From gameplay to gamedev

Lurking of Internet Archive I’ve found a document about custom housing is written by EvilEye, one of the main developers of PernMAngband. Fist part of this document explains quite regular stuff, but second one is about Custom Housing – possibility to create houses of any form. There is this document. Continue reading →

Multilingualization of MAngband, TomeNET, PWMAngband, Tangaria – is possible.

Two years ago CBlue mentioned that there were korean server with multilanguage.. I’ve managed to find an ancient implementation of MAngband ML at internet archive (it’s in Japanese, but still): Continue reading →

I’ve tried to read Silmarillion several times in the past. But it felt too boring for me, something like a Bible (no offence, guys, but it’s boring 😀 ) So I’ve started and dropped it several times over past 20 years since I’ve become interested in Middle-Earth.

At the same time I’ve re-read Lord of The Rings something like 15 times; it’s one of my favorite books. So I had some knowledge about Middle-Earth anyway.

And now when I’ve started to work on my variant – and made a decision to make it about my vision on The Fourth Age (and to put together classic lore from Angband, which got a lot of DnD stuff in it) – I’ve written draft of the storyline.

But actually I’ve recognized that Continue reading →

To understand Angband variants (to ‘feel’ this phenomenon) and to find interesting ideas for my variant, I’ve started research at different web-resources (Roguebasin, oook, The Angband Variant Repository). It’s great websites, but as there are so many variants – I thought it will be fun to bring all needed information and links to _one_ web-page; so you do not need to walk through hundreds of hyperlinks to get all basic information about variants. So I’ve combined all these sources under one table at my website:

Angband variants table

There are only two fields – name (with the link to source) and description; so you could read everything without clicking around while drinking a cup of tea 🙂

It’s a draft for now, but I’ll maintain it and will make it up-to-date in time 😉

In old times it was great to find a cursed ring of teleportation and won’t be able to remove it, but try to survive with it by getting to town’s temple to buy remove curse scroll..

But new V curse system is better, of course; perma-curse system where you couldn’t remove cursed items was too hardcore.

But. Now it’s a bit lack of old flavour. Player just wear all items, without any thinking; which become a bit boring approach.

Suggestion
Add HEAVY_STUCK item flag which will work this way:

if you wear items with this flag – you can not remove it for a certain amount of turns, eg X+YdZ turns.

Then if we will assign such flag to, for example, ring/amul of teleportation (and will make teleport chance on these as it was in old times) with 20+5d30 cursed-turns – a player will have a pretty funny situation – while he has to survive for a certain time under this conditions. When the time of curse ends – you are free to remove this item.

The same thing to other items – make non-removable curse not permanent, but temporary. Then we could put back old good stuff:

Weapon of Morgul
Crowns of Sickliness
Helms/Crowns of stat reducing
Cloak of Irritation
Cloaks of Vulnerability
Gauntlets of Weakness
Gauntlets of Clumsiness
Boots of Noise
Boots of Slowness
Boots of Annoyance

Each type of objects should have a different amount of turns to lift a curse (armours is highers, rings of teleportation – lowest).

This will add a certain amount of additional funny adventures; at the same time won’t make curses too annoying (when player had too thin chances to survive after occasionally wearing certain cursed item).

1) PWMA had huge update with latest Vanilla Angband features: https://tangaria.com/news/pwmangband-1-4-0-dev/ , which included Linux support.
2) monsters & tileset revamp: https://tangaria.com/news/new-monsters/
3) storyline which explain everything: https://tangaria.com/news/world-lore/
4) added history of the genre https://tangaria.com/history/

Recently I’ve announced Tangaria’s monsters update at Angband forums and got such reply there:

ster:
So what I can gather from reading your post is that there’s a niche for a PWMAngband server hosted by someone with a functioning brain.

I know that I’ve obtained some haters after my past criticism of Nick’s concept of V monster revamp. But in my critics I wasn’t rude to Nick, on the contrary I respected him (and respect now) and actually pleaded to reconsider the decision. Some people considered my post (maybe due that English isn’t my native language and I’m bad at it) as disrespect and attacked me with rude words there; while I simply protected the idea of compatibility between V and variants (eg MAngand, TomeNET – which all was based at old monsters.. now they are not compatible with V in terms of monsters, which is sad, but life is going on).

A year past and we all moved on from this old argument; but I suppose there always will be people who see me as an enemy. What could I do there.. Just put these people in ignore list on forum, I suppose.

Keep calm, carry on and play Tangaria 🙂 Today I’ll post new Tangaria lore!

p.s.
Considering ster’s jest about PWMA servers: actually there are two classic-PWMA servers online, list is there: https://www.mangband.org/servers

In my variant, which is based at PWMAngband (which is based at latest V) – I’m adding new ‘monsters’, which will work like an ‘objects’ – barrels, crates, statues, altars, obelics, etc. They will have ~ such config:

name:wooden crate
base:hybrid
color:y
speed:10
hit-points:1
hearing:1
armor-class:0
sleepiness:0
depth:10
rarity:1
weight:0
experience:0
flags:NEVER_BLOW
flags:FORCE_SLEEP | NEVER_MOVE | STUPID | EMPTY_MIND
flags:COLD_BLOOD
flags:NO_CONF | NO_SLEEP | NO_FEAR | DROP_40
desc:Crude old wooden crate. Small beetle sits on it's lid.

So you could smash them and get a treasure (sometimes).

It’s cool, but there are some problems come with such implementation:
1) as this objects appears as ‘monster’ – they interfere with monster’s population and exp gain in the dungeon; they take place of regular monsters which breaks game balance a bit
2) it’s not possible to assign to this objects some interesting effects. For example, barrel could explore (mmm.. Diablo barrels), altar could strict you with a lightning, from the crate which you smashed could appear scorpion or snake, etc. And without such effects it’s too EZPZ way to get a treasure, which breaks item/gold income balance.

I see certain workaround with EFFECTS – to assign spells to monster-object (mobject) with very low probability, eg:

spell-freq:100
spell-power:1
spells:S_ANIMAL | S_MONSTER | S_SPIDER

..which together with very small ‘monster’ speed could work somehow.  But still, it won’t solve all troubles.. and it’s not possible to bind EFFECTS on monster’s death.

Yet another workaround is to put mobject to deep sleep (255), give him normal speed and spell-freq:1. But it will ruin aggro players, and shrieks will create a real bedlam 😉

It will be great if V devs could consider to create a new type of ‘mobjects’ in V which will not interfere with monsters and will have EFFECT bahaviour – like traps, but no traps 🙂

The minimalitic solution (without adding new ‘mobject’ type) could be just to add new flag to monsters which will generate certain action on monster’s death. It could also enhance some other monsters to good (expoding golems could be fun.. remembering dolls from D2 hehe)..

It was experemental testing attemp for a dragon race rebalance – where exp penalty was removed in exchange to:
-20 all stats
-3 HP
– RES_NEXUS not at lvl 1, but at lvl 50
– skill-disarm-phys:-16
– skill-disarm-magic:-16
– skill-device:-16
– basic breed (I’ve disabled all breeds of dragons except traditional basic ones)

So basically this dragon was much more weak than vanilla PWMA dragon. I didn’t expect to go so far with such nerf.. I thought this tiny dragon will not manage it. But he did 🙂 Video: Continue reading →