Play-testing – December 3rd, 2009

A continuation of this previous play-testing post.

Well, it seems like a lot has changed in the past week! There are a lot of advancements in code, bug fixes and features. I’ll attempt to summarise them in this post.

Again, if you have any comments, criticisms or suggestions, please reply in a comment either here, on IRC, or one of the media mentioned in the previous play testing post (linked above).

Bugs fixed

1. Rods should now function correctly once more, as an off-by-one error was recently fixed.
2. “Triggerer already activated” bugs (most noticeably off-level auto-travel) have hopefully been exorcised completely
3. Wandering monsters no longer automatically attack the player
4. Invalid save files are now named.
5. Wizard-mode Ziggurats (&P) are now accessible.
6. Ziggurats should now spawn more than once monster per level.
7. Bailey maps were fixed.
8. Monster clouds should no longer generate auto-exclusions.
9. Harold and Executioners now have their own spell books; this means that Harold no longer casts Pain, and Executioners no longer cast Throw Flame.
10. Messages that scroll should no longer scroll the entire window; this is noticeable in the Wizard mode prompts, as well as the Wizard-mode Lua interpreter.
11. Removing Guardian Spirit amulet no longer generates misplaced Deep Dwarf message.
12. Disappeared Portals will also disappear from the shopping list.
13. Unique placement should no longer clobber stairs, thus preventing this bug.
14. Using ’8′ and ’9′ glyphs in vaults to specify a random monster no longer causes a crash in debug mode, not “dead monster program bug” in other builds.
15. You are now prompted for walking into miasma clouds.
16. rF- messages for steam, lava and fire are now clarified.
17. Banishment for female-pronouned monsters (uniques) now generates a grammatically correct message.
18. Scroll of silence now has a tile.
19. Cloud exclusion updates should now be faster.

New features, changed features

1. Scroll of Silence is now exceedingly rare
2. The Ecumenical Temple now uses an “overflow” system: the Temple now contains a fixed number of altars, to which gods are assigned when the game starts; if there are Gods left over, these are assigned “overflow” vaults. These vaults are guaranteed to show up, meaning that if you have not run into a God by the time you have reached the temple, you can be guaranteed to find the relevant altar soon after (or you may have missed it). As always, Beogh, Jiyva and Lugonu are exempt from this.
3. Evil Gods now give piety for killing freed slaves and other friendlies.
4. Ballistomycetes have had timers and spawn rates adjusted recently.
5. Reaping is now a viable melee brand; it appears on sycthes.
6. Changes to EXP pool and skills were reverted.
7. Food and potions are never assigned, respectively, to ‘e’ and ‘y’ unless absolutely necessary.
8. New monster (demon): sixfirhy, an electric-themed ’4′ glyph monster.
9. Beasts were promoted from ’4′ to ’2′.
10. delay_message_clear now defaults to true.
11. Dumb monsters no longer path-find through secret doors.
12. Level features are now displayed in the “X” map: there is a list of up stairs, down stairs, shafts, escape hatches and altars.
13. New unrand: +3 Robe of Clouds {rElec, +Lev}. Generates a trail of thin mist and occasionally rain.
14. Unique death effects (Pikel, Dowan and Duvessa) should no longer be affected by polymorph.
15. Shafts now generate a milestone.
16. Dowan and Duvessa banishment now has flavour.
17. Passwall is now silent.
18. Messages generated with delay_message_clear now start at the bottom of the window.
19. Firedrakes have been renamed to fire drakes.
20. New monster: giant leech, a red ‘w’ glyph monster with a vampiric draining attack.
21. Crazy Yiuf’s is now chaotic, meaning that Zin will give piety for his death.

Other

1. ZIP and TAR are now usable on FreeBSD platforms.
2. There is a new dLua library: “feat”, that wraps most of the feat_is_XXX functions found in terrain.cc.
3. Vaults can now specify ‘hd’ and ‘hp’ of a monster (using those tags), and using MonPropsMarker, can specify its speech.
4. Purple smoke is now a valid smoke type for fog machines.
5. Using subvaults, it’s now possible to place a vault within another vault; please see the documentation.
6. New monster-flavour Lua iterators.
7. ‘star_item’ and ‘superb_item’ are now syntactically equivalent to ‘*’ and ‘|’ in vaults.
8. mapgrd and mapbld functions are zero-indexed now.
9. As mentioned in the previous post to this, there is now a specific, details ‘process’ document in the repository.
10. In Wizard and debug builds, Ctrl+B now enters Wizard-mode teleport: this bypasses beholders, -TELE checks, is always controlled, and never randomises your destination, while never causing magical contamination.
11. Also in Wizard mode, &z and &Z are now identical; both accept either a number or a monster name.
12. FPROP_FORCE_EXCLUDE and the related ‘force_exclude’ KPROP have been removed.

That’s us up-to-date with git master, at commit de685cf. All comments and corrections welcomed and appreciated. See you next week!