Thursday, 6 November 2008
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| -Crawl- YAFM - Sometimes random artefacts are *very* random. Jeremy Turner 13:32:23 |
| | Hand weapons
N - the +5,+12 battleaxe "Dragonbane"
It is especially effective against all of orcish descent.
jeremy "maybe 'dragon' is a slang term for orcs" turner
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| | Add comment |
|
| 0.3.6 Nick McConnell 13:07:11 |
| | Hi Si,
So, if you're posting 0.3.6 characters, you must be nearly done. How
you release is up to you - you can announce it, or I can announce it, or
whatever. Usually I get everything compiled and up on the site before I
announce. I can compile as much as you need me to. The DS port is
currently in very active development, though, so I think the thing to do
is get everything else done and then I'll talk to Michael (the guy who's
working on the DS port, who I work with) about merging the 0.3.6 code
into his working version.
Cheers, Nick.
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| |  1 answer | Add comment |
|
| [Steam] Next Competition Tony Holmes 11:57:58 |
| | Hello All,
Just to let you know that I have now received 2 submissions for the
next competition. I have decide to run the Steam one in March and the
NPP competition in April (taking into account Jeff Greene's comment in
a recent thread about NPP needing a few issues ironed out).
The following paragraph is taken from the email submitting the
competition sent to me which gives some info which may be useful to
players.
The character is a Dwarven Dashing Hussar with a speciality in Axes.
Dashing Hussars have unique combat abilities (accessed with the 'p'
key), and for those things he can't handle with his Axe, he has
started down the device and spirituality path. To win the compo is
first to beat the game - Steamband is only 50 levels, and can be
beaten without too much difficulty.
Regards
Tony
http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/angband_comp
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| | 4 answer | Add comment |
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| -Crawl- Exploiting the trustfulness of Good Gods (spoily... if it would work!) Jeremy Turner 09:15:53 |
| | I just had a cynical, manipulative idea. Alas, I thought of it too late
to attempt it with my current character, but I'll give it a try later.
Could you sign up with The Shining One (or create a Paladin) and worship
him just long enough to receive an awesome blessed weapon, then switch to
Okawaru? I expect that TSO would be annoyed, but wouldn't do anything
about it because He is a goody two-shoes.
jeremy "you're the good Ash, and i'm the bad Ash... goody goody two-shoes!
goody goody two-shoes!" turner
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| | 1 answer | Add comment |
|
| Re: Drakelings. Oy! Michal Bielinski 01:28:02 |
| | On Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:54:21 +0100, sturgeonslawyer wrote:
Does anyone have any suggestions how to get a drakeling through the ToEF alive?
Do not waste turns there. Magic Map and Teleportation can be very handy.
Using these you can be at the top of tower in no time. Ancient Chaos
Wyrm must die as fast as possible. Take plenty of healing stuff with you.
--
Michal Bielinski
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| | Add comment |
Wednesday, 5 November 2008
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| Re: Ring of Resist Cold {cursed}? Andrew Sidwell 20:12:39 |
| | xGenoBlast@gmail.com wrote:
I just got a cursed ring of Resist Cold, so I was wondering... This is just as good as any ring of Resist Cold, right? Should I go ahead and uncurse it, or does it have some kind of negative effect?
Yup, it's as good as any ring of resist cold, just cursed.
I'm assuming you're playing the 3.1 nightly versions? I'm not sure
whether I'm going to keep the change to allow any rings to be cursed; at
the moment I'm thinking probably not, but we'll see.
--
Andrew Sidwell
http://rephial.org/
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| | 11 answers | Add comment |
|
| Test - Please Ignore Sianlover 06:54:56 |
| | If you ignored my subject line, this is just so I can ascertain whether
posts are getting to this newsgroup, and therefrom to me. My ISP has
been having problems, but I'm told they are now a thing of the past.
This being said, I see no recent posts here or in the
rec.games.roguelike.angband.
--
Sianlover
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| | Add comment |
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| -Crawl- YAAD: Goodbye, Elkalus the DEIE Jeremy Turner 04:59:25 |
| | Laid low by a tag-team of orc wizard and orc priest at XL 11! I
remember now why I swore I'd stop playing Deep Elves after my *last*
DEIE died in similar circumstances... Sublime arcane power is great, but
having more than 4 HP per experience level would be nice, too...
The extra-frustrating part is that, after finding only one shop before
DL 10, I suddenly turned a corner and there were shops everywhere!
*Five* shops on DL 10, and when I turned back to plunder the Orc Mines,
I found another three or four in there!
There were so many things I wanted that I couldn't decide between
them. So I thought I'd clear the Mines first, so I could better plan my
budget... big mistake. If I'd fled the Mines and bought the Boots of
Stealth as soon as I could afford them... <sigh>
And if wishes were tame saddled ponies, beggars would train the Riding
skill.
Snapshots from the morgue:
Hand weapons
a - a +1,+1 falchion of slicing
i - a +1,+0 elven short sword of flaming
n - a +1,+1 orcish short sword of draining
S - a +3,+2 orcish dagger of venom (weapon)
-I never really did settle on a melee weapon. I vorpalised the
falchion quite early, which was almost certainly a mistake, since
falchions have crappy damage potential. A falchion is basically a short
sword with tattoos and an eyebrow piercing
Magical devices
N - a wand of enslavement (0)
-I wish I'd known this wand was out of charges. It would have saved
me a turn, which might have saved my life.
Your Spells Type Power Success Level
a - Freeze Ice #### Excellent 1
b - Throw Frost Ice/Conj ###### Excellent 2
c - Ozocubu's Armour Ice/Ench ######.... Excellent 3
d - Ice Bolt Ice/Conj #######. Excellent 4
e - Regeneration Ench/Necr #####..... Great 3
f - Summon Ice Beast Ice/Summ #####..... Good 5
-I had absolutely no complaints in this department. Ozoc's Armour is
a great spell, IMO. And Regen is wonderful for spellcasters with lousy
HP... that is to say, for spellcasters.
Innate Abilities, Weirdness & Mutations
You can translocate small distances instantaneously.
Your magical capacity is low (-10 percent mp).
You are partially covered in purple scales (AC + 2).
-I was happy to trade a few MP for the ability to Blink... not that I
had any choice, since I never found a Cure Mutation potion. 
Notes
Turn | Place | Note
--------------------------------------------------------------
4641 | D:4 | You fall through a shaft!
4643 | D:7 | You fall through a shaft!
-Ah, fighting my way *back up* through four unexplored dungeon levels.
Good times...
5963 | D:6 | Noticed a yak
-Lines like this always make me giggle.
jeremy "it's no good trying to hide behind the curtains, yak" turner
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Tuesday, 4 November 2008
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| interacting with squelched objects Eddie Grove 15:55:38 |
| |
There are several bugs in 3.0.9 regarding hooks that allow the user to select
a squelched object from the floor. There are also another couple of issues.
The question is not so much how to fix them, but what the correct behaviour
should be.
Let's assume that you have the option set to hide squelched objects from view.
If you use 'k' or cast identify, you surely don't want to select a squelched
object. However, if you mistakenly squelch something, or if you are debugging  ,
it is nice for 'I' to show squelched objects. In particular, '{' to inscribe
a squelched object with "!k!d" seems entirely appropriate.
OTOH, you could just force the users to unset the "hide squelched objects"
option, go about their business, and reset the option. One problem with this
is that I'd vote to remove the option the next time someone tries to reduce
option bloat.
(1) Should any commands at all be able to select hidden squelched objects?
(1a) If so, which commands.
One of the points of squelch is that it is about ignoring things. Ignoring
should not affect gameplay, but there are at least a couple of places where
things change. If you cast create traps, or have it cast on you, you might be
confused that no matter how long you search, there is no trap in the empty
space next to you, because a hidden object on the space stopped the trap from
being created. Another situation is when something unseen picks up a
squelched object. The hiding squelcher deserves to know about location of the
unseen creature as well as the non-hiding squelcher. When you try out an
unaware staff of detect objects, if there are hidden objects you get no
message, and I suspect that means you don't learn awareness.
(2) How high a priority should be assigned to making gameplay always
equivalent for both settings of the "hide squelched" option?
Eddie
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| | 6 answers | Add comment |
|
| Re: - DCSS 0.4.3 - YAVP Jac the SpEn (long) Robert Vollmert 12:56:38 |
| | On 2008-11-03, Matt B <mkbunday@gmail.com> wrote:
Hm. As a SpEn (recently won) I never used the rod. It actually exacerbates the hunger situation, because rods always use the level of hunger from the spell, without reduction. Now I'll go into the spoily specifics. If I recall correctly, this means each time you cast strike from your rod, you use 50 food. And you cast this anywhere from 3 to 6 times per monster, so 150-300 food.
This appears to be untrue: Food cost is reduced by 10*Evocations to
a minimum of 5. That's after the usual reduction by Int*Spellcasting.
A starting SpEn with Spc 2, Int 16, Evo 1 would have a cost of 8 per
strike.
There's always a minimum cost of 5*level, and for high enough levels
you won't be able to reach this just with evocations skills, so a
rod-based spriggan should also look to raise spellcasting and
intelligence.
Cheers
Robert
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| | Add comment |
Monday, 3 November 2008
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| feature request [V] shallower rod of curing Eddie Grove 01:54:34 |
| |
What's the point of a rod that cures confusion if you cannot activate it when
you are confused?
Probably there needs to be a deeper change whereby activation depends upon
something other than item depth, and you could in fact have deeper versions of
items have *higher* activation rates, but until that happens items that cure
confusion should be shallow enough to be usable when confused.
Eddie
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| | 5 answers | Add comment |
Sunday, 2 November 2008
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| /dev/null/nethack Tournament 2008 Announcement Robin 21:07:19 |
| | Below is the annual "official" /dev/null/nethack announcement.
This year is the Tournament's 10th anniversary; it's been suggested that
this makes it the longest-running gaming tournament on the Internet, and
we've been unable to find any older ones out there so that may very well
be true.
We're putting the finishing touches on some swag celebrating the
anniversary and hope to place the orders in the next few days. Thus far
it looks like the traditional t-shirt and sticker will be happening, and
probably one of those little silicone bracelets as well. We still hope to
do the FridgeHack magnet set, but we haven't found a manufacturer who can
do the whole thing yet; it's possible that we can get one shop to print
them and another to cut the pieces out, so I'll be talking to a die cutter
tomorrow and will know pretty soon if we can swing it.
The Trophy structure will be continuing the same as in previous years,
though we are again adding a new Challenge Trophy. No, we still won't
tell you what this year's is; that's part of the Challenge. We will tell
you that it is large enough to warrant its own separate scoreboard ...
We've finished this year's Challenge patch, so folks interested in hosting
a game server can sign up for administrator accounts now and download and
install the system over the next two weeks. The new Challenge's
scoreboard isn't ready yet, but that all happens on the control server so
it shouldn't involve any changes to the installed game servers.
Pre-registration opened on October 1st, and will remain available until
the start of the Tournament on Halloween; during that time you can again
re-activate your player account from previous years (provided that you
still have the same email address), rather than having to register a new
account every year.
Feel free to pass this announcement 'round and submit it to any
appropriate venues, should you feel so inclined.
See y'all on Halloween.
-robin
#####
The NetHack season is upon us once again.
On Halloween, at midnight Pacific U.S. Time, /dev/null's Tenth Annual
NetHack Tournament (<http://nethack.devnull.net>) opens. As with past
years, the Tournament is open to anyone who'd like to play.
We're also open to anyone who'd like to volunteer to run a game server
since, though we have our own servers in California, play can be slow from
other parts of the continent and across the transoceanic links.
We no longer try to describe the Trophy structure in these announcements
anymore; it gets more complicated every year and this section had reached
two screens of text. A full description is available on the web site at
<http://nethack.devnull.net/tournament/trophies.shtml>.
To participate in the Tournament, visit our web site
(<http://nethack.devnull.net>) during the month and sign up for an
account. Pre-registration is available in the month before the Tournament
to returning players from previous years.
Server Requirements:
This year's Tournament will begin with our own servers in California, as
well as returning volunteer servers in Colorado and Germany and a new
volunteer server currently being set up in Australia. Since we always
appreciate additional volunteer servers to help speed the game play up for
folks not near an existing host, here's roughly what you need to volunteer
a game server (Remember,before volunteering, that anyone with admin level
access to a game server box is not allowed to compete; so don't volunteer
to host if you want to be a contender):
a multi-user 3.4.3 NetHack installation (thus, probably, a Unix of
some sort; the /dev/null servers are all OpenBSD systems) built with the
Tournament's custom patches
a multi-user 0.6.3 ZAPM installation, also built with the
Tournament's custom patches
an installed copy of our game server kit (available at
<http://nethack.devnull.net/software>)
sufficient speed/disk/memory to support at least 5000 player
accounts and 26 concurrent players (ours used to be a P133 with 32M of
memory and 5G of disk, but that motherboard died; that small a box would
still work, though we would recommend at least 20G of disk)
a dedicated Internet connection (ours is on the ethernet in a
colocation facility; cable modems and DSL will work fine, but it's not
really possible to do unless you have a static IP address)
since NetHack Tournament needs real user accounts, we'd recommend
that it be a dedicated system (the players will need to be entered in
/etc/passwd to play on the box)
/dev/null is a loose association of networking geeks, unincorporated and
noncommercial. We just do this for giggles; we make no money from this
other than what folks feel like donating and the occasional bit of swag.
#####
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| | 12 answers | Add comment |
|
| -Crawl- How do you pronounce Kikubaaqudgha? Jeremy Turner 15:57:40 |
| | How do you pronounce Kikubaaqudgha?
My guess is KEE-kyoo-buh-AH-kwuh-juh-hah.
jeremy "that's hard to say" turner
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| | 1 answer | Add comment |
|
| Score =/= experience Ray Dillinger 03:47:27 |
| |
After having a good look at various games with highscore files,
I conclude that the "score" recorded in the high-score file should
not be influenced by the experience point total.
The problem? Winning means accomplishing the quest (retrieve
the amulet, kill the bigbad, whatever). Better play means
accomplishing the quest faster. Faster means not spending turns
farming for experience points, items, or levels.
I think I will relate "score" to physical progress; your character
must cover the physical distance (down and back, or just down) to
accomplish the quest, and gets awarded score according to the amount
of distance covered. The problem with that is that all winning
games have the same score. But there are solutions to that too.
To start with, winning should add a huge bonus to your score. Win
or lose, you'd get multipliers for classes acknowledged to be
harder to play, higher difficulty settings, or conducts that make
the game harder. But the "win bonus" should overwhelm these to
ensure that all winning games have higher scores than all losing
games. Finally, winning players would qualify for a "time bonus"
that multiplies score by some amount depending on how few turns
they took to win.
Hmmm, time bonus multiplier = (N + time_taken) /time_taken,
where N is a "reasonable" or average time to win? Seems right....
Bear
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| | 9 answers | Add comment |
|
| Re: The Berlin Interpretation Dpeg 00:37:57 |
| | Darren Grey wrote:
On Sep 26, 9:13pm, Jeff Lait <torespondisfut...@hotmail.com> wrote: "Roguelike" refers to a genre, not merely "like-Rogue". The genre is represented by its canon. The canon for Roguelikes is ADOM, Angband, Crawl, Nethack, and Rogue. So can we start a flamewar now? ;)
Of course!
Considering you used those 5 games as the major canon I'm somewhat surprised you haven't included other general features such as: -Tolkien/D&D style fantasy setting. Obviously not necessary, but extremely prevalent among roguelikes.
This is nowhere needed for a roguelike. We tried to nail down properties
related to gameplay, and/or dealing with differentiating from other genres.
(And it might have been useful to state that.)
On the contrary (to your point), I'd rather say that the chosen
flavour/theme of a roguelike is arbitrary. You can easily transfer the
whole setting to something different without affecting the game as such.
-Computer RPG gameplay elements. In particular stats such as HP, strength, etc, and levels/experience gained through killing monsters. Very few (if any) fully developed roguelikes don't have some sort of character stat improvement system.
We alluded to this in the last point: numbers. I think that's enough.
Again contrary (to your point), it might have been pointed out better that
roguelikes are _not_ roleplaying games, I think
-Character creation that allows numerous very different starting characters (usually through a race/class system). This ties in with the random generation to increase replayability, since it allows very different games each playthrough.
This might be an omission, indeed.
-Keyboard-only or keyboard dominant interface. This really ties in with the ASCII display in that roguelikes have their roots in console applications.
The ASCII (and the keyboard) points are not really important. At the time
those games were invented, they were the only choices available, but
mentioning it now feels a bit superfluous. Transferring a given roguelike
from keyboard/ASCII to mouse/tiles should affect the gameplay even less
than altering the setting.
Thanks for reading the pamphlet
David
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| | 19 answers | Add comment |
|
| Re: bonus parameters progression Ray Dillinger 00:20:32 |
| | Xecutor wrote:
i.e. there can be useful numbers on low level equipment, and ever growing numbers (but not too fast) on equipment of higher levels. But actual bonus parameter will still have reasonable value.
What do you think about this?
It's a game. You're in the business of mapping numbers to
meanings anyway, so why not just map the numbers to a different
meaning rather than mapping them to a different number which
is mapped to a different meaning? Seriously, think about it;
you're essentially converting units here - maybe from a linear
to a logarithmic scale, but still converting units. Why not
just do everything in the other system of units instead of
embedding a conversion into the game?
I'm assuming, for example, that strength is limited to 3 times
its starting value. When someone starts out as a weakling with
a 10 strength, it affects them for the rest of the game, because
drinking strength potions, etc, adds to a "strength delta" rather
than directly to actual strength. Actual strength is calculated:
AS: actual strength
BS: beginning strength
Sdelta: number of strength potions drunk
AS = BS * (BS + (3* Sdelta)) / (BS + Sdelta)
From the player's POV, potions of strength simply have diminishing
returns, and the effect depends on your starting strength. The
first few get you slightly more than one strength point each, the
first hundred get you within a few points of tripling your strength,
and after that you might as well not bother picking them up unless
you plan to use them as bribes or peace offerings.
Bear
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| | 5 answers | Add comment |
Saturday, 1 November 2008
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| Re: Cool roguelike idea Radomir Dopieralski 18:41:01 |
| | At Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:15:39 -0700 (PDT), GreenNight wrote:
On 24 Oct, 06:00, Gelatinous Mutant Coconut <GelatinousMutantCoco...@gmail.com> wrote: When your @ dies, you take control of the monster that killed you. How do you make it challenging? Lots and lots of options
Or mix it with the idea of starting at the bottom of dungeon and
going upwards, together with the negative character development
of course.
--
Radomir Dopieralski, http://sheep.art.pl
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| | 8 answers | Add comment |
|
| Re: Making melee combat interesting DaveB 05:15:09 |
| | Jeff Lait wrote:
On Sep 8, 2:45 am, Patas...@gmail.com wrote: On Sep 8, 7:02 am, BirdofPrey...@gmail.com wrote: One thing I've noticed in a lot of roguelikes is that melee characters tend to be left in the lurch when it comes to interesting combat. When my trollish barbarian opens a door in ADOM and is greeted by a room full of goblin slavemasters, all I have to do is lean on the directional button and about 500 messages later the room is cleared. It seems to me that even though I tend to die a lot quicker and a lot more often with more tactical characters like spellcasters, I tend to enjoy it a lot more when I have to carefully position myself and choose the right spell than when I just have to mash the numpad and mop up a level, maybe stopping once or twice to heal in the middle. I'll point out as well that most attempts to make it "more exciting" do just the opposite. If you have 1000s of kills in a game, most will be done by rote in the same manner. Instead of leaning the arrow keys to clear the room, I'll instead step through the standard "bull rush, charge, cleavex3" sequence that works in every such scenario. The user typing a more complicated set of keypresses should not be mistaken for the user thinking more or having more fun! If that room really is so unchallenging that one can empty it with rote actions, I'd rather the designer go the opposite direction and have an auto- fight to turn leaning on the arrow key into a single key press!
I like the idea of an autofight option. If a windshield kill(s) appears
can't I just press a key (combination) that makes my character run up and
pummel it/them to death? Allow for interrupts (i.e. health reaches a
certain amount, a new nasty appears in view, opponent does something
different (zap or quaff something)). At least it saves leaning on the arrow
key and you can still watch the mayhem scroll by
Obviously not so useful for spell-casters who are likely to change actions
based on what the last spell did. However may be useful for those using
projectile weapons (add interrupt of NPC reaching one square away (weapon
change time)).
Dave
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| | 29 answers | Add comment |
Friday, 31 October 2008
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| Re: Zombie Roguelike Raymond Martineau 09:45:07 |
| | On Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:08:20 -0700 (PDT), Gelatinous Mutant Coconut
<GelatinousMutantCoconut@gmail.com> wrote:
That would be a hard task to do in city full of zombies, because the random movements of zombies would be unable to predict. Zombies are generally rather predictable; they head towards the nearest living thing that they sense and attempt to consume its brains.
That's not always a requirement. While one source claims that zombies
are simply dumb drones, the documentary "Shawn of the Dead" indicates
zombies having at least a minimal of intelligence enough to push carts
around shopping malls or to play video games.
There's a list of zombie types listed here, the first four being the
most important:
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Zombie_Types
If you want, you can have the zombies externally controlled (i.e. an
undead army of zombies with a Lich controlling them.)
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| | 1 answer | Add comment |
Thursday, 30 October 2008
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| Re: runaway game plot request. Radomir Dopieralski 21:15:44 |
| | At Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:11:36 -0700 (PDT), idontexist wrote:
I have started a game that is less hack and slash than other roguelikes and i need a plot.
Please don't troll
--
Radomir Dopieralski, http://sheep.art.pl
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| | 5 answers | Add comment |
|
| -Crawl- Obituary for my latest dwarf Jeremy Turner 13:14:34 |
| | I just couldn't stay away from Dwarfs, so I rolled up a Dwarfish Chaos
Knight of Mahkleb... it was awesome!
I found a +5/+2 dwarfish broad axe of distortion for sale in the Orcish
Mines... Careful zapping and demon-summoning allowed me to grab enough gold
in the mines and get back to the shop. I bought the axe in a spirit of
excitement.
Then I suddenly got nervous. I have only been to the Abyss a couple of
times, and I didn't like it.
But then I thought, "Come on, don't be a chicken! You probably won't get
sent to the Abyss by accidentally unwielding it!"
...
14362 Ironthighs the Cleaver (level 11, -1/95 HPs)
Began as a Mountain Dwarf Chaos Knight on Oct 28, 2008.
Was the Champion of Makhleb.
Slain by a skeletal warrior
... wielding an orcish long sword (10 damage)
... in The Abyss on Oct 29, 2008.
jeremy "on the bright side... well, there is no bright side" turner
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| | 4 answer | Add comment |
|
| Re: Changes to 0.4 gods? (DCSS) Jeremy Turner 08:04:12 |
| | Zeb <Firefoxorange@gmail.com> wrote in news:53a80051-4648-4edd-94ed-
85dc3bace311@h60g2000hsg.googlegroups.com:
I hate to "bump" something, but I was really hoping for an answer. No one on IRC, etc. seems to have any concrete info.
I'm not sure about all the ins and outs, but you can learn quite a lot by
visiting each altar in the Temple. The in-game info provided is much more
detailed than it was in 3.4.
jeremy "just switched to 4.3 a few days ago" turner
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| | Add comment |
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