Vote your favourite implementable

There is a new thread in the Tavern, dealing with Implementables. It’s a good place to indicate what features you’d like to see – of the list of current Implementables on Mantis, but you can also lobby for other features beyond that.

Implementable voting

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OSX Builds back on Track!

I’m happy to announce that OSX builds of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup are available again!

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!

August 2011 Tournament Summary

We are happy to collect what’s been going on during the last three weeks in the dungeons. Despite rather minimal advertisement, the tournament was quite successful. A little late, but not too late, did we see 0.9 Webtiles kick into action.

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

WebTiles at 0.9 finally!

Vacations, family, job, etc… but finally WebTiles are on 0.9 too now.

Sorry for the delay – and happy crawling!

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

Crawl 0.9: Victory Valedictory

Four months have already passed, and, with the tournament already begun, we’re pleased to announce the next release of Dungeon Crawl: 0.9, Victory Valedictory. As always, there have been a load of changes, but most significant of these is probably the following: we say Auf Wiedersehen to victory dancing.

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!
More: Read the rest of this entry…

WebTiles got a Map!

Edlothiol has been working on adding new features to WebTiles:

  • 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!

Upcoming Tournament, 0.9 plans

There’s an important change this year:
due to the second tourney we had in May, duration of the official tournament has been shortened.
It will last from Aug 13th to Aug 28th, sixteen days.

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.

0.8.1 Bugfix Release

While 0.8 has been largely bug-free compared to 0.7, some bugs nevertheless crept in. Fixes include:

  • 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).

May tournament is over!

It is a pleasure to recap what has been going during the last 16 days: some players have set up a tournament to celebrate the release of 0.8: Overview

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!

WebTiles and Online Player Status

I’m happy to announce that we can now offer an online version of “Tiles”!

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:

More: Read the rest of this entry…

Tourney Time!

No, it’s not August! But to celebrate the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.8, “Frantic Frenzied Felines”, various members of the Crawl community have banded together to run an unofficial tournament. Of course, August’s Tourney will run as scheduled.

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!

Best Bad Ideas!

Ortoslon compiled a top-list of the funniest and most hilarious bad ideas from our LearnDB, which is fed by players and developers alike – through the helpful bots in our IRC channels.

He’s planning to keep this list updated regularly. Make sure you let him know what you think and give feedback.

Head over to his site and feel free to giggle:

For the record: Good ideas are also very welcome in our Wiki! :-)

Packages for Debian-based OSes

Thanks to Kilobyte, we are now also offering packages for Debian-based operating systems (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc). For now there are three architectures supported: i386, amd64 and armel.

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.

Faster, Pussycats! Kill! Kill!

It’s that time of year again! The Stone Soup development team are extremely pleased to announce the latest release of Dungeon Crawl: 0.8, “Frantic Frenzied Felines”. As usual, there have been some massive changes, which, if you’ve been playing any of the development builds hosted on CDO for download and online play or CAO for online play, you’re possibly already familiar with. A big thanks to all of our play-testers!

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

More: Read the rest of this entry…

Behind the Scenes

As some of you may have noticed, there were some down-times of CAO and CDO recently, and I’d like to keep everyone posted.

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!

A Glimpse Into the Future: the 0.8 pre-release

If you’ve been following the Stonesoup development, you might have noticed the recent shift of activity from longterm development to shortterm bugfixing, as well as a switch of trunk to version 0.9; the reason being the release of 0.8 that is currently slated for April 24.

The recent changes include the incorporation of the unicode branch, which fixes a number of issues with non-ASCII path names etc., bringing Ashenzari up to speed, and the aforementioned gazillions of bug fixes. In a concerted effort of several developers, we’ve managed to close 100+ bug reports on our bug tracker over the last couple of weeks, which is quite a feat, let me tell you. Of course, we wouldn’t have been able to do that if they hadn’t been reported in the first place. So, here’s a large thank you to our diligent reporters! :)

What follows is the list of changes in the 0.8 pre-release branch currently available on CDO (a206725), meaning they’ll be included in the stable release.

More: Read the rest of this entry…

Playtesting: Introducing the new tutorial, and other changes

Currently, the guys at Oulu University (Finland) are running a usability project involving DCSS like they already did last year. We got a truckload of detailed feedback and great ideas the last time around, so I’m eager to see what they find this time. In preparation of this project (well, I’d been meaning to do it anyway, but this way there was a deadline), I overhauled the tutorial — once again.

You see, one of the first things I did when I started coding for Stonesoup was to create an in-game tutorial with situational triggers. Last year’s UP team created a new tutorial from scratch, so the old one was renamed to Hints mode. The idea was to use a fixed map with fixed puzzles and explanations. We had been planning to do something like that anyway, so we were glad when someone took up the task.

More: Read the rest of this entry…

Press Crawl has received

https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:press

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Glorious Gitorious!

If you have been following the ##crawl-dev IRC channel, you may already be aware that we recently (this time last week) moved our code base from SourceForge.net to Gitorious.org. This move comes mainly from some minor frustrations with SourceForge, most of which relating to their recent reliability problems. SourceForge have been a excellent host, but as we’ve recently been butting up against its limitations, it seemed like a good opportunity to move.

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.

More: Read the rest of this entry…

0.7.2 Bug-Fix Release

With several months delay, here is the 0.7.2 bug fix release. You’ve probably all switched to trunk by now, but just in case you haven’t, 0.7.2 fixes a couple of nasty crash bugs.

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!