We are proud to announce that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.10: “Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus” has been released! With 6 months of development there have been a huge number of changes, including the addition of a brand new species. Octopodes are a race of sentient, amphibious cephalopods incapable of wearing armour, but able to wear up to eight rings at a time thanks to their tentacles. They’re squishy in mêlée but come with the new combat mechanic of constriction, allowing them to immobilise their foes and deal additional damage over time.
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!
A new bugfix release was released a couple weeks ago, fixing several crashes and other bugs: 0.9.2 is available in the Downloads.
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!
Time for a new minor release which fixes a few bugs:
- 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!
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!
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
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.
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…
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!
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.
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).
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!
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:
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!
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.
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:
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!
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.
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!