I’ll be moving everything on CDO to a new server starting this Thursday. Shouldn’t take long, but I can’t take the old IPs with me, so DNS refresh might cause an additional delay of up to 4 days.
During that time CDO will be closed for external connections, which means this website (including the bug tracker, the wiki and the forums) will be unreachable.
Wish me luck and stay tuned :)
Hi crawlers! Here’s what’s new in trunk:
Enjoy the tweaks, and happy crawling!
Hi crawlers! Here’s the latest and greatest from trunk:
Happy crawling!
After a long time of waiting, finally here they are: the results of last year’s Stonesoup survey. Ideally, this would have been out exactly a year ago. We hope the tables and charts are still of interest to some of you.
Below we give an extremely abridged report. For an in-depth treatment, read the full report (pdf, 37 pages).
There have been 5735 meaningful replies, arriving between 16/02/2012 and 29/12/2012, a period which included the 0.10 and 0.11 releases and tournaments.
The average participant is male (92%), 24 years old, and lives in the USA (46%). He strongly prefers the Tiles version (76%) because he feels that tiles are less confusing and easier to understand than ASCII glyphs. He is playing Crawl offline (72%) and would like to use the online game if it was as same comfortable.
The average Crawler has started playing Crawl within the last three years (74%), and hasn’t won the game (76%) or even found a rune yet (66%), but has made it as deep as the Orcish Mines and Lair. He doesn’t use spoilers or only in moderation to read up on the most deadly of enemies. He’s quite likely to have played Diablo for a while (57%) and may also have tried NetHack (63%) or Dwarf Fortress’ adventure mode (51%) at some point, but otherwise has little experience with roguelikes or comparable games. The survey was his first interaction with the devteam in any shape or form (85%).
Among the 1224 participants who did snatch a win, some have achieved additional feats of even greater difficulty: 430 won allruners, 375 have won more than five games, 197 have completed Ziggurats and 72 obtained streaks of at least three wins in succession.
About 15% of all participants consider themselves thoroughly spoiled by the time they won their first character whereas 36% consider themselves completely or mostly unspoiled, at least when it comes to monster properties. This has actually informed on-going Crawl development, as 0.13 will disclose monster spells to players, something that was regarded as the most pertinent spoily monster information.
As some of you may have already heard, a new public server is available: crawl.berotato.org (or CBRO).
I actually didn’t plan on creating an official server; I just wanted to start learning some crawl dev with a few friends and needed a webtiles server. In the past when I messed around with this stuff, I simply used the webserver setup that comes with the source. This time however, I found some documentation on the dev wiki and decided to go all-out.
It took a while, but with help from a bunch of folks in ##crawl-dev (primarily |amethyst/neil (CSZO) and TZer0 (CLAN)), CBRO finally went online.
Oh, and people keep asking, “What’s a Rotato?”. It comes from the (smallish) gaming community, MeFightClub. I learned about Crawl from there and we’ve had about 30 players the past two tournaments, so it’s been a fairly big influence on my crawl experience so far.
Being Rotato can be summed up in the following quote:
“Be Excellent to each other. If you can’t be excellent, Be Civil. If you can’t be civil, Be Offline”
Enjoy!
Hi crawlers! Here’s some of the latest interesting changes to trunk:
Not all of these changes are available online / in the current builds yet, but within a day or so they will be there.
Although it’s not in trunk (yet), I’ll take a moment to point out that crawl.s-z.org has a new experimental branch for the purpose of testing several implementations of the spell Glaciate, a proposed replacement for Ice Storm. Read the discussion here.
Happy crawling!
Hello, Crawlers! This is meant to be the first of many posts updating you on recent changes to trunk, much as has been done with the blog in the past.
Without further ado, here are some things you may not have seen yet, relative to the last time an update was posted here (which was a while ago, so some things here may not exactly be news):
The relatively infrequently-updated changelog contains more details on many of these, and can always be found by way of Gitorious at http://gitorious.org/crawl/crawl/blobs/master/crawl-ref/docs/changelog.txt.
Not everything that’s tested in trunk will end up in a stable release, so be sure to enjoy things while they last! You can play trunk online, or download a local build of trunk from here.
Happy Crawling!
Yesterday, a slightly controversial commit got pushed:
Commit: #f2529f3
Rune lock.
You need a rune to go to D:15. Downstairs of D:14 could be recoloured
or replaced by a portal (maybe more consistent with D:27 zot portal).
This is a mandatory Vow of Courage I banner. The idea is quite old and was pushed after the 0.13 tournament so as to have as much time for testing as possible. You can read discussions about it on a old dev wiki page, or in several forum threads: here (locked), here (locked), here and here.
If the rune lock is considered to be good enough to stay for the next release, there will definitely be follow-up changes, cosmetic ones (locked staircase appearance, dungeon appearance before and after the lock) and balancing ones (unique generation springs to mind).
The 0.13 tournament is over. For 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.13 games on the public servers.
The winning player was bmfx, with an amazing 7942 points. Over the course of the tournament bmfx won 21 games, all with distinct species and backgrounds and with many of the wins streaked together. In second place was 78291, with 5014 points and 9 wins, all of them with Nemelex’s Choice species/background combinations. In third place was elliptic, with 4945 points.
The fastest wins in the tournament were achieved by WalkerBoh (turncount, 23506 turns with a GrBe) and BANISHMENT (realtime, 1h 49m with a DDBe). 4tharraofdagon had the highest score, 41M points with a DDBe (the 5th highest score of all time). Three Tier III banners were attained by only one player each: Lord of Darkness, by Yermak, Speed Demon, by jeanjacques, and Lorekeeper, by johnnyzero.
The clan competition was won by Campbell and the Removals (21183 points). AWBW – Iskenderuns Battle Copters (17512 points) and Runey Mara (16458 points) were second and third respectively. There were 112 clans in all.
Here are some assorted statistics on the tournament games (with quits removed), compared with the 0.12 tournament (in parentheses):
Players with at least one game: 1749 (1735) Players with at least one game to reach XL 9: 1117 (1066) Players who got a rune: 526 (478) Players who won a game: 246 (279) Total wins: 603 (637) Win %: 1.37% (1.40%) Total player time: 25902 hrs (28022 hrs) Avg player time: 14.8 hrs (16.2 hrs) Proportion of players using webtiles: 76.5% (71.7%) Proportion of winners using webtiles: 62.6% (63.3%)
We are proud to announce that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.13: “Pan-Galactic Gargoyle Blasters” is released! 0.13 adds a new species: Gargoyles, made from living stone. It also features many new and reworked spells, monsters and items, including a reworked Skald spellbook and a brand new monster set for the Crypt.
Download DCSS 0.13 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 October, with all online 0.13 games counting towards your score. See the tournament website for more details, including how to set up or join a clan.
0.13′s highlights include:
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 0.13!
This is a reminder that the 0.13 tournament will begin in just a few days. From 20:00 UTC Friday 11 October through 20:00 UTC Sunday 27 October, any 0.13 game played on CAO, CDO, CLN, CSZO, or RHF will count for the tournament. (RHF does not currently have 0.13 set up, but if/when it gets 0.13, games played there will count for the tournament… please go to one of the other servers until then.)
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. (Before tournament start, some scores might briefly appear on this page as we test the tournament scripts, but they are just for testing.)
Crawl 0.13 is in beta!
You can test out the upcoming release on CSZO, CAO, or CLAN. We hope to have the other servers updated soon. Please report any bugs you find on Mantis.
The 0.13 release is scheduled for 11 October. The tournament will begin at 20:00 UTC on Friday 11 October and continue for 16 days (until 20:00 UTC Sunday, 27 October). Check here for more announcements, including links to the tournament rules.
Update: You may be interested in the 0.13 changelog.
A few days ago on IRC, blackcustard asked me to do a blog post on a particular save-compatibility fix I made about a month ago, because it’s an interesting (I prefer “dirty”) kludge. I should start, however, with an introduction to how save compatibility works in Crawl.
For save compatibility purposes, the actual version number (for example, 0.12.2 or 0.13-a0-2578-ged92a99) makes almost no difference. Instead, there are three version numbers (which we call “tags” for historic reasons) associated with each save and with each version of crawl: the character format, major version, and minor version. In current trunk these are 0, 34, and 44.
The major version tag is stored in each section of the save (each level, character, transiting monsters, and so on). Changing this version indicates that Crawl is no longer compatible with the old save: the save will be coloured red in the save browser and cannot be loaded. The major tag is never incremented within a release (e.g. between 0.12.0 and 0.12.1), only in trunk. We try to avoid doing this when we can, because it means trunk players will be unable to transfer their saves to newer versions to get bug fixes; it furthermore means that local players will have to keep the previous stable release installed until they have finished their games.
The major tag has been incremented 34 times, but the rate has slowed down significantly. It was incremented several times in 0.8 development, once in 0.11 development, and once early in 0.12 development. Through heroic effort, kilobyte was able to restore save compatibility between 0.11 and 0.12 despite the major tag change. Therefore, current trunk can load saves from 0.11 and 0.12 releases, all but the earliest 0.12 development versions, and all 0.13 development versions.
The minor version tag is also stored in each section of the save, and is used to indicate changes that require special handling for loading old saves. The save-loading code if full of checks that say “only do this if the save’s minor tag is greater than N” or “initialize this new field if the minor tag is less than N”. Older versions of Crawl will refuse to load a save with a too-new minor tag (that is, we do not provide forward compatibility between versions), but newer versions will see the old tag and apply the appropriate fixups on load (which makes the save incompatible with the old version of crawl).
The minor tag is reset to zero whenever the major tag changes. A major bump provides an opportunity to clean up the old save-compatibility code, since the old saves won’t be loadable anyway; and to remove or rearrange enumeration values that could not change without breaking compatibility. The minor tag has been incremented 44 times since the last major tag (0.12-a0-109-ged95631, in August 2012).
The upshot of this is that, for the most part, online players can keep transferring their saves to the latest version of Crawl. In the rare event that we change the major version tag (once a year maybe), the servers keep those saves on the old version, so the players can continue even if they don’t get bug fixes.
Among the situations that require compatibility code (and hence incrementing the minor version tag) are new fields or data structures added to monsters: trying to load those from the old save would either cause corruption, or crash. Likewise, any change to enumerations like monster type, spell, dungeon feature, other than adding a new value at the end, requires at least a minor version bump and code to shift all the old values.
All the rules about how to preserve save compatibility, and what does and doesn’t need special handling, can be kind of complex (see docs/develop/save_compatibility.txt). It’s no wonder, then, that occasionally there are problems. The development of Spectral Weapon introduced two save compatibility issues at different times:
At some point later we started noticing these apparently-corrupt saves that would crash on load. After some investigation we found that they seemed to all have a “spectral weapon” on the incorrect level. That let us track down the second, newer bug. But without the version tags, how to detect and fix it?
Kilobyte made a first pass at fixing the ghost_demon problem. For potentially affected versions (remember that because of the missing tag, this check caught some good versions as well), he used read-ahead to determine whether it looked like the saved SW had a ghost_demon structure. If it did not not, the weapon was replaced with a placeholder “ghost” monster.
However, after kilobyte made but did not commit his patch, we discovered the other problem: sometimes neither the player, nor any ghosts on the level, had the Spectral Weapon spell. More digging showed that the spectral weapon had Primal Wave and Summon Water Elementals, and led us to the enum problem. To fix that, we needed some way to tell which monster it was supposed to be. We noticed that all three of the affected monsters (SW, Wellspring, and Polymoth) had different speeds, which happens to be stored with the monster rather than being loaded from the monster class. Then qoala pointed out that the ghost_demon change to spectral weapon happened in the very same batch of commits as the one that changed its speed from 25 to 30. We could therefore kill two birds with one stone by using the monster speed to determine the true monster type, and didn’t need the look-ahead.
Ultimately, for saves from affected versions (between minor tags 38 and 39), for any monster claiming to be one of those three, we check the monster’s saved speed. If it is 10, it must be a wellspring; if 12 it must be a polymoth; if 30 it must be a correct spectral weapon; and if 25 it must be a spectral weapon with a missing ghost_demon structure (so we remove it, leaving a placeholder ghost behind). However, haste, slow, and friends affect the speeds stored with the monster; we therefore have to check for numbers like 15 (hasted wellspring), 16 or 17 (slowed old spectral weapon), and so on. Fortunately none of the three base speeds is 2/3 or 3/2 of any of the others, so we are still able to distinguish on the basis of speed alone.
For all the gory details, see commit 0.13-a0-2175-ga079a5c. One day we will break compatibility again and increment the major version; then this kludge can return to the ether from which it came. Until then, enjoy! :)
Edit 24 June (later): It’s back up now, and now in Tampa, Florida.
The server crawl.s-z.org will be down for a data center migration most of Sunday, 23 June. If you’re looking for another US server, you can play on crawl.akrasiac.org instead.
Edit 24 June: The ISP had various problems with the move, so cszo is still offline. I’m in contact with them to get the remaining issues resolved.
Another European server is now available: rl.heh.fi (RHF), maintained by joosa. Old-timers may remember RHF from a few years ago; it is back, this time with webtiles support. RHF is located in Finland and serves both webtiles and console for trunk and stable versions. Games are reported on IRC by the bot Ruffell, and are also known to Sequell and the scoring pages.
Many thanks to joosa!
A new server is available: crawl.lantea.net, hosted by Aleksi and maintained by TZer0. It is located in Germany and serves both webtiles and console for trunk and stable versions. Games are reported on IRC by the bot Lantell, and are also known to Sequell.
Many thanks to Aleksi and TZer0!
The 0.12 tournament is over. During the last 16 days, players could compete for tournament points and banners by playing 0.12 games on any of the three public servers. On the final day of the tournament, there were an amazing 83 wins, crushing the previous record of 48 wins in one day on the public servers.
The winning player was jeanjacques, with 6566 points. Jeanjacques not only won 17 games and achieved the most points, but he also achieved all 18 tier III banners and had the fastest three wins! In second place was elliptic, with 6532 points and 19 wins. In third place was Tolias, with 5097 points and 15 wins, including a 6-game streak, the third-longest (behind elliptic and Implojin with 9-game streaks). 4thArraOfDagon had the three highest scores, all three of them Fire Elementalists of Vehumet.
The clan competition was won by Take It Easy (17364 points). Unlucky Tengu (17071 points) and unemployed unpersons (16648 points) were second and third respectively. It was a very tight team competition, with AWBW Rising (16067 points) also close in fourth place. There were 127 clans in all.
Here are some assorted statistics on the tournament games (with quits removed), compared with the 0.11 tournament (in parentheses):
Players with at least one game: 1735 (1545) Players with at least one game to reach XL 9: 1066 (979) Players who got a rune: 478 (400) Players who won a game: 279 (214) Total wins: 637 (473) Win %: 1.40% (1.18%) Total player time: 28022 hrs (24287 hrs) Avg player time: 16.2 hrs (15.7 hrs) Proportion of players using webtiles: 71.7% (71.3%) Proportion of winners using webtiles: 63.3% (59.0%)
We’ve changed some of the default interface settings for servers (not for desktop versions), so now:
travel_delay = -1
explore_delay = -1
rest_delay = -1
show_travel_trail = true
The second-to-last setting (rest_delay) is a new setting that was also added so resting/healing now happens instantly (this only makes a difference in webtiles, since in console the stats area always updates).
These settings will make online play better by default for webtiles users who are being particularly affected by lag. The game is much quicker and more fun to play without waiting for autoexplore/travel/rest. Additionally this should reduce overall server load which will hopefully be significant during the tournament!
Webtiles players should also be aware that there was recently a change to the way webtiles data packets are batched, which should also result in a significant speed gain for laggy connections (much less round trips are being made overall).
See the options guide for more details on these options, and please comment here if you have any issues or questions with the new settings.
This is a reminder that the 0.12 tournament will begin in just a few days. From 0:00 May 11 (midnight UTC) through 24:00 May 26 (May 27 midnight UTC), any 0.12 game played on CAO, CDO, or CSZO will count for the tournament.
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.
We are proud to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.12: “High Vaultage”! This latest version contains many new and overhauled features, including revamped Vaults and Abyss branches, a new weapon effect for axes allowing them to cleave through multiple enemies at once, and much more!
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:
See the changelog for a summary of other major changes. Thanks to Stone Soup’s many contributors, and enjoy playing 0.12!