Angband Online

Update: vigor mushrooms and magic mapping

Vigor mushrooms are now available in BM (Black Market) under ‘always’ flag. Their price increased x4 (200 -> 800), from 600 to 2400 gold. It’s temporary measure, having ‘always’ stuff in BM is wrong, such items should be semi-rare, but for now no other flags available (more are comming). 

Next change is more important – Magic Mapping (MM) & Detection Monsters from items become nerfed – it’s radius heavely reduced.

Why MM is imba right now?

1. MM removing huge part of one of the most important parts of roguelike genre – exploration. Especially at mid-end game when everyone could afford MM magic.
   Beauty of exploration is based on lvls RNG. You _should_ never know what to expect after you turn a corner, what’s lay after you enter next door. You could have certain sneak peek (that’s why MM is still in the game, but with small radius), but you shouldn’t know too much. Playing without MM brings to the game new feelings – so players would try to search for hidden rooms, passages & etc.
2. It’s all came from Angband (which came from Moria.. ). As I wrote in previous post about shops’ rebalancing, Vanilla ‘Angband’ got limited stock refreshing in stores, so you can not buy 99 MM scrolls or bunch of staves at wish, so MM is kinda balanced there in compare to MAngband, TomeNET and PWMAngband. So having artifact with MM on activation in vanilla gives you real advantage; in online roguelikes you would rather be frustraded with such artifact property, cause of endless flow of MM util items. Having cheezy ‘MM on demand’ is wrong.
3. And at the end.. Please note that almost all major RPG or even roguelikish-ARPG (Diablo, PoE etc) do not give player endless possibility to MM ‘at will’; exploration is one of the foundamental RPG mechanics.

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Shops rebalancing

Why we rebalancing shops? Because current balance based at vanilla Angband in which shops got static stock for 10000 turns, so resources are limited to Angband’s player. But they are limited only for one player and it’s pretty alright to have all the shops only for yourself even without restock. As we got a lot of players at the server and all of them needs different items, we have to redesign this gameplay system by adjusting  shops refreshments and prices. Currently players had to wait a lot of time near BM doors to buy consumables and it’s quite grindy gameplay. At the same time prices for some items are too cheap…

Previous tiny attempt to rebalance (yesterday) was focused on XBM (expensive black market) price rearrangment , but it seems that it’s wrong approach, cause x15 prices isn’t right for ‘regular’ items (pots&teleport scrolls), it’s alright for vanilla Angband with limited stock refreshment, but not for multiplayer. At the same time we do not have possibility to use ‘normal’ (which appears from time to time) stock in BM (glitch?), so we got to use ‘always’ flag there. For now (as always, experimental):

Shops & price rebalancing (experimental)

To reduce ‘shop grind’ (need of wating for certain items at stores) were made several experimental adjustments:

1. refresh time for shops boosted from 250 to 100
2. added ‘always’ to BM (Black Market):
   – Cure Serious Wounds
   – Cure Critical Wounds
   – Restore Life Levels
   3. added ‘always’ to XBT (Expensive Black Market):
   – Healing
   – Speed
   – Resist Poison
   – Teleportation scrolls
   4. Prices changed:
   – Teleportation scrolls: x5 (40 -> 200 value)
   – Speed potions: x2 (75 -> 150 value)

This is temporary measures to reduce grind because currently there is a problem that it’s not possible to assing ‘normal’ price appearence to BM and XBM. Also more price rebalancing are planned soon. Please leave your feedback!

Fixed critical bug

Fixed critical bug which crushed client when player was idle:

New PWMAngband 1.2.0 beta 2 released!

Quick update to narrow down the bug which occures quite rare, but it’s crush the server. Eg

090119 164424 Goose: You enter a maze of down staircases.
090119 164424 BEGIN dungeon_change_level()
090119 164424 depth=1 height=66 width=198
090119 164424 END dungeon_change_level()
090119 164424 Shutting down (panic save).
090119 164424 Server panic info save succeeded!

So when player changes the lvl – he crush server. And if after I restart server he try to login again – crush repeats.

List of changes:

– Add a server option to automatically transfer death dumps to the client (AUTO_DUMP in mangband.cfg)
– Add a debug version of the server executable which generates a mangband.rpt file when a crash occurs

Files are available for download at the usual location: http://powerwyrm.monsite-orange.fr

To update server in debug mode:
– download PWMAngband server (debug version)
– copy the files from the zip into the /PWMAngband directory
This will replace the executable mangband.exe and add files to include debug information to generate a file named mangband.rpt when a crash occurs.

New PWMAngband 1.2.0 beta 1 released!

– Remove “change password” feature from character description screen
– Reduce the allowed minimum size of subterms to a fifth of the maximal size (16×4)
– Fix 32bit builds of the Windows client
– Allow looking and targeting with roguelike keyset
– Make maximum number of characters per account a server option

Players must get the new client to play on beta 1 servers. Files are available for download at the usual location: http://powerwyrm.monsite-orange.fr . Here’s a little upgrade procedure for players:

1) Rename the /PWMAngband directory to /PWMAngband_old
2) Unzip the binaries into /PWMAngband directory
3) Replace \PWMAngband\lib\user by \PWMAngband_old\lib\user
4) Replace modified configuration files by the ones from /PWMAngband_old: the ini files, any .prf modified in /lib/customize, any .fon added in /lib/fonts
5) Archive (or delete) /PWMAngband_old
6) Restart your client

And this one for server admins:

1) Rename the /PWMAngband directory to /PWMAngband_old
2) Unzip the binaries into /PWMAngband directory
3) Replace \PWMAngband\lib\user by \PWMAngband_old\lib\user (this should copy the savefiles, preference files, logs and score file)
4) Replace modified configuration files by the ones from /PWMAngband_old: the cfg file 
5) Archive (or delete) /PWMAngband_old
6) Restart your server

Welcome!

Hiho! We are online 😀 It was my dream for a long time: to have proper, truly online roguelike gameplay without cheating, stair-scumming, everlasting and other stuff with spoil the fun and habitate people to play ‘wrong’, non-roguelikish way, so after a while they loose interest to the game. No! In my opinion, online roguelike should propose different philosophy opposite to MMORPG boredom hoarder-simulators.
Roguelike – it’s just you, your skill, your guts.. and your freedom.

Freedom from fear of death. Freedom from fear ‘to loose’. Every adventure – counts. Every death – is an achievement. Every new character – is a happiness of unique exploration experience.

It’s came at last! Time to dive!