesting like in cool variants

- 0.8.7 Weapons of KILL_ANGEL now protect the player from Lucifers'

curse

*Stores

- 0.8.7 Black Markets have deeper items once you start to get over

character level 25

*Internals

- 0.8.7 Remove compile option ALLOW_EASY_DISARM and

ALLOW_EASY_DISARM, why would you not want it ??

- 0.8.7 Fixed evil wand stacking 'problem'

- 0.8.7 level creation time has decreased MUCH both on count of

object generation and monster generation being more stable

- 0.8.7 Object dropping, stacking and compacting robustified, lots

of arrows should no longer crash the game

- 0.8.7 store item maintenance is now centralize instead of copy

pasted in 4 locations

- 0.8.7 makefile.WHICH now has proper code

- 0.8.7 Stat adjustment tables are merged into 1 2D matrix, cleaning

up 900 lines of code

- 0.8.7 Fixed warlock realm choice