The rules page contains all the details about how to score points and earn banners in the tournament. As usual, clans (teams of up to six players) can be formed and changed until one week into the tournament, so don’t panic if you aren’t on one yet! (Being on a clan isn’t necessary to participate in the tournament, but it can be a lot of fun.)

Once the tournament has started, the tournament leaderboard will contain the current results.

Head over to the Downloads page to get 0.12, or see the How to play Online page for a list of available servers.

There will be a tournament from May 11-27 to celebrate the release. All 0.12 games played on one of the online servers (CAO, CDO or CSZO) will count for scoring. See the 0.12 tournament website for the rules and start forming clans!

Some of 0.12′s highlights include:

• Places: The Vaults branch is now 5 levels deep, with a revamped layout and new guardians. The Abyss consists of 5 (still infinite) levels of increasing danger, with the rune found only on the deeper levels, and contains many new monsters. There are many new layouts and vaults in other branches. Secret doors have been removed. Three Sprint maps have been added: “Thunderdome” by evilmike, and “The Pits” and “Arena of Blood” both by st.
• Monsters: In the Vaults, vault sentinels alert monsters to your location, ironbrand convokers recall monsters from elsewhere directly to you, vault wardens seal nearby doors, and ironheart preservers reduce the damage that their allies take. The Abyss is inhabited by a variety of new eldritch horrors: ancient zymes, tentacled starspawn, lurking horrors, starcursed masses, wretched stars, apocalypse crabs, thrashing horrors and spatial maelstroms. Two uniques have been added: Jorgrun, a deep dwarf earth elementalist, and Lamia, queen of the nagas. Other new monsters include moths of suppression (with an aura that suppresses the effects of magical equipment) and deep troll shamans and earth mages. Ant larvae, bumblebees, rock trolls and wood golems are no more.
• Spells: Many non-elemental conjurations have been added: Force Lance (causes low-range knockback), Dazzling Spray (blinds multiple enemies), Iskenderun’s Battlesphere (creates an autonomous globe that attacks alongside your other conjurations) and Fulminant Prism (creates a smite-targeted time bomb). Another new spell, Disjunction (blinks away all nearby enemies for a duration), can be found in high-level translocation books. Fulsome Distillation, Evaporate, Cigotuvi’s Degeneration, See Invisible and Insulation have been removed. Venom Bolt, Bolt of Magma, Teleport Other and Dispersal have been made more effective.
• Characters: Conjurers now start with a spellbook containing the new non-elemental conjurations. Summoned allies now only attack while both the summon and the target are in line-of-sight. Levitation and controlled flight no longer exist – all sources of flight are controlled instead. Stalkers have evaporated.
• Items: Axes cleave through multiple targets when attacking, but have slightly reduced damage. One-handed maces and flails have been improved. The wand of polymorph other is now the wand of polymorph, and causes random transformations instead of mutations in players (with a number of new bad forms: tree, wisp, porcupine and fungus).
• Gods: Vehumet now gifts destructive spells one at a time, starting with low-level spells at low piety and ending with multiple high-level spells. Vehumet no longer supports summoners. Worshippers of Yredelemnul and Beogh can recall their allies from different floors, and Beogh allies gain experience when the player gets kills. Xom has a number of new available actions, and some negative effects are toned down or removed.

See the changelog for a summary of other major changes. Thanks to Stone Soup’s many contributors, and enjoy playing 0.12!

Anyone willing to host a WebTiles server, especially in Europe, please let us know in The Tavern. For now there are WebTiles servers available in the US.

Thank you all for participating!

The winning player was theglow, with 6739 points. Theglow won an impressive 18 games (all with distinct species and backgrounds), but even more impressively he didn’t die at all during the tournament, streaking all 18 games! In second place was jeanjacques, with 5915 points. Jeanjacques got the most tier III banners – 15 of them – and also had the win with the lowest turncount, just 17901 turns. In third place was bmfx, with 5646 points and the second-longest streak of wins: 9 games long. The first win and the win with the last start, which were also the two fastest wins at a little over two hours each, were both played by ophanim.

The clan competition was won by the hex pistols (21415 points). Margery and the Hell Knights (18011 points) and Hemipene (11839 points) were second and third respectively. There were 102 clans in all, a record high.

Here are some assorted statistics on the tournament games (with quits removed), compared with the 0.10 tournament (in parentheses):

Players with at least one game: 1545 (1568)
Players with at least one game to reach XL 9: 979 (908)
Players who got a rune: 400 (372)
Players who won a game: 214 (183)
Total wins: 473 (370)
Win %: 1.18% (1.10%)
Total player time: 24287 hrs (23347 hrs)
Avg player time: 15.7 hrs (14.9 hrs)
Proportion of players using webtiles: 71.3% (61.2%)
Proportion of winners using webtiles: 59.0% (45.0%)

The rules are available on the tournament website. Some rules and banners have been changed. As usual, clans can be set up and changed until one week into the tournament.

Updated 2012-10-11: CDO now has 0.11 webtiles. Thanks, Napkin!

You can get 0.11 at our Downloads page, or see the How to play Online page for a list of available servers. There will be an official tournament to celebrate this release, but we’re waiting for the new CAO server before setting a date. As soon as more information is available a new announcement will be made.

One change that may cause problems for upgrading users, especially online players, is a slight change in the way the options file works: the default options file now consists only of commented out lines. If you modified your config and are reusing it for 0.11, which is done by default on the servers, you should comment out or delete all lines that you did not change from the default. This will ensure that you are not using any default values from older versions. You may also need to update your config to use the new syntax for various list options (such as message colours or travel stoppers), by ensuring you use “option += value” to append to the list instead of “option = value” (as in the future this will replace the list entirely instead of appending to it). Using the old syntax will cause an ingame message to be displayed, to remind players that the options format has changed. See the List Options section of the options guide for full details.

Some of 0.11′s major changes include:

• Places: With the addition of the Spider Nest, the Lair will now contain one of Swamp/Shoals and one of Snake/Spider. The Swamp has an improved layout with more compact levels. The Elven Halls are shortened to three floors. As always, there are many new vaults, including new branch endings and full-level vaults. The frequency of vaults has also been slightly increased. Upon escaping from the Abyss, you now land back where you came from, but with a few turns’ banishment immunity. A new Sprint map has been added: Ziggurat Sprint by st squeezes an entire Ziggurat into one floor, and contains appropriately ridiculous amounts of loot and monsters.
• Monsters: Fannar, an elven ice mage, and Arachne, a poisonous half-spider, join the ranks of Crawl’s unique monsters. The omniresistant Hell Sentinels replace Pit Fiends. Boulder beetles can now curl up and roll at you for heavy damage. Mimics can now constrict their foes, although early mimics are much weaker: their constriction does no damage, and they don’t resist elemental attacks. Monster constriction formulae have been changed to make it much easier to escape, but blink counts as two escape attempts now instead of always letting you get out. Equipment-using monsters can now wear rings and amulets and benefit from most of their effects.
• Items: Ammo enchantment has been removed, which greatly simplifies inventory management for those who use ranged weaponry. Weapon skill now fills the role of ammo enchantment, instead. You can now abort changing your armour instead of slowly getting nibbled to death by a rat while putting on your shiny new crystal plate armour. Most fixed artefacts now start out identified. Weapons are identified by having a certain amount of the corresponding skill instead of by whacking plants with them. Rods of smiting are replaced with lightning rods that let you shoot cones of lightning. You can adjust the width of the cone to either do heavy damage to single targets or quickly clear out hordes of popcorn.
• Gods: Okawaru now gives almost no piety for killing and sacrificing weak enemies, but gives much more for winning difficult fights. Nemelex worshippers can now earn the ability to use the top four cards in a deck at once, replacing the old “Mark Four” ability. Nemelex also gifts fewer decks of summoning, and various cards have been adjusted. Kikubaaqudgha gifts randomised necromancy spellbooks instead of the fixed ones. Xom now usually times his pranks to coincide with interesting situations.
• Interface: Several new options were added, including automatically dropping old chunks when burdened, and sacrificing corpses before autoexploring. The spell targeting interface has been greatly improved, showing the affected area for AoE spells and beam paths for bouncing lightning bolts. The ‘\’ known items menu lets you adjust your autopickup options while you play. The HUD now displays current gold and game time, so you can see in brackets how long your last action took. Local versions now include a scrollable highscore list that lets you easily open the morgue files of your most successful dead or victorious characters.
• Tiles: As always there are many beautiful new tiles for the dungeon, its inhabitants, and many items. These include special tall tiles for the unique lords of Pandemonium and the Hells, and a huge amount of new weapon tiles, including tiles for the different racial weapon variations.

There are a lot more changes, and as always the changelog lists all major ones. Many thanks to galefury for writing most of this post, and to all the contributors to Stone Soup. Have fun playing DCSS 0.11! Beware of the spiders!

Games are shared between webtiles and ssh, and can furthermore be watched across interfaces (e.g. watch an ssh game in webtiles; chatting across interfaces doesn’t work that well for now, though).  You can even watch yourself in webtiles while playing ASCII, or vice versa, to get the best of both interfaces.

Ttyrecs and morgues are available for browsing at http://dobrazupa.org/ . Games and milestones are recorded by Sequell and reported in ##crawl on freenode by the new bot Sizzell; this also means that CSZO games will count for the upcoming tournament. Note that the user database is separate from CDO and CAO, so you will have to register an account for CSZO.

I plan to at some point publish the configurations, git branches, and instructions online to make it a little easier to set up a new server.  Eventually we’d like to make this all available as a Debian package or something similar, but first things first :)

In the meantime, you can get your fix here on CDO or play on the new US-based server at crawl.s-z.org - for console use SSH (port 22, username crawl, OpenSSH key here, PuTTY key here).

Check the How to Play Online page for more detailed information on online play.

* Lots of fixes for various crash cases
* Grey draconians can’t drown — we mean it this time
* Slaying now works as expected for magical staves
* Allies are not allowed to smite enemies through glass
* Allies can now cast Orb of Destruction
* Reaching with polearms is not allowed while trapped in a net/web
* Description text updates to match 0.10 changes
* plus many other small updates and fixes.

A bit more detailed list of changes can be found in the changelog.

Work on the next major release, Crawl 0.11, is proceeding rapidly. This
release will land in time for the next tournament, most likely sometime in
August. Bug fixes on the 0.10 stable branch will continue, as we are trying to give more than just lip service to actually maintaining the released version. You can help by
reporting any bugs you find (not counting spiders, giant cockroaches,
and killer bees — those are your problem!). And don’t forget to take a
few minutes to complete the Stone Soup Survey.

The winning player is elliptic, with 6601 points. Elliptic won 16 out of 26 games, including a 12 streak. Second place goes to jeanjacques, with 6504 points. Jeanjacques also recorded the win with the fewest turns and the highest scoring game. Both players were nearly tied going into the final hours as they competed for the win with the latest starting time (which is worth 100 bonus points) – but elliptic’s winning KoWn started slightly later than jeanjacques’ winning DDBe. Third place goes to pivotal, with 4568 points.

The top three clans exchanged first place several times, with Saint Lorocyproca (18074 points) coming out on top. Second place goes to Team Teddybear (17228 points), and third place goes to sonic yiuf (14954 points).
This tournament’s banners had three difficulty levels. Elliptic was the only player to obtain level III of every banner, while jeanjacques obtained all of them except Pious III.

The tournament statistics show an increase in number of players, time spent playing, and player performance. Below, the 0.10 tournament compared to the 0.9 tournament (in parentheses):

Players: 1628 (1337)
Total player time: 23507 hrs (16435 hrs)
Avg player time: 14.44 hrs (12.29 hrs)
Players who got a rune: 372 (264)
Players who won a game: 183 (116)
Total wins: 370 (232)
Win %, excluding quits/leaves: 1.10% (0.86%)

Alongside all the exciting new content in-game, there have been many significant improvements and additions to Webtiles. A list of visible monsters is now displayed, there are various menu improvements, and Webtiles games can even be watched by console players over SSH.

You can download 0.10 from our Download page, or play console builds online on CAO or CDO. Webtiles will be upgraded to 0.10 within the next few days, keep an eye out for an update!

We’re also conducting a survey of players alongside this release. If you have a few minutes to spare please take a look, we’d greatly appreciate your response.

Don’t forget that the 0.10 release tournament begins on February 25th! All 0.10 games played on CAO and CDO will count towards it, which of course includes Webtiles games. Check out the tournament website for the rules, start forming clans, and get ready to tackle the challenging new banners!

Some of the major changes this version include:

• New species: Octopodes, capable of wearing eight rings, but not most other items of armour.
• Removed species: Mountain Dwarves have returned to the mountains. Read why they were axed here.
• Changed species: Hill Orcs have had their aptitudes improved, and Minotaurs have gained both better aptitudes and a retaliatory attack with their horns. Centaurs have a slower metabolism, but are now somewhat herbivorous, gaining bonus nutrition from plants but less nutrition from meat. Draconians cannot wear body armour anymore, but can wear gloves and boots. Some Demonspawn mutations have been adjusted, and a number of new mutation sets are also available. Kenku have rediscovered their roots and now prefer to be called Tengu.
• Backgrounds: Arcane Marksmen are back with a Hex-based spellbook. Transmuters have Beastly Appendage (a new spell providing a temporary beneficial combat mutation) instead of Fulsome Distillation and Evaporate. Necromancers have Control Undead instead of Dispel Undead. Monks have been rewarded for their devotion to asceticism and gain a one-time boost to ** piety when they first convert to a god.
• Skills: You will now need to find an appropriate item or spell to train most skills (and doing so allows even unknown skills to be trained). Additionally, partial levels of skills (e.g., ‘15.2’) matter.
• New monsters: Blizzard demons can call down freezing cold and howling winds with but a gesture. Profane servitors are angels that have been corrupted by Yredelemnul. These undead beings radiate unholy darkness and are resistant to holy forces. Several new holy monsters have been added.
• Removed monsters: Giant toads have croaked, vipers have rolled snake eyes, and blue deaths have all died.
• Changed monsters: Reapers are much more powerful. Fiends are now known as Brimstone Fiends, and imps are now known as crimson imps. Some demons have found themselves on different glyphs. Summoning monsters bring fewer creatures with each cast, and monsters with breath attacks (e.g., dragons) need to recover between attacks. There are many new monster descriptions and quotes.
• Spells: Combining Swiftness and Flight no longer gives bonus movement speed. Mephitic Cloud and Evaporate no longer guarantee a 3×3 cloud. Passage of Golubria creates two portals when cast, and allows more than two portals to exist simultaneously. Lee’s Rapid Deconstruction and Shatter are stopped by walls unless the spell manages to destroy them. To account for the monster summoning changes, Abjuration is now a single-target spell. The screen-wide version is available as a new level 6 spell, Mass Abjuration. Maxwell’s Silver Hammer and Levitate have been removed.
• Cheibriados: Ponderous equipment has been replaced. Instead, gaining Cheibriados piety slows you down. Followers are no longer given resistances, but gain the Temporal Distortion ability, which moves nearby monsters forwards in time a few turns.
• Makhleb: The demon prince of destruction deals only in blood and souls! Makhleb’s invocations now cost health instead of magic. Followers will be rewarded for kills with a larger amount of health, but no magic.
• The three good gods now have piety decay over time, but each has new methods of gaining piety. Elyvilon piety from pacification has been greatly increased and piety from weapon sacrifices has been adjusted, Zin demands a tithe of all gold collected in return for piety, and The Shining One gives piety for meeting new monsters (and determining whether they need to be eradicated!).
• Constriction: Octopodes, nagas, some snakes, and tentacled monstrosities can now prevent their foes from escaping while squeezing the life out of them.
• Various changed mechanics: Poison resistance is now only 90% effective against most effects. No spells work through glass or trees anymore. The slaying property (incribed as {Dam+X}) now works identically to weapon enchantments. Contaminated (‘brown’) chunks always give nutrition and cause nausea instead of sickness. Nauseous characters can only eat when near starving and might make themselves ill.
• Items: All polearms have been lengthened and may now be evoked (‘v’) to attack non-adjacent squares (like the reaching brand). Potions of healing are now known as potions of curing, and wands of healing are now known as wands of heal wounds. Many new fixed artefacts have been added.
• Branches: Terrain in the Abyss now shifts with nearly every step. This may open new escape routes for stranded adventurers – or seal ones they were planning to take. Pandemonium has a dangerous new holy-themed unique level. The Hive is no more. Tiles players can enjoy the newly redecorated Snake Pit, Labyrinth, Vestibule of Hell, Crypt, Dis, Tartarus, Cocytus, and Pandemonium. Many new vaults have been added across the entire dungeon.
• Interface: Spell success adjectives are replaced with failure rate percentages which are coloured based on potential miscast severity.

Thanks to Eronarn for compiling the list of changes, and to the many contributors to this version. See the full changelog for much more!

But 0.10 is almost upon us — it will likely be released within a week. As with the 0.8 release last year, there will be a tournament to celebrate this release: from 0:00 Feb 25 (midnight UTC) through 24:00 Mar 11 (Mar 12 midnight UTC), any 0.10 game played on CDO or CAO will count towards the tournament. The annual August tournament will still happen later this year, as usual.

The rules are available on the tournament website. This tournament will offer far more banners to strive towards than any past DCSS tournament has, so don’t miss it!

• Fix missing portals to Zot on D:27 with restart_after_game after Sprint.
• Fix most large special maps not being generated.
• Fix mad amounts of divine gifts in certain cases.
• Don’t duplicate monsters when exiting the Abyss.
• Fix a lock-up on selecting a random character.
• A number of crash fixes.
• Some documentation amendments.
• Don’t stop butchering on unimportant messages.
• Add a command “show runes” (‘}’) that was documented but not implemented.

Head over to the Downloads and enjoy! As all point releases, 0.9.1 is save-compatible with 0.9.0.

Note: Omg! All releases (Linux, Windows, OSX) uploaded in time! CAO/CDO/WebTiles are being upgraded while we speak!

The Downloads page lists 0.9 builds of the Console and Tiles version now, and also we will be able to provide more regularly updated builds of the current Development Builds.

Thank you very much to GreatZebu, who volunteered to provide OSX builds for the foreseeable future!

The winning player is theglow with 4934 points, who won 15 games, including an 8 streak! Runner up is mikee with 4653 points, who won 11 out of 13 games, including an 10 streak (actually 11 games in a row, but two wizards in the list). The competition was close, mikee might have won if his level 16 Spriggan Enchanter would not have died to an orb guardian in Zot:5. The third player to get more than 4000 points is jeanjacques with 4333 points.

Another highlight: 78291 played the fastest game, both in real time (2:32 hours) and turn count (19460), winning a Deep Dwarf of Elyvilon. He only killed 64 creatures himself, thus proving the power of pacifism.

The most successful clans were: The Adorable Catlobes with 14201 points, followed by wucad mu-tang clan aint nuthin ta fuck wit with 9074 points and Zignacio with 8276 points.

The ubiquitous numbers (in parentheses for August 2010):

Days:                       16         (31)
Players:                  1337         (1091)
Players getting a rune:    264 = 20%   (229 = 21%)
Winning players:           116 = 8.7%  (109 = 10.0%)
All games:               37593         (58428)
Non-quit games:          27049         (44884)
Winning games:             232 = 0.9%   (321 = 0.7%)
Won race/class combos:     128         (101)

Most everyone agreed that the new rules encouraged diversification. This can be seen when comparing the most popular winning combinations (three or more wins):

2011:
 8xSpEn  7xMDFi  7xMiBe  6xDDNe  6xDEWz  6xKoBe  6xVpAE  5xCeWz  5xHOAr  5xHaVM
 5xKoSk  5xMfIE  5xOgCj  5xTrAs  4xDECj  3xDsVM  3xGhMo  3xHECj  3xHEWz  3xMfGl
 3xNaTm 3xSpDK

2010:
49xSpEn 23xDDNe 22xMfCr 18xGhFE 18xHaTm 17xSEAs  9xMfIE  7xHEWz  7xHaBe  6xHECr
 5xDDCK  4xDECj  4xDSNe  4xHEIE  4xMfTm  4xSpVM  3xDEWz  3xDSAs  3xDSBe  3xDSVM
 3xHEFE  3xKoCr  3xMDEn  3xSEIE  3xSpSt

Sorry for the delay – and happy crawling!

Update: The service shut itself down during the night but is up again now.

Gone are the days of pointlessly casting spells at walls, or pounding on a macro to evoke a crystal ball — usually with undesired results. The experience pool has been removed, and it is now not actually possible to “victory dance”. Instead, experience is spent as it is gained. The exact mechanics of this depend on two separate modes: in auto mode, experience is spent on skills recently used, while in manual mode, finer control is available via the skill screen (m).

As a final reminder, the August tournament has already started! You can visit the Tourney Website for more details, but succinctly: you can play with the console version either on CAO or CDO (“Trunk” on CDO, and “0.9″ on CAO, currently). Webtiles does not currently count towards the tournament, as it needs to be updated to run 0.9. This will be done Soon!

So, pull on your crawling shoes (and knee-cap covers), and get ready for a solid two weeks of frantic adventuring!

Eronarn has provided an excellent summary of major changes in 0.9, so here they are!

• Ashenzari changes. We’ve finally nailed down Ashenzari balance! Most importantly, his passive XP boost has been replaced with a passive skill boost. This boost is based on how bound you are and what types of equipment you have bound – for example, wield a cursed weapon to improve your weapon skills, or wear a cursed ring to improve your magic skills. Other changes are listed in the full changelog.
• Trog changes. The god of rage is also the god of antimagic, and his weapon gifts will now reflect this more prominently. He’ll also punish his followers for daring to even learn magic skills – and Trog forbid that they attempt to make use of them.
• Reduce Berserk speed bonus. Previously, being berserk let you take 2x as many actions. That speed boost has been reduced to 1.5x, bringing it in line with the Haste status effect.
• Implicit butchering. Characters are now assumed to bring a small knife into the dungeon with them. Cursed non-cutting weapons will still prevent them from butchering, but they no longer need to lose an inventory slot or risk throwing their butchery implements.
• Adjust HP rules. Starting characters are now beefier, getting +3 HP across the board. On the other hand, raising Fighting skill now gives less of a boost to HP.
• Rename Crusader to Skald. The Crusader starting book was hit hard by recent changes, and their flavor has always been problematic (as they have nothing to do with crusades or religion). Rather than scrap them completely, elliptic took this opportunity to give them a makeover. They are still focused on improving their fighting prowess with magic, but they have a different starting book and skill levels.
• New spells added. We have our first Hex/Fire spell in Inner Flame, which curses a target to explode upon death. Larger targets may make for better fireworks! Shroud of Golubria, which appears in the Skald and Warper books, provides a barrier that will completely protect against some melee attacks. Any attack has a chance to tear right through the barrier, which will end the spell, but stronger attacks are far more likely to do so.
• Major modifications to Tornado. The funnel cloud will take some time to spin up to its full size, and it cannot be cast multiple times in a row because of lingering turbulence. However, those caught in its winds will now be flung about wildly.
• Old spells removed. Teleport Self, Berserker Rage, Resist Poison are no longer player-castable spells.
• New monsters: The Lair is now home to basilisks, fearsome lizards that petrify with their gaze. They aren’t the only new beast to come out of the stonework, though. Thanks to Wensley, the deeper regions of the Lair may contain catoblepae. They are slow, but you’ll be slower than them soon if you can’t avoid their clouds of petrifying dust!
• New unique: Ignacio, a powerful Executioner who remembered to bring his axe.
• Many small balance changes. See the whole changelog for full details!
• Also of note is the experimental release of a new game mode, Zot Defence. Those of you who played it on CAO/CDO should note that it has received significant changes since its debut; however, it should still be regarded as a work in progress.

• Mini-Map is in!
• Permanent login via cookies!
• Browser sizes no longer matter!
• Browser versions don’t matter either anymore!
• Sprint and Tutorial available now, too!

The Mini-Map is shown and working now, alas it cannot be used yet to initiate a travel. During login you have the choice to stay logged in via cookies. Also, spectators no longer need to resize their browser when watching someone. The game always adjusts to the browser size of the player and spectator independently. Additionally, the websocket protocol was updated to support Firefox 4, 5 and 6.

And last but not least, the game-mode Sprint and the Tutorial are now playable via WebTiles, too!

I was told there are more features in the making – so stay tuned! Also, webtiles code has been merged into the official master branch.

Head over to its website and give it a try!

In other news, the tentative date for 0.9 release has been changed to the first week of August.

Also, Debian trunk builds have been automated, so you might see them updated regularly. This is not the case for Mac builds though, sorry for that.

• official builds of 0.8.0 didn’t work on Windows 2000
• a number of crasher bugs
• stair colouring on the “X” map was sometimes wrong
• spores produced by Jiyva’s wrath could be converted by Fedhas
• running could fail to notice items being found
• Ashenzari worshippers could change armour under cursed cloaks
• certain values of LC_CTYPE could cause display corruption
• felids resting could take lots of CPU
• power failures or system crashes were likely to cause save corruption on MacOS X
• Kikubaaqudgha’s torment invocation didn’t grant you xp

Head over to the Downloads and enjoy!
As all point releases, 0.8.1 is save-compatible with 0.8.0.

Note: Please bear with us while the builds are being uploaded (MacOS X is late).

USAGE AND WEBTILES:

Server usage jumped up (about 400 players/day), not least because tiles players were able to join in the fun – a feature that’s been long asked for: Webtiles, Usage

PLAYER HIGHLIGHTS:

Winner was mikee (4191 points), narrowly edging out elliptic (4107 points) by managing the last win in the tourney (which gives bonus points).

mikee started with a two streak (including the first 15-rune win of the tourney), followed by two duds and then a seven streak! (KeAr^A, TrCr^E, MiAr^O, SEIE^K, HuVM^V, HOHu^T, HECj^S)

theglow played just five games and won them all! (SEWz^V, HuSt^S, GhGl^M, CeTm^O, DEIE^A)

casmith789 had the most combo high scores (22).

Players could go for some additional goals (Pennants). Only two got them all: 78291 and mikee.

CLAN HIGHLIGHTS:

Winner was Zinja, who was also the only clan to win at least one game with each species.

Second place was narrowly won by catonkeyboard (the team with the most combo high scores) over killdudes (aptly enough, the team with the most uniques killed… only Tiamat escaped them).

INTERESTING STATISTICS:
(brackets are about last August’s tournament, which took a full month)

number of players: .......................... 1523 (1091)
number of players with at least one win: ..... 108 (109)
number of wins: .............................. 233 (321)
average number of wins per day: ............. 14.5 (10.3)
distinct winning combinations: ............... 149 (101)*
overall winrate, quits excluded: ........... 0.79% (0.72%)
* Rules have been changed to make niche combinations more attractive.


Thanks to everyone who helped with the infrastructure and cheers to participants!

We call it WebTiles for now and it serves version 0.8 of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Right in time for the unofficial tournament!

Edlothiol announced his great idea with working code on the mailing-list a few weeks back, and even though it’s still beta-quality in the aspects of features (mini-map missing, inventory-tab, etc), it’s fully playable and there have even been the first 4 wins by players testing it!

There is a slight draw-back: It needs a fairly modern browser which supports a technology called WebSockets:

• Chrome 6 or higher
• Safari 5 or higher
• Opera 11 or higher (enable WebSockets in opera:config#Enable WebSockets)
• Firefox 4 or higher (disable network.websocket.override-security-block in about:config)

WebTiles are actively being developed! If you’d like to participate, head over to edlothiol’s git-repository and have a look. If you’d like to play, head over to the WebTiles now and either use your login from CDO or create a new login.

Additionally, Wensley practiced his awesome AJAX skills and practically over night created an Online Player Status website. It gives a detailed list about who is playing online – in both, the Console/DGL version and the WebTiles version, on CAO and CDO.

Both, WebTiles and the Online Player Status page, are now linked from the front-page of our website for your convenience.

I’d also like to pay thankful credit to the Tornado Web Server, the open-source python library used to create and manage the websocket for WebTiles, and especially Ben Darnell, who helped edlothiol and me very quickly when we ran into trouble.

Note: CAO games are still missing from the status page, but should show up sometime during the weekend.

From May 14th (midnight UTC) through May 30 (midnight UTC), 2011, any version 0.8 game played on CDO or CAO will count towards the tournament.

As with the official tournament, one can join a team, gain banners (or pennants) for various accomplishments, and, most importantly, accrue points for various activities.

All of the details for the tournament can be found here (http://crawl.develz.org/tournament).

Good luck, and good crawling!

Add one of the lines from below to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

Stable release:        deb http://crawl.develz.org/debian crawl 0.8
Development version:   deb http://crawl.develz.org/debian crawl trunk

Additionally you should download and install our signing key to prevent warnings and to verify the packages:

wget http://crawl.develz.org/debian/pubkey -O - | apt-key add -

The available packages to apt-get are named: crawl, crawl-tiles

We’re working on getting the packages of the development version updated as regularly as the Windows binaries that we’ve been offering for a while already.

What’s changed? Here’s an excerpt of some major changes:

• New god: Ashenzari: the god of curses and divination, who gifts a number of passive and active abilities in return for wearing cursed equipment, gaining knowledge, and exploring the dungeon extensively. The most significant of these passive abilities includes magic mapping, see invisible, clarity, and the active abilities of scrying, which allows the player to see through walls (though not to perform smite-based attacks), and transfer knowledge, which allows the player to improve one skill by sacrificing experience invested in another skill.
• New race: Felids. These sentient furry felines are incapable of using rods, armour, wands or weapons, nor are they able to throw things, but are granted extra lives as they gain levels. These extra lives allow the player to escape death! As one might expect, felids are fast and come with claws and fangs, making them excellent at unarmed combat, and have excellent eyesight — the ability to see invisible creatures.
• The Enchantments school has been split into Charms and Hexes. While a significant and drastic change, it has certainly been long in the making: the Enchantments school contained a large percentage of the game’s spells, and was certainly a no-brainer in terms of experience usage.
• Character backgrounds have been improved: the Stalker background now focusses on transmutation for the purposes of stabbing. Makhleb and The Shining One are no longer accessible as starting gods as Paladins have been removed, and Chaos Knights are now worshippers of Xom, while the new class of Abyssal Knights provides access to Lugonu.
• Heavy armour has been improved. Guaranteed damage reduction has returned! The formula has been tweaked since the great armour nerf in version 0.6, making it more efficient again.

As always, you can check out the full changelog in our stone_soup-0.8 branch on Gitorious, or find it in whichever package you decide to download!

In server news: CAO is now running up-to-date development builds of upcoming 0.9 alongside the latest stable releases, as well as a number of experimental branches (currently consisting of Lava Orcs and Octopodes, based on a branch by Eronarn). CDO is back to development builds as well.

As always, you can find all of our releases on SourceForge. Alternately, you can check out the our Downloads page.

We just started hosting a Ubuntu/Debian repositories of our own! Simply add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://crawl.develz.org/debian crawl 0.8

To get the public key, please do: (on Ubuntu, you need to insert “sudo” before apt-key)

wget http://crawl.develz.org/debian/pubkey -O - | apt-key add -

Further information can be found on the Downloads page soon!

Happy crawling!

Unfortunately, we are still awaiting builds for Mac OS X! These will be added to this post as soon as they’re available!

Edit: Binaries for Mac OS X have arrived and are now linked on the Downloads page!

CAO, located in North America, now also allows to play the unstable development version of Stone Soup – with all the additional features like save-game backups for reporting, removing save-games, resetting config-files. With CDO being located in Europe, this should make playing the development version much smoother for Crawlers living in the Americas. While Greensnark was at it, he also installed a new branch called EroCrawl, maintained by Eronarn, presenting two new races called Lava Orcs & Octopodes and square LOS, which he would like to have included in the main branch of Stone Soup one day.

A week ago the server hosting CDO & its services has moved to a new Server Hosting Company (within Germany again). The website and all services were down for 3 days while I moved everything. It’s a much stronger & bigger machine now and should withstand future incidents much easier. Additionally crawl.develz.org is now fully reachable via IPv6.

Due to the upcoming release CDO and the Windows builds will now focus on providing the pre-release version of Stone Soup 0.8 for a while by updating daily. Please, help us iron out as many bugs as possible!

Thank you very much, Greensnark, for all the work you did to upgrade CAO!

You can find the main page for the Crawl code on Gitorious at: <http://gitorious.org/crawl>.

From there, you can see all of the contained repository, begin watching any of them, and see all of the changes represented as a stream; from the repositories, you can clone and begin tracking and pushing changes to these clones.

Therefore, if you’ve been following Crawl development via Git on SourceForge, you’ll need to make some changes in order to switch to tracking Gitorious instead.

For newer versions of Git, you can execute the following command to update your “origin” remote — replacing “origin” with whichever name you use for Crawl’s main remote:

git remote set-url origin git://gitorious.org/crawl/crawl.git

For all other versions of Git, including newer ones, you can use the following command:

git config remote.origin.url git://gitorious.org/crawl/crawl.git

If you have commit access to Gitorious, you should replace git://gitorious.org/crawl/crawl.git with ssh://git@gitorious.org:crawl/crawl.git in all of the above statements.

Our suite of submodules (specifically including Lua, Luajit, sqlite, and so-on) currently still point to SourceForge, however I intend to properly update them to point to the relevant repository on Gitorious.

So, how does this impact Crawl’s external or contributed development procedure?

For simple patches: Currently, our process for submitting patches remains the same: you can still upload them as an attachment to an issue on our Mantis tracker, and these patches will be applied and merged back into the upstream code base as per our previous records.

For larger changes, it is now possible to register for Gitorious and clone our repository there. We currently have no procedures for dealing with merge requests from Gitorious, however, I would recommend that you still open a ticket on Mantis, and provide a link to the merge request on Gitorious along with the ticket.

As usual, if you have any issues, please leave a comment here, or alternately, drop by ##crawl-dev and hopefully someone there can help. Happy crawling!

As always, you can find source code and binaries on our Downloads page. Unfortunately, we cannot currently provide Mac binaries.

The changelog is a bit rough around the edges, so here’s a more detailed list:

• Fix crashes on entering new levels with restart_after_game = true.
• Fix crash with off-level map viewing.
• Fix a crash when Jiyva worshippers spawn jellies for non-monster-damage.
• Fix crash when trying to throw a quivered dancing weapon.
• Fix problems with Unicode locales other than en_US.UTF-8.
• Fix near-uselessness on ARM.
• Fix save corruption for too long player names.
• Don’t trap teleporting merfolk in a couple of temples.
• Disallow targeting passwall at self.
• Fix stat boosting armour not losing bonus when melding.
• Fix weapon acquirement not considering some rare weapons.
• Disable Trowel card in portal vaults, labyrinths, Pan and the Abyss.
• A variety of other bug fixes.

Hopefully, 0.8 won’t be long in coming now, either.

As always, have fun playing!

• Windows Console
• Windows Tiles
• Windows Installer
• Mac OS X Console
• Mac OS X Tiles
• CDO Versions

Each feed entry will provide information about the 10 recent changes and a link to download and play the build.

Update: A summary of all RSS feeds can be found here.

Danr contacted me and, due to the heavy snow keeping me away from work, I just finished to set up a truly free forum on CDO. Danr will do all the administrative work and I will deal with code changes and updates.

Proud to present: The Tavern

The feature I’m especially fond of is the fact that the user database is taken from our Mantis Bug Tracking System.

- If you have an existing account in Mantis the Tavern account will be automatically created on your first login to the forum. There you can update your profile with additional information if you like.
- If you don’t have an account in Mantis yet, create one, confirm the link in the email and you can set your password then. Once that’s done, click on the Tavern link and log into the forum.

One important thing: If you ever need to reset your password, you need to do that in Mantis, too.

Enough of this techno-babble…

The Doors to The Tavern are open! Join and have a pleasant stay!

This is really new, so there may be kinks to be ironed out. If you have any ideas for improvement, you can also speak up on the corresponding Mantis thread.

Have fun discussing all things Crawlific and more!

Update: Due various reasons the forum has moved.

–Eino

Contributors no longer need to ask for page-creation privileges to add new pages to the Code and Development Wiki. This should make contributing your ideas easier.

Note that when we moved our development resources to crawl.develz.org, the intention was to use the wiki for brainstorming and the tracker for ready proposals. We haven’t really enforced it so far, but would like to see this in action. FRs tend to turn into discussions and rot in the tracker, which limits the usefulness of tracker functionality. Discussion (and rotting) will happen in the wiki as well, but we think it is a better tool for that, as developers can summarize and reboot the pages more flexibly. We also hope that related issues get grouped better, so that contributors are more aware about related issues surrounding particular features.

Arguably, having categories called “Feature Request” in the tracker is pretty bad for the intended workflow. We are working on sorting this out. :-)

I’d like to add that the DCSS development mailing list is also a tool available for discussing ideas and issues with the development.

Below is the current tracker/wiki HOWTO for reference:

How to use the tracker and wiki

The Mantis tracker is used for reporting bugs and submitting patches, graphics and vaults. The wiki is used for requesting features, discussing ideas and providing feedback.

You need to create an account to be able to create and edit wiki pages, file issues and post your comments.

If you have a bug to report

1. Make sure it hasn’t been reported yet:
   • Search the tracker if it was already reported.
   • You can also search through the list of changes to see if the bug you found has been fixed already.
2. Either add your comments to the existing bug or report it as a new bug in the tracker: Choose “Bug Report” as the category. More instructions on the bug reporting page.

If you have an idea for a feature

The checklist is a little long, but don’t be discouraged – ideas and insights are very welcome! The work-flow is to iterate over the idea in the wiki. The developers will then post an implementable, approved proposal as an “Implementable” in the tracker. The aim is to have the tracker as a list of approved ideas, that anyone who is interested can pick up and make a patch for.

1. Check the Philosphy section (N) in the manual to see if the idea fits in those principles.
2. Check the brainstorming wiki pages if someone already has posted a similar idea there.
3. Idea not discussed yet? Add to an existing appropriate brainstorm page or put up a new one as necessary in the correct namespace.
4. It’s also possible to drop by ##crawl-dev on Freenode or mail to DCSS mailing list to discuss the idea.

Reaching the developer team for further questions

• ##crawl-dev on Freenode
• The DCSS mailing list

Do not use the tracker to ask questions or start discussions.

More discussion about Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

• ##crawl on Freenode
• rec.games.roguelike.misc on Usenet
• Your favourite gaming forums! Start a new thread if necessary. :-)

Click here for the official tournament web page,

Some interesting numbers (those in brackets refer to the 2009 and 2008 tournaments):

Games played:       44884  (28306, 13771)    [excluding quitters]
Number of players:   1091  (737, 385)
Number of winners:    109  (90, 50)
Numbers of wins:      321  (286, 169)

(For comparison, the Nethack devnull 2009 tournament had 11910 games by 354 players with 292 ascensions. These numbers seem suspiciously low, so here are the 2008 figures as well: 22812 games by 1305 players with 300 ascensions.)

The winner of the Crawl tournament 2010 is elliptic with 4121 points and 17 wins. The runners-up are Jaeger (3351 points, 17 wins) and 78291 (3274 points, 10 wins).

The best clan is Team Kiku, they dominated the competition.

Some fancy records achieved during the tournament:
Longest streak: elliptic with ten wins in a row!
Fastest win: qwqw won a SpEn in 14318 turns!
Quickest win: 78291 won another SpEn in less than 72 minutes!

For the next year, it may be desirable to have another North American server. The load was quite heavy during the first week.

Apart from that, there is talk of shortening the tournament to cover only 16 days. For comments on that, and also on the scoring, please comment here.

Congratulations to all winners and thanks to everyone involved, including all players and the good souls announcing this event on boards and forums!

The Crawl devteam.

As a reminder, crawl.akrasiac.org’s official tourney page is here.

We look forward to see you die regularly!

-DCSS Tourney Team, ’10

The calendar rolls once more towards August, and August means the annual Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Tournament! It will begin at midnight, August 1st (UTC), and continue through until midnight, September 1st (UTC). All Stone Soup version 0.7.0 games started during this period of time, on both crawl.akrasiac.org and crawl.develz.org, will count towards the tournament.

We have several changes from last year’s tournament, including new banners, changes to the scoring system, and much more! You can read all about it on the official tourney page on crawl.akrasiac.org.

This year also introduces the Dungeon Sprint mini-game into the Tournament. Dungeon Sprint, or Sprint, is a variant of Stone Soup created by Chapayev, consisting of a dungeon dramatically reduced in size but increased in difficulty. Sprint games will be counted for the tournament from the 15th of August at midnight (UTC) on both CAO and CDO, and points will be awarded for wins! For more information, check out the tourney page linked above.

As usual, the Tournament will be a fast-paced month of Stone Soup action! Tune in for the blood-shed, tears and the enraged screams of those killed by Sigmund, as well as the joy of snatching the orb, and your first win, from beneath the pulsations of an orb of fire!

The best of luck to you all, we hope you have a great time playing this year.

-The Crawl Development & Tournament 2010 Teams

Edit: 0.7.1 is now out with a fix for a severe bug affecting ziggurats and other Lua-triggered features such as bazaars. Please update to 0.7.1 if you’ve already downloaded the 0.7.0 release.

All 0.7.1 release files are available on the Downloads page.

You can also read something approximating a changelog for a rough summary of what’s in the release.

I’d like to thank the whole team for working to release 0.7 in the short space we have before the annual August crawl tournament, and I’d like to give extra thanks to kilobyte and rob for their help with the release.

Thanks again to Napkin for hosting Crawl development on CDO, and the Crawl player community for their help improving the game.

Enjoy! And please keep the suggestions and bug reports coming! :)

Changes:

• Fix instant starvation bug related to vampiric weapon butchery.
• Fix Cheibriados excommunication permanent stat gain.
  No more 72/72/72 for you.
• Reenable sound for mingw builds.
• Xcode, Visual C++ and clang build fixes.
• Fix save handling on BSD systems.
• Fix some triggers being dropped when viewing other levels.
  This was exploitable to get unlimited Troves or Bazaars.
• Selected other bug fixes.

Enjoy!

While there has been a lot of public development on Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, resulting in the massive upsurge of new features in the recent release of 0.6, our Tiles developers, as well as the public server administrators, have been working day and night behind closed doors on a huge wish-list item: the ability to play crawl online, at servers such as crawl.akrasiac.org and crawl.develz.org, but using the Tiles interface instead of ASCII. This is something that a lot of people have been waiting on, and we’re really excited that it’s finally happened!

Public binaries will be released shortly, as we co-ordinate with server administrators for the change-over, and this post will be updated with links as soon as they’re live. For now, here’s a few screenshots of what it looks like, as well as a list of exciting new social media interactions that we hope you’ll enjoy.

Some new features:

• Link your character’s status to your Facebook page, transmit milestones to your Twitter!
• Clickable character images: each click gives you a character point, and for a thousand character points, you can resurrect that character when it dies.
• You can now sell your unwanted or unused items, armour and weapons on eBay and etsy! You can also purchase from other players and import it into your game.

We hope you enjoy this month’s new release, Happy Crawling!

The new files are available on our download page. There are binaries of Tiles & Console for Windows & Mac OSX and, of course, the source! If you are new to the game, head over to the preliminary screenshots section to decide. The release notes can be found here.

The online servers (CAO & CDO) are hosting 0.6.0 too now and CDO is back to also hosting early 0.7.0 versions (unreleased, unstable, may cause your computer to explode, etc, etc…).

And a special thanks to doy for handling and coordinating this fine release :)

Update #1: CAO is now hosting 0.6.0 games.
Update #2: SourceForge now has Mac OSX builds uploaded.
Update #3: CDO & Trunk builds updated.

And for those of you who have been holding off on playing trunk builds because of stability issues, well, the wait is almost over! If everything goes incredibly smoothly and according to plan (no guarantees!), we should be able to have an actual release by early next week. Thanks a lot to everyone who has filed bugs, submitted patches, brainstormed new ideas, and tested all of the numerous builds we’ve released over the course of this (admittedly long) release cycle… we couldn’t have done it without you (:

“Dungeon Sprint” is a twist on Dungeon Crawl: only one dungeon level is generated, but it’s..

A mostly-fixed (i.e., mostly non-random), very difficult level; the player gains experience and trains skills at 27 times the normal rate; and the player gains piety at 9 times the normal rate. Some problematic features in Crawl such as certain teleportation effects and the Portal spell are also disabled in Sprint. You can play Dungeon Sprint on the server crawl.develz.org (telnet in, port 345), and the source code is also available online in case you want to look at it or change it yourself. I think the best way to understand Sprint is to play at least a few games of it, so you can get a sense of what’s fun about it.

There’s something called Tomb of Horrors, which was an adventure from the 1970s for Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t really care at all about Dungeons and Dragons but Tomb of Horrors is interesting stuff: It’s the crypt of some nasty lich, absolutely full of hilariously convoluted, deadly, “unfair” traps, of all different kinds. After hearing about Tomb of Horrors, I tracked down a paper copy of Tomb of Horrors and read it (despite not really knowing the rules for D&D), and I was thoroughly entertained, and this might be worth it for anyone else who enjoys Sprint and the idea behind it. Dungeon Sprint is like Tomb of Horrors: it’s a pretty small game, just full of nasty little traps, most of which have a number of ways to circumvent; and you can throw yourself at the game over and over until you figure out how to get past a certain trap (and then you get killed by the next one). Unlike Crawl, which is randomly generated, the fact that certain parts of Sprint are fixed gives you a comfortable, enjoyable sense of familiarity in the early part of the game, and an enjoyable sense of exploring a dangerous new place when you get into some part you haven’t been in before. I think Sprint’s a lot of fun, and I hope other Crawl players will too.

There’s an important thing about Sprint: what I’ve actually released is called “Dungeon Sprint 1.” That “1″ isn’t a version number; it’s supposed to indicate that it’s just the first game in a series. You can easily make a new level for Sprint to take place on, by editing the file source/dat/des/variable/entry.des in the Sprint source code, the “dungeon-sprint” branch on git://git.develz.org/crawl-ref.git. Making new levels this way is actually pretty straightforward: Crawl’s .des files aren’t hard to read and change even for a non-programmer, and there’s a how-to guide here. I hope others will feel free to make future installments of Sprint (Sprint 2, Sprint 3, and so on) – it’s designed so that anyone who likes it should be able to make a new level for it, and make the next edition of Sprint.

I hope you enjoy the game.

-Chapayev

A note by the editor: In the mean-time Dungeon Sprint has already been added to the master branch of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and the level file has been renamed to dat/des/sprint/sprint.des. If you would like to try – grab a latest master/trunk build. Activate the “sprint-mode” by adding -sprint as parameter when you start the binary.

We have migrated our bug and feature-request tracking to a Mantis Tracker – please sign up there to contribute! In addition to the tracker, we have created a DokuWiki for play-testing feedback and for suggesting and discussing new features and ideas.

Also, the official home page for the Stone Soup project is now http://crawl.develz.org – if you haven’t yet checked out our development blog, you should! Mailing list and git repository are still located on SourceForge.

Thanks to Jude for covering many of the major changes in 0.6 in the play-testing posts, Darshan for his history blog-post, and Johanna for the post covering tiles and tides! And last but not least, thanks to develz.org and Napkin for hosting us!

Our bots – willing to answer all kinds of questions you may have about monster, uniques, items, even about skills and branches and strategies.

All those gory details are now available via this website, too! Head over to the Knowledge Bots and check it out for yourself.

Note: During this weekend the queries should become considerably faster – after remote access to the great LearnDB has been simplified.

Update: LearnDB is now mirrored and parsing the entries is done locally. Much faster! Links in Henzell entries are now clickable. Colors have been slightly adjusted and screenshot of Sigmund added :) Enjoy!

I remember installing a new development version on CDO every week or two. Suddenly I’m being asked to update almost every day! Awesome! :-D

For that reason I have changed the way of installing. A new version will no longer overwrite data or save-games of an old one. This means your character will no longer be lost or broken when an update is done.

Even more: Every save-game has an internal version number. When you load your character and there is a newer version of Stone Soup installed, which can also handle your save-game, you will be presented with an option to move your character and enjoy the bug-fixes and new features!

As always – if you run into any trouble or if transferring your save-game fails, let me know. Cheers!

I’ve committed it to the repository now for public scrutiny, and hopefully, benefit to current and future contributors. (Wow, am I making a speech here..) It’s in the docs/develop folder.

There’s still room for improvement. The following could (should) be added:

The process of a proposal/patch making its way into into the game

Versioning: use of agendas for major versions; only fixes for minor version

And of course, needs to be updated for the new Mantis/Wiki once it’s official. Any feedback is very welcome!