Archive for December, 2020:

Wednesday, December 30th, 2020 19:41

Dec 30 Trunk Update and 0.26 Tournament and Release Dates

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gammafunk gestures. gammafunk spews toxic sludge! The Trunk Update festers in the toxic bog!

Hello crawlers and welcome to the last trunk update of the 0.26 cycle. We’ve been under feature freeze since last Friday, so the remaining time before the 0.26 Release and Tournament will be devoted to bug fixes, balance tweaks, and polish. If you’ve been holding out and playing 0.25 due to concerns about stability, know that all major features are fixed in trunk, and only reasonable balance changes and bug fixes will be a thing from here until release. We’ll be making the 0.26 beta branch soon, at which time servers will begin installing 0.26. So please play-test trunk or the 0.26 branch when that’s available on your favorite server to help us find bugs! The 0.26 release will be either Thursday, January 7th, or Friday, January 8th, depending on timing. Look out for an official release post with download links to come.

The 0.26 tournament will run from Friday Jan 8th, 8pm UTC to Sunday Jan 24th, 8pm UTC. We don’t don’t yet have a rules page installed on this server, but expect that link in a forthcoming post. Check out the pages for the previous tournament to get a sense of the rules and presentation. We’ll try to announce any rules changes in that subsequent post, but as always the final rules page will cover everything you need to know.

Now, onto the Trunk Update! Note that this is not the full set of 0.26 changes, just the ones since our last trunk update. For the full and official set of 0.26 changes, check out the changelog. Here are the changes since last time:

  • Monster draining attacks now temporarily reduce player max HP instead of skills. The UI cost of skill drain was high…beware! See a more detailed discussion in this commit. Right now, the new drain effect is a bit weak, but I plan on making a couple balance changes to it during the freeze. Don’t worry, you’ll be afraid of bolts of drain, but it’ll be the good kind of afraid. Note that drain inflicted by the player is unchanged.
  • Frozen Ramparts has its effect end upon movement. Yes, another nerf to your favorite new ice spell. That’s ok, kiting isn’t very fun, and now it works much better with Ozocubu’s Armour!
  • Eringya’s Noxious Bog now places bogs on all squares within a range of 4 where there is no adjacent solid feature. A much-needed power increase for this spell, and hopefully an interesting positional trade-off. Kudos to hellmonk for the idea!
  • Irradiate now checks monster AC but does slightly more damage. Ignoring AC was not part of the original PleasingFungus vision (which is all-powerful).
  • The cloak of Starlight gains *Dazzle, which sometimes dazzles foes like the Dazzling Flash spell upon successful dodge. It no longer has rElec and rC+. This cloak wins you so many style points when you go swish that monsters are dumbfounded!
  • The glaive of the Guard gains a spectral weapon brand in addition to electricity, and loses sInv and +Rage. That’s right, dual branding!
  • The sword of Power is now +5, vorpal, and sometimes fires a powerful but low-accuracy beam with chance based on the player’s current HP. Have you played the lesser-known indie game The Legend of Zelda? It’s a bit like the sword from that game.
  • New Vaults! Sadly I don’t have enough time to go into detail about most individual vaults, but here’s a quick summary.
    • A big set of winding woodlands vaults from nikheizen that feature a forest/woodland theme with many variations.
    • A new Swamp rune vault by nikheizen featuring a coven of 13 witches, mages, sorcerers, and wizards who want tell you all about demons.
    • A ghost vault, two greek myth themed Shoals vaults, four Swamp vaults, and 7 altar vaults from nikheizen.
    • A set of 11 arrival vaults, 4 minivaults, and 2 altar vaults from amcnicky.
    • A Wu Jian altar vault from pdpol.
  • Damage and accuracy for spells and damage for wands are now shown in the UI. No more looking up info on various pages and bots just to get an idea of how much damage you can do! Well, for the most part. Some spells like Tornado refuse to cooperate.
  • Boulder beetles now stop rolling when they can’t move towards their target (that’s you) nor will they start rolling if this is the case. I know it was funny, but beetles rolling in place behind that poor little kobold in front of them was too traumatizing for the kobold.
  • Gauntlet monsters now generate awake, and those other than the minotaur can’t pickup loot. Now characters in Gauntlets don’t have weird incentives to explore the map in certain ways to not wake up monsters or to see the loot before monsters do.
  • Temporary allies all dismiss when you leave the level. Apparently there were corner cases where they didn’t do that right away!

That wraps it up for this set of trunk updates. Stay tuned for more tournament details, and until next time, happy crawling!

The Trunk Update looks as sick as possible!

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Sunday, December 13th, 2020 13:19

Trunk Updates 13 December 2020

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Quiver which trunk update?

Ho ho ho hello! Santaeus has rolled up from the North Pole with a box of beastly trunk changes for all you good crawlers out there on the net.

The major highlight is the new quiver system, written primarily by advil. A quick overview:

Any ranged attack, spell, ability, or evokable action can be quivered! This change change lets a wide range of things appear in the quiver slot for quick access via firing, autofiring (p and shift-tab) and cycling (( and )); use Q to select an action. At the same time it introduces a number of UI improvements and new options.

For the gory details, check out the updated documentation or read the pull request summary and discussion.

Here’s what else is new in trunk:

  • Net traps are now permanent, but the nets always mulch (no more net farming!).
  • Translocations miscasts now prevent movement altogether for a short time (like Tree form!).
  • Player spell damage and spell accuracy are now displayed in the UI in various easy to find places.
  • Hailstorm now hits automatically (instead of having a very small chance to miss).
  • Several ghost vaults have been revamped to have better loot and better theme.
  • Palentonga can now mutate longer rolls.
  • Skills can now be trained at any time, without item or spell restrictions.
  • The revamped Swamp has seen various balance tweaks and adjustments after play testing, including:
    • Goliath frogs are now a bit slower,
    • Will-o-the-wisps cast marshlight more often.
  • The chance for the distortion brand to banish has been reduced.
  • The ancient pharoahs have asserted their right to title, greater mummies are now royal mummies.
  • Evocable invisibility now drains skills, whether or not you successfully vanish!
  • Magic Resistance has been renamed to Willpower (with the abbreviation changing from MR to Will).
That’s all for now! This development cycle has seen many large changes land, so as always your play testing feedback and bug reports are welcome as we draw closer to the time of a new release. Until next time, happy crawling.
Aiming: blog post
Press: ? – help, Q – select action, (/) – cycle 
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