Archive for April, 2014:

Monday, April 28th, 2014 17:53

0.14.1 bugfix release

by

Hi crawlers:

With the tournament over, here is a new minor release fixing the known bugs that cropped up during the tournament – 0.14.1:

  • Several crash fixes.
  • Fire dragons correctly grant bonus Dithmenos piety.
  • Ranged attacks from invisibile monsters correctly turn off autopickup.
  • Good gods punish the player properly for negative energy clouds.
  • Natasha no longer revives after being pacified, and does not get a new item when reviving.
  • When playing a race with permanent flight ability, it is now possible to remove an item granting flight over dangerous terrain.
  • Wanderers do not occasionally get more MP than other backgrounds.

Builds for most platforms are now available over at the downloads page.

Happy Crawling!

10 comments!
Monday, April 28th, 2014 05:39

Trunk updates, 27 April 2014

by

Hi crawlers! With the end of the tournament, trunk development is gearing up again. Here are some of the changes that have already been made:

  • A large number of enemy glyphs (for console players) have been changed; see Mantis #8242 for more details.
  • Crypt has been reduced to three levels (was five); the entrance to Tomb is always on Crypt:3.
  • Some areas of the Tomb layout can now vary.
  • Formicids can no longer throw large rocks.
  • Tengu gain their permanent flight ability at XL14 (was 15).
  • Changes/improvements to forms: all non-undead forms can eat and drink normally; all forms can butcher; wisp form can read scrolls and cannot blink innately.
  • Enemies are more intelligent about using some attack spells such as Symbol of Torment and Chain Lightning when the player is not in LOS.
  • Manticores can now move as fast as the player.
  • Komodo dragons bite harder but can no longer sicken the player.
  • Deep dwarf death knights are now (human) death knights.
  • Removed enemies: vapours, thorn lotuses, giant goldfish, silver stars.
  • Dazzling Spray replaces Invisibility in the book of Maledictions (the Enchanter starting spellbook); Invisibility in turn replaces Apportation in the book of Burglary. (Note that each of these spells is still available in at least one other spellbook.)
  • When the player casts Ozocubu’s Refrigeration, they are now prevented from using potions for several turns instead of having their potions destroyed.
  • Damage from the electrocution brand has been reduced slightly.
  • There are status lights for might, agility, and brilliance.
  • Followers of good gods no longer get a chance to pacify holy enemies.
  • The low-level weapon branding skills and the book of War Chants have been removed.
  • Scrolls of brand weapon can no longer be used to affix brands, and do not trigger a distortion effect on rebranding a distortion weapon.

In addition, crawl.beRotato.org has some experimental branches available for testing: “ranged_combat”, containing a mostly-complete rewrite of the system of ranged combat (bows, crossbows, etc.), and “gods”, featuring two new deities – Gozag Ym Sagoz the Greedy and Qazlal Stormbringer. These branches should also be available on crawl.s-z.org shortly.

Happy crawling!

1 comment...
Monday, April 28th, 2014 00:46

0.14 Tournament Results

by

The 0.14 tournament is over. For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.14 games on the public servers.

The winning player was Tolias, with 6521 points. Over the course of the tournament Tolias won 18 games, all of them with Nemelex’s Choice species/background combinations. In second place was johnnyzero, with 5824 points and 15 wins, including the win with the latest start time. In third place was Yermak, with 5534 points and 12 wins, including the first 15-rune win.

The fastest wins in the tournament were achieved by elliptic (turncount, 16177 turns with a DDBe) and simm (realtime, 1h 16m with a MiBe). 4tharraofdagon yet again had the highest score, 40M points with a TrMo of Cheibriados. Basil had the longest streak, of 7 games. Three Tier III banners were attained by only two players each: Nature’s Ally, by Basil and Megaslime; Lord of Darkness, by jeanjacques and joy1999; and The Heretic, by jeanjacques and Piginabag. The first victory of the tournament was claimed by Roarke, a mere 16 seconds before runner-up Basil.

The clan competition was won by how I learned to stop worrying and lock the vaults (21281 points). Aqua Felid (17973 points) and Talkin Bout MiGl (17673 points) were second and third respectively. There were 139 clans in all.

Here are some assorted statistics on the tournament games (with quits removed), compared with the 0.13 tournament (in parentheses):

Players with at least one game: 2318 (1771)
Players with at least one game to reach XL 9: 1589 (1129)
Players who got a rune: 787 (528)
Players who won a game: 325 (246)
Total wins: 743 (603)
Win %: 1.31% (1.37%)
Total player time: 35858 hrs (25902 hrs)
Avg player time: 15.5 hrs (14.6 hrs)
Proportion of players using webtiles: 80.4% (76.5%)
Proportion of winners using webtiles: 70.6% (62.6%)
6 comments!
Wednesday, April 16th, 2014 16:10

CSZO broken

by

Hi Crawlers,

This is a very inopportune moment, but it seems that CSZO vanished from the Internet this morning. The maintainer Amethyst opened an emergency ticket with the ISP a few hours ago; there has been no response yet.

For the time being, please use CAO or CBRO. If the downtime persists, we will try to host the tournament page elsewhere until it is resolved.

Update 2014-04-16 14:43 UTC: The ISP says they are having technical difficulty with their fiber connections to two upstream providers, and have been working on the issue since it started about eight hours ago. Several customers are experiencing problems, not just CSZO. They expect the network to be “back up and running soon”. -neil

Update 2014-04-16 20:55 UTC: The network is back up, but there is still some packet loss for the time being, so expect some lag until everything is fully resolved. -neil

2 comments!
Wednesday, April 9th, 2014 18:41

Crawl 0.14: “The Shadowy Depths of Madness”

by

We are proud to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.14: “The Shadowy Depths of Madness” is released! 0.14 features two new races, a new god, a new branch, many new spells, enemies and items, and a wealth of other changes.

Download DCSS 0.14 here, or play it online on one of many servers across the world!

The release tournament will begin at 20:00 UTC on Friday 11 April, with all online 0.14 games counting towards your score. See the tournament website for more details, including how to set up or join a clan.

0.14′s highlights include:

  • Characters: Two new races: Formicids, an insectoid species with permanent stasis and an affinity for digging, and Vine Stalkers, a parasitic plant on a human host – very fragile, but possessing great regenerative ability, permanent guardian spirit, and a powerful magic-draining bite. Recommended backgrounds and species have been adjusted; in particular, backgrounds can recommend species that don’t necessarily recommend that background and vice versa (e.g. Chaos Knight -> Troll may be recommended whereas Troll -> Chaos Knight is not). Fighters and Gladiators start with better weapons. Poison damage is now deterministic.
  • Places: The lower half of the dungeon has been transformed into a new branch, the Depths; five levels long and containing the entrance to the Realm of Zot. The Vaults require a rune to enter. Ziggurats now require three runes to enter in lieu of an entry fee.
  • Monsters: A great deal of new enemies appear, primarily in the Lair sub-branches – from new specialist nagas to plants with vicious volleys of thorns to demonspawn with a variety of sets of mutations and jobs. Three new uniques make their debut: Natasha, the lost felid familiar of a powerful wizard; Asterion, a powerful minotaur king; and Vashnia, leader of an elite squad of naga sharpshooters. Adjustments have been made to many other enemies.
  • Gods: Dithmenos the Shadowed makes a debut, granting followers an aura of shadows and many abilities related thereto. Divine wrath is now contingent on gaining experience; it can no longer be “waited out”. Zin and Okawaru no longer care about the deaths of allies.
  • Spells: A great deal of spells have been added to the Summoning school, allowing the creation of minions from lightning spires to harpies and sphinxes to your very own spell-casting construct. Glaciate, a level 9 Conjurations/Ice spell, makes its debut as a replacement for Ice Storm; it creates a powerful cone-shaped icy blast that can freeze enemies solid.
  • Items: Several new rods have been introduced, from the rod of clouds with its ability to call forth strange and powerful cloud effects at high power to the rod of ignition with great explosive power. Many new pre-defined artefacts are available, and several have received tweaks and modernisation. All scrolls now identify on read.

For a list of other major changes, see the changelog. Many thanks to all those who have contributed to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. We hope you enjoy playing 0.14!

(Update 2014-04-10 16:20 UTC: OS X binaries of 0.14.0 are now available from the downloads page. Many thanks to frogor! -neil)

(Update 2014-04-24 20:36 UTC: Debian/Ubuntu packages in 0.14 are now available! See the downloads page for more info. ~Grunt)

18 comments!
Friday, April 4th, 2014 19:13

0.13.2 bugfix release

by

Hi crawlers!

In anticipation of the imminent release of 0.14, we’re happy to announce the final 0.13 release, 0.13.2. Get the source code and Windows builds over at the Downloads page.

Check back in a week or so for the final 0.14 release!

1 comment...
Friday, April 4th, 2014 17:33

0.14 Tournament

by

The 0.14 tournament will begin in just one week! From 20:00 UTC Friday 11 April through 20:00 UTC Sunday 27 April, any 0.14 game played on any of the online servers will count for the tournament. 0.14 will be officially released before the start of the tournament – at the moment, a 0.14 beta is playable on all the online servers except CDO.

The rules page contains all the details about how to score points and earn banners in the tournament. There are quite a few changes to the banners this 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. (Before tournament start, some scores might briefly appear on this page as we test the tournament scripts, but they are just for testing.)

Comments Off
Tuesday, April 1st, 2014 13:51

A sneak peek at future development

by

Hi crawlers!

For a limited time, we’re offering an insight into the future of Crawl development. To see the latest and greatest the devteam has to over, check out trunk on http://crawl.s-z.org/ .

Happy crawling!

6 comments!