You can catch any play-testing posts that you might’ve missed here. Windows trunk builds will be updated shortly for this post.

This week, we’re going to talk about the Ecumenical Temple: with all the new gods (who you can read about here), it’s started to feel a little bit cramped. In order to solve this issue, we’ve devised a new system of “overflow” altars.

As normal, the Temple will show up between levels four and seven in the main Dungeon. It will have a large percentage of the altars representing each of the “temple” gods (excluding Beogh, Jiyva and Lugonu), but it may lack the one that you’re looking for.

Don’t panic! The altar that you’re looking for will appear as an “overflow” altar. These are small vaults that are placed throughout the dungeon, between levels two and nine, and which are dedicated to the god in question. Some of these overflow altars may prove to be a challenge, and you might not be able to get the god that you want when you want it. Rest assured, the altar to that god will always show up.

What else does this mean for you? Well, the positive side of this is that the altar that you’re looking for could show up as early as D:2. It also could be that the altar shows up as late as D:9, and that you might have to decide whether or not you wait, or pick another god.

Hopefully, the changes will not only aid us, as developers, in the addition of new gods (preventing the necessity for constantly changing the size and layout of the temple), but it will also provide interesting tactical decisions for you, the player! Good luck, and good religion.

And now, on to the great list of changes! We’ll start where we left off, at commit cd1279820c.

Bug fixes

1. Tiles: Drawing the Dance card (or any form of Dancing weapons, as well as summoning mimics) would cause a crash in initialisation. This has been fixed.
2. Tiles: Beam paths should now be displayed properly in Tiles.
3. Pandemonium Lords are no longer silenceable.
4. Loot in bailey_polearm_2 is now always accessible.
5. Amulet of Stasis now has a cost similar to that of the Amulet of Rage.
6. A variety of minivaults and floating vaults that no longer work with the current Swamp layout have been disabled.
7. Swamp drake mephitic cloud breath now functions properly, instead of having absolutely no effect.
8. Decomposed skeletons and corpses now get speed and HP maluses.
9. Toadstools can now be placed on the same grid as the player for Fedhas worshipers: this means that using the decomposition ability while standing on a corpse has the proper effect.
10. Allies no longer head for the map origin when the player is out of sight. This was caused by the code setting their target grid to 0,0.
11. Statues in dis_mu should now all come to life when Dispater is destroyed.
12. Fixed a bug that was causing monsters to never speak at all.
13. Iskenderun’s Orb of Destruction now tries multiple times to place the orb, instead of just “fizzling” the first time that it fails.
14. Monsters will now pathfind and target through toadstools if it means that they can get to the player quicker; friendly monsters will not destroy likewise friendly toadstools, meaning that there will be no piety loss for Fedhas worshipers.
15. A variety of typos and doubled words in descriptions have been fixed.
16. Hand axes of reaching will no longer appear in or around Bailey entrances.
17. &M-created player ghosts without a specified background no longer causes crashes when viewing their full description. They were not being initialised properly.
18. Overly long quiver names will no longer clear the following line.
19. Call Tide now ends properly, meaning that you can never become stuck in a Shoals level at high tide.
20. Attempting to draw a holy scourge on holy monsters no longer causes a strange and confusing assert.
21. Using ^C to clear the map no longer clears monster memory, therefore no longer causing issues with autotravel.
22. Autopickup will turn back on once a backlit (whether by halo, sticky flame, or corona) monster has been killed.
23. Post-mortem inventory screen is once more browsable.
24. Save selection screen now appears properly at the start of the game.
25. Torment scrolls are no longer marked as useless for the torment-immune, while multiple copies of the new amulets are.
26. Searching for “artefact” now lists all artefacts, instead of just identified ones; searching for “stick” also returns all objects that are suitable targets for Sticks to Snakes.
27. Travel exclusions can no longer be placed in Labyrinths.
28. Shield value is now redrawn when the player’s strength changes.
29. Snapping turtles now get their tile picked properly.

Features, new and changed

1. Ilsuiw’s Call Tide peak has been adjusted upwards, meaning that this spell has a much more interesting visual effect.
2. There have been many further changes to key-bindings, making the system much more flexible for re-keying. This includes changes to allow re-binding of vi-keys, as well as a rebinding for the Dvorak keyboard.
3. CDO: Swamp has been re-enabled for testing purposes.
4. Instead of occasionally replacing Swamp with Shoals, pick two of Shoals, Swamp and Snake.
5. There’s a new Swamp layout generator: this uses trees and mixture of shallow and deep water in more natural looking layouts. Gone are the weird corridors! Hooray!
6. New tiles: sixfirhy, improved Angel tile considerably, Dowan and Duvessa.
7. Burning trees in Swamp now produce clouds of steam (as do all sources of flame near water), and once destroyed, are left behind by shallow water, rather than dry land.
8. New Swamp ending: old school. This ending also contains the Lernaean Hydra, good luck!
9. Swamp now gets a variety of “pool” vaults: these are deep water pools surrounded by trees, which are either randomised, or contain patrolling Swamp drakes.
10. The alternative Swamp ending now has a higher number of hydras and swamp dragons than before.
11. Giant leeches now generate with more regularity in the Swamp than they did before.
12. New tiles: Nessos tile has been adjusted, the human tile is now used for detected Dwarves; flowered grass tiles now exist, and existing grass tiles have been recoloured to be slightly darker.
13. Fedhas tweaks: Rain is now more difficult to use, the Evolution ability has had its cost display updated, and the descriptions of Growth and Evolution have been tweaked to reflect the current mechanism, the player can now target themselves with Sunlight, but are prompted to do so.
14. Water transparency in tiles is no longer dependent on overlays.
15. Ilsuiw now no longer appears on Shoals:1-2.
16. Berserk maxhp also scales by 1.5x, rather than the previous 2x.
17. Sticks to snakes no longer converts artefact weapons into snakes.
18. Needle brands have been adjusted: paralysis and frenzy are now the rarest, with sleep and slow the most common, and sickenss and confusion common. Stack sizes for poisoned needles and poisoned darts have also been reduced.
19. Mara’s summons are now “wove by” him, rather than “summoned by” him.
20. New unique (kinda): Donald. He is utterly different than before, now having speech that is dependent on both the player’s current religion, as well as the branch you find him in. He has similar stats to an orc warlord (though not quite as heavy), generates with nice equipment, and always comes with a shield.
21. Tile: Shift-click running is now replaced by mouse-click running in Tiles, Angels now use dynamic weapon placement in their tiles.
22. Ice form is now amphibious, matching with the changes to monster ice form: they do not see items in deep water, however, nor are they able to pick them up.
23. ossuary_due_mausolem now uses door restriction on the central chamber, meaning that the guardian mummy will not exit via the secret doors to attack the player if disturbed.
24. MessageWindow branch has been merged into master: this has involved quite a lot of new changes, which fix a variety of issues involving the ‘–more–’ prompt overlaying text, and a huge subset of other bugs. There may still be issues with the new code that haven’t been ironed out yet, so please, file a bug if you see them!
25. delay_message_clear has been renamed to clear_messages.
26. New tile: Donald, replacing the previous tile. This tile looks more like the player, and always is created with a shield.
27. Silver no longer affects the demonic, unless they are chaotic as well as demonic; Crazy Yiuf, Psyche and Gastronok are now considered unclean creatures for Zin purposes; Cigotuvi’s Degeneration, Summon Horrible Things, Twisted Resurrection and Banishment are marked as chaotic spells; abominations are now chaotic, as are scrolls of summoning.
28. Tiles: the player character now gets a health and magic bar similar to that of monsters, the display of which is controllable via an option, Frances’ tile has been improved to look more feminine; new Polyphemus tile.
29. Tile cleanup: Menkaure, Purgy, Roxanne.
30. Current HP is now conserved when merging and splitting slimes, instead of just the maximum HP, and slimes now use grid distance instead of actual distance when determining whether or not to split.
31. Monster attitudes (charmed, friendly, peaceful) are now listed correctly in the ^X window; the default behaviour for it is also now defaulting to ACT_EXECUTE, or examining the monster in question.
32. Instances of “job” and “class” in the game are now referred to as “background”: Hunter, Arcane Marksmen, Conjurer, etc, are now backgrounds instead of classes. This is a semantic change, but reflects the fact that the background is merely what you have (skill and equipment) when you come into the dungeon, not what you must be, as nothing prevents a conjurer from picking up a sword and becoming a fighter, or a fighter picking up a spell book and becoming a conjurer.
33. New tiles: holy scourge, orb of destruction and the cloud that it creates.
34. david_glass_crypt now works properly (hopefully) when walking over the loot. Unfortunately, linking this in to item_pickup is currently unfeasible.
35. Tiamat is now considered a chaotic creature; just because a spellcaster has chaotic spells does not make them inherently chaotic. If they have spells that are considered “innate” abilities, they are. This does not affect how Zin deals with these creatures.
36. Massive Mummy changes: they now get a +5 stat bonus for starting, getting diminishing EXP gains for hundreds of kills. Affecting everyone, monster spawns have been dramatically reduced, while out-of-depth spawns have been increased: monster spawn rate reduces after 3,000 turns on a level, and is stopped completely after 15,000 turns on a level.
37. Gourmand no longer gives piety with Cheibriados.
38. Tentacled monstrosities are no longer as rare as they were before in Swamp.
39. HT_AMPHIBIOUS_LAND and HT_AMPHIBIOUS_WATER have been merged. Amphibious monsters no longer get an automatic speed bonus in water. This is instead defined per-monster. Slime creatures and jellies, as well as ice beasts and a small selection of other amphibious monsters, no longer get this bonus; slugs and snails are no longer amphibious.
40. Submerging is no longer linked to habitat, but is instead controlled per-monster by using the M_SUBMERGES flag.
41. Attackers that are swimming no longer get an attack bonus against defenders that are floundering; this affects both aquatic monsters damaging the player, as well as player merfolk attacking floundering monsters while swimming.
42. The many pools layout (and modifier) now occasionally place clusters of trees instead of pools of deep water or lava.
43. Unidentified artefacts also get marked as artefacts in their description.
44. New tile: hog-form player, Robe of Clouds (on the floor).
45. Steam cloud generation near shallow water has been reduced.
46. Cheibriados worshipers can cause any armour slot to be ponderous, allowing for fine-tuning of their speed; removing ponderous armour causes a piety loss.
47. “You hear a splashing noise!” only occurs within short distances, or if you can see the monster that is floundering.

Other changes

1. Mara’s Mislead, Summon Fake Mara and Summon Player Ghost spells now have waste_of_time checks, meaning that they’ll only be cast when they’re needed.
2. .des files for branches have now be split absolutely: each file contains only the vaults required for itself, and none of its sub-branches.
3. fprops are now accessible and modifiable by vaults using dgn.fprop_at, dgn.fprop_changed.
4. The height map is now accessible via vaults by using the FHEIGHT specifier. Tides can be seeded from a starting position by using a marker (see documentation).
5. New Lua marker: RestrictDoor. This prevents monsters from opening a door that has never been previously opened by the player.
6. Door opened and door closed now generate dungeon events.
7. Branch and the player’s religion are now included in speech prefixes.
8. Fixed a typo in Purgy’s entry of the mon-speak.txt file.
9. New Wizard-mode command for adjusting the tides: ).
10. New Lua accessors for monster: get_prop and has_prop, for interfacing with monster props. monster_dies triggerer now also checks for these props, looking for monster->props[target]==target.
11. .des vault files are now found in the dat/des/ folder, and in subfolders: branches/ contain all branch files, portals/ for portal vaults, variable/ for floating vaults, etc.
12. Lua slave iterator now generates an error message when not finding any markers, rather than generating a weird error further down the line in the point iterator.
13. Monster casts (as_player, as_monster) are now found in the actor interface, returning NULL if the actor isn’t the relevant player/monster.
14. mon-util has been split up into a variety of files, and the functions have been split between these.

And that’s us–up-to-date at commit 629a7ffc5d! Tune in throughout the week, as we’ll hopefully have further play-testing posts before next weekend’s update!