Saturday, 17 January 2009
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| feature request [V] experience for all Eddie Grove 21:00:50 |
| |
This is sort of two requests in one, but both come down to applying "adders
should add" to max experience.
Currently, a potion of experience adds min{100K, exp/2 + 10} to your current
exp. For me, that means that the first potion of experience I find goes home
while I wait for my current exp to get up to 200K. That takes what should be
a fun find, and turns it into a ho-hum find.
The point of the current situation is to stop a lucky cLevel 5 character from
gaining 20+ levels. But why? We don't stop a cLevel 5 char from picking up
multi-hued scale, or any other great out-of-depth drop. Why cripple only !exp?
As things are now, a char with a sufficiently low cLevel that !exp would be
"unbalancing" is better off just selling it. That's just awful.
On to the second part. I'd like to see experience gains, from !exp or kills
or whatever, add fully to max exp [and equally to current exp] even when
drained. When that undead sucks away the experience from killing a HellWyrm,
and then you kill an IceWyrm, and then you restore the experience of killing
the HellWyrm, you should have the full experience for both.
There hasn't been much arguing against any of my recent feature requests.
Let's see if I managed to get controversial this time, or need I try harder? 
Eddie
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| |  6 answers | Add comment |
|
| Re: Races in V The Wanderer 20:53:13 |
| | Ed wrote:
On Jan 10, 5:18 pm, antoine.from.r...@gmail.com wrote:
- Making half-elves much more able. Currently we have a D&D half-elf (basically a funny looking human) rather than a true Tolkien half-elf (who were exceptionally able at everything - look at Elrond). I'd like to see all their scores raised by several points and their experience modifier up to about 150. So half-elves would be MORE powerful than humans or elves individually, combining the best of both worlds rather than averaging the two races out? Interesting... I never played half-elves anyay due to the fact they were just an "intermediate" between humans and elves... but now how will they be much different from high-elves?
That wouldn't be Tolkien-authentic, really.
Elrond was a half-elf, yes - but he was a half-elf who had chosen the
elven side of his heritage, and so his differences from a full-blooded
elf were really very minor (some might argue nonexistent).
A half-elf who chose the human side of his or her heritage, by contrast,
would be similarly very much like a human - albeit a human of the glory
days of the Numenoreans or beforehand, the very best the race has to
offer.
If memory serves, "high elves" were those who had lived in Valinor,
"elves" were those who had remained in Middle-earth rather than going
west in the early days (also at some stages called "dark elves", because
they lived in the dark land before the Sun), and half-elves were simply
any crossbreed between either variety of elf and the race of man.
There were few enough canonical Tolkien half-elves (low to mid single
digits in total) that we have very little on which to base a
generalization about the "race" as a whole, and what there is doesn't
necessarily lend itself well to modeling for gameplay purposes. IMO,
however, making them either basically a minor variant on human or a
minor variant on elf would be the wrong approach to take - the former
more so than the latter.
--
The Wanderer
Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.
Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.
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| | 16 answers | Add comment |
Friday, 16 January 2009
|
| 3.1(beta) TME Eddie Grove 21:11:22 |
| |
I think 3.1 may still have the TMJ problem, defined as enough useless items
that squelch is necessary. However, it appears to have a new problem --
Too Many Egos.
There are a lot of changes, and they have impacted my playstyle, so I cannot
be accurate about the extent of the problem. Detection spells are now on the
order of a 100x50 rectangle [roughly 4 times the detection area of a standard
terminal], and that means I can use detect objects all of the time. Now that
objects are better, that makes it worth going out of my way to get more of
them. I spent a significant amount of time wearing two teleportation rings
for a combined +4 speed, which I'd guess breaks even for diving purposes
traveling further while faster. That meant I covered more area and got more
stuff. Pseudo is much faster, and fewer items to pseudo as well, so that has
meant no wasting any time at all for pseudo using not too many inventory
slots, for faster diving.
I'm down to 3000' at 217K turns. My goal at that turncount is 4350', and even
behind schedule I'd ususally be at 3800'. I am definitely diving slower this
game. In addition, I am covering more area, and with the speed boost I was
able to kill more, so perhaps it would be reasonable for me to have
accumulated twice as much useful stuff as usual at this depth.
Ever since I hit 2500', it has seemed crazy. I would guess that about half of
the weapons and armor are excellent. I am squelching good stuff, so maybe
from a TMJ viewpoint they should all be egos. However, the weapon and armor
drops are not nearly smaller enough to make up for the increase, so it seems
ridiculously excessive.
On my last trip, I picked up a lothlorien shortbow, elven cloak of the magi,
crown of might(+3), *slay evil* weapon with ESP, and some useless things like
*slay orc* or blessed or *slay evil* with uninteresting powers that I tossed.
That's not from some greater vault, just a normal 10K turn dive from 2700' to
3000'. Oh - probably also some gloves and/or boots of FA that would have
thrilled me to no end in a 3.0.9 game at this depth, but are so commonplace in
the stores this game that I can't even remember for sure.
There have been reports of not enough stat potions, but I saw plenty. I sold
my first one, didn't bother to get the second [that was guarded], because of
course both were !wisdom and I was playing a rogue. In addition, I picked up
5 useful stat potions and also !augmentation. I am doing far better than
usual for this depth, and maybe close to average stat boosts for the turncount.
[I don't count !charisma as a stat potion in the above paragraph.]
Gold drops have lessened, egos are way up, and there are useful egos in the
shops -- free action, resistance, launchers of might, gondolin weapons, and
presumably more that do not come to mind at the moment. This increased the
shopping aspects a whole lot in the early game, before things went completely
crazy at 2500'. I cannot be 100% sure about this, since I usually play my
patch with no selling, but this game was felt like shopping was an order of
magnitude worse than the two games I played of comp 62, V309 starting with
PDSM.
Eddie
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| | Add comment |
Wednesday, 14 January 2009
|
| Oops! Hugo Kornelis 07:29:21 |
| | You sold The Dagger 'Narthanc' (2d4) (+4,+6) (i) for 6 gold.
The shopkeeper jumps for joy.
Now where am I going to get the 19028 gp to buy it back???
(weeps softly)
Best, Hugo
--
Angband spoilers - last updated for Angband 3.0.8.
Visit http://www.juti.nl/hugo/Angband/Spoiler/index.htm
--
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| | 15 answers | Add comment |
Monday, 12 January 2009
|
| general squelch issues Eddie Grove 23:34:48 |
| |
I've been messing around with improved squelching for a while, and keep
changing how I do things. It's time to come up with some specifics, and then
incorporate them into V hopefully in a way that can be then grabbed into
variants without too much pain.
However, first there are issues to be resolved.
The first question is whether there should be a separate pseudo level I have
referred to as {splendid}, which refers to items that are obviously excellent
the moment you wield them, even without pseudo, e.g. boots of speed. The
reason is so that you could specify quality squelch of excellent but not
splendid, squelching boots of stability but not speed and squelching armor of
resistance but not of elvenkind [assuming stealth boosts are obvious].
There definitely needs to be a new pseudo level {tainted} for items
simultaneously excellent and worthless, such as nazgul launchers, since the
plan is to have more of those in the future. So in any event there will have
to be at least 1 additional pseudo level.
The second question, much bigger, is whether there should even be quality
squelch at all. I believe in the model that the player should be provided
with the definitions of all of the egos, but that seems to be a minority
opinion. If you do not know all of the egos, how can it ever be safe to
squelch an excellent dagger when possibly there might be an unknown ego that
provides damage of {base damage * 20 vs evil} ?
It would be feasible to only allow squelching of particular seen egos. A bit
more generally, one could specify sets of object flags (and weight, damage
dice, etc) and squelch items whose flags are a subset of one of the given sets.
It may not seem related, but I need to know whether branded weapons should be
obvious upon wield. The upcoming 3.1 will make brands obvious at least upon a
successful hit. Is there any strong opposition to making them obvious on wield?
Somewhat related, I added pseudo levels on jewelry to my patch. I thought it
was necessary for the way I dealt with artifacts, but I was mistaken. I have
found it necessary to recognize artifacts when they are wielded. This brings
up a couple more questions.
Should artifacts be recognized immediately when wielded?
Should jewelry pseudo?
Also, squelching is about ignoring, not object destruction. Is there any
reason that artifacts should not be squelchable, assuming they are no better
than other items that would be squelched?
Finally, one goal of my squelch interface is to avoid menus, and there is no
separate squelch command. When you 'k'ill an object, it first asks if you
wish to squelch it, and if so tries to guess larger classes of objects you may
wish to squelch and interrogates you about them. Only if you say no to
squelching are you asked if you want to destroy the object. Does anyone have
a problem with this approach?
Eddie
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| | 2 answer | Add comment |
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| 3.1.0beta - mon-info / wizard monster memory omissions (bug?) Matthew Vernon 20:16:03 |
| | Hi,
Having just been killed by Wormy's poison ball, I thought I'd mention
this. The spoiler-file generated in wizard mode (^A " 4), as well as
the effect in monster memory of using the wizard-move "tell me all
about monsters" option omits any magical abilities that monsters
have. This is quite critical, and I assume it's a bug?
[I'll try the edit-recompile suggestion to fix the ESC issue later,
and report back]
Matthew
--
Rapun.sel - outermost outpost of the Pick Empire
http://www.pick.ucam.org
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| | 2 answer | Add comment |
|
| experimenting with minimal id Eddie Grove 18:44:44 |
| |
I've been modifying V in many ways. I started with the principle that
identify should not affect gameplay, so e.g. if wands stack when identified
they should also stack when not identified. This led me to add pseudo-id to
jewelry so that I could define preserve mode in terms of pseudo rather than in
terms of identify.
Once I got started, I kept on going, and incorporated a model of active magic.
In this model, if you quaff an unaware potion of sleep while wielding an
unaware ring of free action and an unidentified defender weapon, you learn
about them all. You feel sluggish for a moment, and then the ring and weapon
actively oppose the bad magic. Specifically, you learn the flavor of the
potion, and that the ring and weapon both have the flag that provides free
action. You notice a slay when you hit a monster affected by the slay, and
equally learn there is no slay if it is not.
I modified a few of the nastier items, such as making !death "too nasty to
drink" and changing ?curse_armor to curse the armor but not blast it.
I implemented full learning code for wieldable items. Everything you learn is
saved, and when the flavor or ego is uniquely determined, you are told what it
is. I changed so that artifacts are recognized immediately when wielded. So
if you wield a weapon that gives a wisdom bonus, when you inspect it you see
that it is {blessed} or {*slay evil} or {holy avenger} or {*slay undead}. If
you then hit an undead, that will determine exactly which one it is due to the
different slays.
I just played a game through to the end where I never used identify on any
unaware flavor except {good} jewelry, or on any unlearned ego. I never
sold anything for id either. I tried not to buy unaware items from the shops,
but I had to buy a few. After I learned an ego on an item, or knew the
flavor, I allowed myself to ?identify it to see the plusses.
The most notable problem was that rings of damage, accuracy, slaying,
searching, and protection pseudo as bad or good with no way to be
differentiated in my learning code. Those required ?identify to learn.
I will probably change things so that you learn to_dam and to_hit bonuses on
any hit, and search bonus on any successful search, and maybe ac bonus on any
melee attack against you. I don't know exactly what, but something needs to
be done here.
Due to the horrible way consumables are hard-coded, my learning stuff does not
work on them. I was forced to take notes like "pink does not reduce poison".
The most annoying consumable I did not modify was !ruination. Dropping all
stats from 18/100 to 18/88, requiring maybe 5 stat potions to restore each
individual stat, seems very excessive.
The biggest problem was learning ego ammo. I took out a checkerboard vault,
and acquired lots ammo. There were not enough monsters of all possible types,
so I could not risk killing them when testing the ammo, and first I would
*throw* each ammo in turn to check the slays, and then kill only after testing
was done. This is a mess, and the only solution I see is to learn at least
ammo egos like flavors that you recognize in the future on pickup. Perhaps
the [I believe] v dev approach of egos on the launchers instead could work if
not too many launchers.
I played a rogue, so at high levels I had various enchant spells. I used
enchant spells as a slow expensive method of removing curses. Ammo is worse,
because you cannot wield it to speed up pseudo. When things got slow, I
tested ammo for ego by trying to brand it.
I consider checking for artifacts using the 'k' command to be abuse, but
checking with acid balls is not. Perhaps that is silly. Toward the end, I
was checking not only armor but also low dice weapons using acid balls.
It was essential that sustain rings pseudoed as average, and I squelched most
average flavors without trying to learn them. Some other flags, like FF and
slow digestion also count as average, but at least those can be learned
easily, and I wouldn't care if I squelched them anyway.
I also coded in learning by process of elimination, and so the very last wand
flavor was learned without ever trying it. It turned out to be -heal_monster!
I definitely need ?*ID and !self_knowledge [which I changed to *ID everything
wielded] for learning randarts. I also used it once to figure out a cloak
with a stealth bonus that could have been stealth or aman. It turned out my
mistake learning the cloak was wearing it. Later I left those in my pack.
Perhaps buggily, my code learns about ignore_fire on every item in the pack
when hit by a fire attack, but if you are *wearing* a cloak it is not affected
by a fire attack so you don't learn then! That whole item destruction thing
is really messed up. As to the pack, when an item survives the attack, does
that mean it is untouched or that it is lightly singed but not badly burnt?
My code currently assumes the latter.
FWIW, I learned 225 flavors through usage. I collected too much slay evil
ammo and had to finish the game with about ten ring flavors unlearned, mostly
squelched unaware, and another about ten unaware flavors never encountered.
The win took about 450K turns, so I was slowed down, but not by too huge an
amount. Acid balls as a primary means of identify. There is still work to
do.
My conclusion is that with the "active resistance" model, it is possible to
play without identify. I don't think the severe model, where you have to know
the attack and have exactly one wielded item that might resist it to be
learnable, would be playable.
Eddie
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| | 1 answer | Add comment |
Saturday, 10 January 2009
|
| Competiton 63 Nick McConnell 02:49:57 |
| | Competition 63 is now available from the competition page,
http://angband.oook.cz/competition.php. It is an Angband 3.1.0 Kobold
Rogue. The competition will run for a calendar month. The winning
condition is fastest winner, or failing that exp/turns; attempts to get
a different winning condition sorted out were derailed by my apparent
inability to work out what day it is.
Nick.
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| | Add comment |
Friday, 9 January 2009
|
| ADOM artists? Gut 13:33:25 |
| | Hellooooooo. Anybody heeeere? Just kidding : )
I recently had an idea regarding ADOM art images. I thought it would
be a good idea to produce/contribute images to represent every monster
in the game. There are over 400 monsters in ADOM, so if you have some
skill in art (any), please consider contributing a few pieces to the
effort. For the full idea, please read the info on the adom.de forums:
http://www.adom.de/forums/showthread.php?t=762
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| | Add comment |
Monday, 5 January 2009
|
| Re: YAWP [Lame] (V, 3.0.9b) Eddie Grove 19:58:10 |
| | Just a User <chance2now@gmail.com> writes:
OK, first off, I know this win is totally lame, because of the massive turn count and ridiculous amount of inventory carried into the final battle, but I am posting it anyway.  It is, however, a legitimate win without using any save file tricks or other non-kosher actions.
No win is totally lame, and 4M turns is not that excessive compared to some
others on the oook ladder.
I feel compelled to haul up junk to sell for much longer than I really need to.
Another reason in favor of my suggestion to remove selling from the game!
Of course, I still couldn't resist picking up spare copies of the high-level priest books and continuing to sell them,
The biggest advantage of taking spares home to sell is that you do not need to
save a slot at home. If your pack gets too full before you return, toss that
dungeon spellbook and buy it back when you return to town. I even do this in
my mangled version where selling items gets me 0 gold.
Title ***WINNER*** Status 1 DEX! 18/100 +2 -1 +13
Congrats on the win.
Eddie
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| | 4 answer | Add comment |
Tuesday, 30 December 2008
|
| Re: Merry Christmas George Saint Pierre 13:26:59 |
| | Viva La France! and a good frogging to all you fuckwits in the new year.
----------------------------------------------------------
No more no less just me George The Christmas Frogger
"Marcus" <akf@afdslkj.com> wrote in message
news:m-6dnUYQPMMuhxLYnZ2dnUVZ_vamnZ2d@adelphia.com...> To all of my favorite game developers out there, for providing me (and > many others!) with years and years of quality gaming entertainment.>
Thank you, and season's blessings on you and yours  >
|
| | 8 answers | Add comment |
Sunday, 28 December 2008
|
| Re: Dark elven beastfighter talents question TragicTheGarnerer 14:07:23 |
| | "Pavel" wrote:
Hi, just started playing Adom and developed a love for DE beastfighters, but I can't decide what talents I should go for. The trickie part is the DV talents since they require Quick which makes levelling slow which is a bad thing for Beastfighters. Plus my speed is quite good as it is. So, what do the experts think? /pavel
Go for it. If I recall correctly, beastfighters and monks gain +1 to speed
every second level so +2 from Quick talent isn't a big deal.
Beastfighters also require less experience to level than most other warrior
classes so leveling shouldn't be a problem.
Treasure Hunter is the only talent that you "must" have. But you need Alert
talent which is level 1 only talent as a prerequisitie for it.
Although you don't have archery skill, you can try archery talents. You
won't be able to get all of them but Quick Shot talent is nice to have if
you plan on using missile weapons, and you should.
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| | Add comment |
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| feature request [V] inform counter change Eddie Grove 05:19:15 |
| |
Currently, if you quaff a potion of slow poison, the only time you are
informed is if you go from a poison counter of 1 to 0. Drop from 50 to 25 and
you do not notice. The general rule is that you only notice if you go from 0
to non-zero, or non-zero to 0. That only makes sense for a player whose only
info are status flags, but not to the character who should notice changes IMO.
I would like to see things changed so that you are informed if a counter
changes in either direction as a result of an action [not turn by turn
regeneration or healing which is assumed].
"You are more/less cut/stunned/poisoned" etc, uniformly for all counters.
Things are a bit confused because durations, for speed or heroism e.g., use
the same code as counters for effects with varying intensity, but that's a
coding issue not a playing issue.
Eddie
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| | 2 answer | Add comment |
Saturday, 27 December 2008
|
| Best Character Class Icky Shuffle 07:35:06 |
| | Hi,
I just installed Moria from DarwinPorts on my Mac and it's good to get
back to Moria. It's been so long, I can't remember what Character
Class(es) I used to like. I'm thinking I might like Paladin but was
just curious what people thought.
Icky
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| | 1 answer | Add comment |
Tuesday, 23 December 2008
|
| size of screen / level an difficulty? Matthias Sommer 14:45:55 |
| | Hello,
ADOM adapts itself to the screen size, that has to bes at least 80x25,
but may be bigger. For my understanding, almost all levels also adapt to
this size. So, if I play on a bigger screen, I get bigger levels. How
does this influence the game difficulty?
I feel bigger levels of course play longer, but allow you to level up
faster in compare to reached dungeon levels. So the game is less hard
this way?
Or is there somewhere a variable, that I do not notice yet?
I play on Linux, in a KDE-Konsole, that can adapt to different screen
sizes up to 80x52 predefined and free adjustable to custom sizes. ATM I
prefer XTerm resolution of 80x40. What is recommendable? What size do
you like?
BTW.: A wish for the next version of ADOM (if there will be one): If one
starts the game in a wrong resolution and tries to restore an existing
game, the program issues an rather cryptic error message. Better would
be something like: "Games was saved in resolution 80x40, please set your
display to this resolution to play this game."
Regards
Matthias
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| | 2 answer | Add comment |
Monday, 15 December 2008
|
| Re: Deity List Andy Williams 01:49:29 |
| | Darren Grey wrote:
myrddinbach wrote:
Anyone know where there is a list of all the deities for each race and their respective alignments?
Here you go:
For the record, this has been tabulated in the GB, Appendix I. Thanks
Darren.
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| | Add comment |
Sunday, 14 December 2008
|
| good vs bad Eddie Grove 00:34:50 |
| |
I am decoupling {cursed} status from the question of good vs bad for squelch
purposes, to allow in the future for interesting curses, or monsters
icky-cursing your stuff, or whatever. I have added a pseudo level "bad" which
should be the counterpart to "good".
My question is what to do with something like a non-ego dagger (1d4) (-10, +9).
Currently, if such a thing was generated, it would be of level "cursed" or
"average". IMO it should be "good".
There are a couple of things going on. It only takes N enchant scrolls to
enchant up from -N to 0, but it may take well more than N to go from 0 to +N.
Also, damage bonuses/penalties are far more important than hit bonuses.
What should be the rule for items with different signs on the to_hit and
to_damage bonuses?
(1) just call it good
(2) judge by the damage bonus
(3) compare expected number of enchants to get to the positive value against
the magnitude of the negative value
(4) add and compare to 0
(5) create another pseudo level
(6) something else
Keep in mind that anything considered "bad" or "average" will be squelched by
a player who wants to squelch (+0,+0) items of the same type.
I have also added a pseudo level "tainted" for items which are simultaneously
excellent and worthless, such as nazgul launchers [or in the future items with
interesting curses]. I don't think that applies to this discussion. Calling
items without flags "tainted" screws up using pseudo to detect nazgul launchers.
Eddie
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| | 23 answer | Add comment |
Friday, 12 December 2008
|
| Competition 61 Nick McConnell 10:24:15 |
| | The savefile for competition 61 is now available from
http://angband.oook.cz/competition.php -
it's an Oangband110u High-Elf Assassin (cl15, dl30) submitted by Donald
Jonker. Winner is fastest win, or failing that max experience/turns.
Note that this page also has a facility for submitting character dumps,
and a mini-ladder ranked according to competition position - many thanks
to pav for setting this up.
Oangband110u can be downloaded from
http://angband.oook.cz/faangband/Fonts.html
A bugfixed version was just put up today, so make sure to get the latest.
Many, many thanks to Tony Holmes for running the competition so well for
such a long time. I hope I can do it justice.
Nick.
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| | 8 answers | Add comment |
Thursday, 11 December 2008
|
| Re: Zen Monk effort Jan Erik Mydland 19:46:08 |
| | On Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:47:02 +0100, Soira <baisunas@yahoo.com> wrote:
Sorry, but both adom.de and brikster forums are down so will put my situattion here Will use char info instead of spoiler space <snip>
Why sorry? This is the ADOM newsgroup after all
It's good to remember that the NG is still around as webforums can be
fickle (I should know mine was down most of November and still seem to
hickup ocationaly). Usenet is decentralised (and archived), so much more
robust as long as ISP's don't descide to drop the service altogeter due to
low use...
--
Jan Erik Mydland mailto:jamydlan@online.no
http://home.online.no/~jamydlan
Visit my ADOM Hall Of Fame at:
http://adom.brinkster.net/hof
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| | Add comment |
Wednesday, 10 December 2008
|
| feature request [V] launchers of power Eddie Grove 23:42:31 |
| |
In a recent game, I picked up a long bow of power at 3100'.
It had a damage bonus of +5. I was annoyed.
I suppose that my changes to pseudo at least will pseudo it as good rather
than excellent, but surely it would be better for it to be excellent in the
first place.
My suggestion is to give it a fixed *additional* damage bonus and generate the
standard +hit and +dam plusses normally for the level.
E.g. a long bow (x3) of power (+10 dam) (+5, +5) would do
brand_multiplier * 3 * (ammo + 5 + 10) damage.
In other words, for an x3 launcher, +30 before any brand is applied. This is
basically comparable to extra might, where the bonus is (ammo + bow_bonus),
which might range from 8 up to 50 or more depending upon how awesome the
various bonuses are and whether you have seeker ammo.
Then if you find a wimpy launcher of power, you could enchant it up to +9 for
an effective +19 to damage. Now that's excellent.
I suppose you could have launchers of accuracy as well, but they would need a
huge bonus like +25 to hit to be interesting. Probably the two egos should
be combined.
Eddie
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| | 1 answer | Add comment |
|
